Until May 2010 and selling his soul for a title and a car plus driver, Nick Clegg might have been the leader of such a party.

Now there's nothing

That's pretty much what the electorate voted for, aye.

And if you read Robert Peston on the BBC even though the government as majority shareholder could have vetoed it the treasury accepted the remuneration committees recommendation because they feared if they didn't Hester and the board of directors would have resigned.

What I want to know is did they threaten resignation or not?

If they did and basically blackmailed Cameron they should have been sacked not given a bonus.

If the treasury just thought it was a risk (i.e. there was no outright threat of resignation) and paid it because they thought they might resign then that is equally unacceptable and shows incredibly weak government from Cameron (as does succumbing to blackmail).

Either way this demonstrates even when the bank is state run bankers can ignore calls from the majority shareholder to curb bonuses and Cameron is weak or has no desire to deal with the bonus culture.

So what if they all resigned? The shares are worth little as it is and their bluff needs to be called at some point or nothing will change.

Put someone in charge who is salaried. There is no need for bonuses in the first place. If you do your job you take home your agreed wages. That is what the majority of us do. Bankers should be no different. The bonus culture of "if we don't pay it they will leave" is just self serving drivel.

Well, I took him to mean that the economic cycle was then an awful lot smoother than the previous Tory government's huge swings from massive boom to severe recession.
Which was true, if badly phrased.

But, back to your previous wild comment about the conservatives always sorting out labour's "overborrowing"... How foolish do you feel now? Probably not at all, you'll just carry on ignoring half the argument.

I have wondered long and hard about just where this "elsewhere" is that they'd all bugger off to, if they didn't get their divvy.

I have no doubt that just like in the "real world", of which we are constantly reminded on here, there are equally capable people who would be willing to do the job for less.

Spot on.



There was a big piece in the FT last year about this – and it was deeply sceptical about how serious the threats were and, indeed, where any such businesses would move to.

My message was aimed more at individual employees than organisations. That was always the excuse: "we've got to pay the best to get the best". What doesn't seem to follow is how much better "the best" keep getting in order to justify the ever spralling remunerations packages.

As a post script to the above:

I had to laugh at last night's QT when David Lammy (lab. Tottenham), suggested a remuneration multiplier as one way of better transparency. Basically the top executives receive no more than a clearly-stated multiple of the lowest paid operative in the organisation. It's always sounded a reasonable suggestion to me but this was then countered by Liz Truss (Con. SW Norfolk), that all any organisation would do is offshore the lower paid jobs and would therefore appear to be complying. Quite how she thinks the shithouses in UK businesses could be cleaned by someone in Mombai is totally beyond me.

I don't have an issue with performance-related bonuses, per se.
Trouble is, we are all shareholders in RBS and we don't know what the deliverables and amounts in his bonus are/were.

Just outsource the cleaning. Then the cleaner works for a different company.