Bonus-Bonkers Bankers

'Oi! 'ope you washed yer 'ands,' a Cockney will ask of a Merchant Banker offering to shake hands.

Bankers are terribly misunderstood. It’s not surprising that they misbehave when we consider that they are confined to gated communities. This is what people do if they are put behind bars. They become institutionalised. They live cheek-by-jowl with other bankers, learning from each other how to do things like claim tax credits when they haven’t paid tax in the first place, how to restructure debt and refuse to lend to other people. So that when they get out and into the office, they fall into learnt patterns of behaviour.

We can just imagine how they’re brought up. ‘Did you tidy your room?’ asks a parent.

‘No. If anything it’s messier,’ answers the latent banker.

‘Not good, Stephen. There’s only one thing for it. I’m going to have to raise your pocket money.’ (CLICK ON 'Read more' LINK, BELOW)

Not everything is as it seems with bankers, either. We tend to hold onto this perception of executives driving top of the range cars. But, how often have we seen Royal Bank of Scotland boss Stephen Hester having to go around on a horse? A horse, in this day and age? And he’s never allowed to go home until he’s killed a fox.

Some people will suggest that fraudulent bankers should be locked up. ‘They should lock them up and throw away the key,’ some hardliners will say, but perhaps their comment would be more appropriately phrased: ‘They should lock them up and throw away the PIN number.’ Incriminated bankers have nothing in common with blue-collar criminals. They wear suits all the time, not just when they have to look respectable when their court case comes up. And the blue-collars are frequently up for common theft. Common theft – they don’t have the class, the imagination to call it ‘breaking a code of conduct’. The bankers don’t thieve. By avoiding tax, they take the money out of the public purse, not as the common criminal who extracts it from private purses.

Whatever is said about the big finance cheeses, you can’t argue with them when they say, If you don’t pay me top dollar, I will simply skip the country, go somewhere else and lose somebody else their money.