They Must Have Seen You Coming, Mate

Mr. Brown is VERY angry. Yvette Cooper is in a right legal tizz. Meanwhile bankers at RBS are paying themselves £1bn worth of bonuses.

What did we expect?

Sick Joke

It's not just that this is greed on a scale that is so appalling as to wonder what goes through the minds of people who think that they are entitled to bonuses when their activities put their bank into public ownership and reduced its value to only a few multiples of the collective bonus they now propose to pay themselves, but it is the incredible lack of thought and planning by the Government to have not even thought of covering this off.

It's a sick joke beyond the imagination of most decent people.

'Asleep On The Job'

From Brown, Darling and Cooper's position, it is as David Cameron put it - a case 'Sleeping on the job'. It really is no use Gordon Brown being 'angry' about it now that it's in the public domain - the Government, while using the taxpayer's money with such generosity, had a moral and legal obligation to have covered this off as a precondition of any bail out.

As far as the credibility of these ministers go, it is cut to shreds. Most people would have thought of this but it is entirely in keeping with the slipshod, knee jerk series of reactions to their stupid policies going wrong which got us here - and they did not pay enough attention to warning signs before the debacle so perhaps we should not have expected anything different in the execution of the so-called 'rescue' mission.

Badly Advised

I come back to a central point of mine. Brown and Darling have surrounded themselves with Investment Bankers at incredible cost to the taxpayer to rescue us from the very catastrophe they caused. It comes as no surprise that their advice seems to overlook penalising their colleagues in the banking world. Indeed, you can bet your life their smarmy, expensive advice was that in order for the machine to restart, adequate incentives needed to be kept in place to tempt the executives into playing ball.

Just as at Northern Rock where Ron Sandler, earning nicely himself, is paying bonuses to staff just for repaying what they owe the taxpayer, the banking mentality is one of mega-money - and it's where numbers like millions do not cut it any longer as they were so 1980s.

Like the whole credit crunch and recession, this was entirely a predictable result of the bail outs.

It really is time we all voted with our feet. Just think if the British public withheld their tax cheques until the Government got this mess sorted out to ensure to a penny goes in bonus to anyone in a bank part owned by the taxpayer.

Now that would be some incentive to get things right, would it not?