Bankers keep being called to ordure!

It seems to be coming a regular feature of the British way of life.

The banking chiefs (not the ordinary, customer-facing members of staff, you will note), not content with their huge and immoral remunerations and unwarranted honours from HM The Queen, continue to line their pockets unhindered and unconcerned.

The banking chiefs get found out.

The FSA (Financial Services Authority and not the Food Standards Agency, although I suspect given the use the former has been, the latter might in all probability be more effective in these matters) does nothing, having forgotten, once again, to put its teeth in that morning. Yes, read all about their tranche of successes in Private Eye magazine every fortnight!

The banking chiefs get away with it.

Already on hefty 7-figure salaries, through the kindness of their own hearts, and as a wonderful, thoughtful, empty and meaningless gesture, forgo their annual bonus because of the absolute hash they make of things. Big deal, as the rest of us suffer.

The Government of the day then bails the thieving liars out again.

And everything is Hunky Dory, which is the name of an excellent 1971 album (the forth) from David Bowie. And probably has more financial sense between its grooves that the entire ennobled, extremely forthright, honest and lovable banking chief executive fraternity combined.

So how do they do it? 

Just a slap on the wrist and told not to do it again? Retire in their early fifties on £6,000 tax free a week and only suffer the mild embarrassment of being un-sir-ificated (© George W Bush) while thousands lose their jobs as a result?

You or I keep schtum about the £48 deposit that was credited in error as £84 the previous week, and we get 6 years in jail with hard labour thrown in!

What does get extremely tiresome, is the fact we are continually reminded that these thieving buffoons command the salaries they do because “they will go elsewhere otherwise”. I say, let them go, and good riddance to bad rubbish. The new BBC Director General’s annual salary has been reduced from £671,000 to a mere £450,000, so why shouldn’t the useless banking fraternity be rewarded for their dishonesty and failures with a more normal salary. Or, more suitably, the immediate sack. Which would be more equitable and suitably rewarding as far as the long-suffering public is concerned.

Yes, they may do the work of two men (now officially confirmed as being Laurel and Hardy), or at a stretch three (Larry, Mo and Curly) but if that work is useless and dishonest, well, it ‘aint much good then, innit guv’?

The banks are in the situation where they need someone at the helm who doesn’t need the money, seeing as those currently running things can’t be trusted to do it themselves, relying on it, as they seem to, as their crony shareholders’ personal cash cow.

If it was their money they were losing, then, like gamblers, I’d have no concerns with who was running them, but as it’s our money they play with, it needs sorting, and quickly. 

And if that means ridding the banking industry of these overpaid ‘sirs’ and other self-acclaimed non hoi polloi and putting in someone who actually knows what they are doing, then tough.