Sunday 18 October 2009

Bonuses bonuses but none for you....

The top 20 staff at the Royal Bank of Scotland is possibly getting bonuses between £1m and £5m and there are huge payouts for senior staff at Barclays as well according to the Sunday Times.
On Friday my housing officer's eyes swept across the Guardian's headline, which was lying casually on my sofa:

"Lloyds asks taxpayers for another £5bn"

He let out a low moan that said everything that neither of us could articulate.

Then Polly Toynbee said it in yesterday's Guardian Weekend, about this decade's financial meltdown (sorry to quote all of her but it's so well said):

"The British Government found itself within hours of the collapse of everything, when ATM's would have closed, supermarket shelves cleared and the thin wall separating our just-in-time capitalism would have been torn down to expose the frightening vulnerability of the whole system.
It didn't happen....quite"

You, taxpayer, saved everyone's arses to the tune of £1.3 trillion. Toynbee continues:

"Were lessons learned? Was the City repentant? The band played on as the new head of the now taxpayer-owned RBS was paid more than £9m. Bonuses were not banned, merely delayed after G20 pressure, and regulation only mildly tightened.
Will it happen again in the next decade? Almost certainly, as the country yearns for every sign that house prices take off again. We want our bubble back - heedless of warnings that the next bubble could be catastrophic."

We're a nation going to hell and not even in a bucket while these "executives" take this cash and threaten to leave the country if Government taxes them at 50%.

I have no words. I can't blog about this, I don't understand. Goodnight.

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