Taking the bonus

Stephen Hester - Chief Executive of RBS - has been awarded a bonus of nearly £1M, and is being encouraged to refuse it. Bear in mind that he also earns a salary of £1.2M, and that RBS is government owned, in other words, paid for by the taxpayer ( 82% of it ).

Some people have said that the senior executives should not receive any bonuses until the money we, the taxpayers, have put in to the bank. That makes sense, although I suspect that, with the huge sums involved, this would take way beyond the tenure of current employees, which is not really the way that the banking business works. Which is why we are in the mess we are in, of course, so it does not have a good record.

David Cameron throws his hands up and blames it on the deal agreed with the previous government. Which is a typical political response to pretty much everything. And it is a cop out - he could have spoken to Stephen Hester and made it clear that, whatever the agreement was, he should make it clear that taking such bonuses would be a bad idea. He could do this, if he believed it, which I suspect he doesn't. The current government policy seems to be "squeeze the poor, encourage the rich", which is not quite the message that Jesus preached.

But the real problem I have with this is the assumption that these people can only be motivated by obscene amounts of money. Why is there no-one motivated by doing something good? Helping people? Making a difference? Because in most areas of life, if the only enticement is money, it suggests that the actual task is very unappealing, the job is something extremely distateful. Maybe they leaders of our financial markets have to be given so much money because, deep down, they realise that the job they do is fundamentally foul, like stirring a huge cesspool.