Any other business | 19 December 2009

Is there a banker in the house? Well, please don’t ask me to go on apologising for you

If I have one last sentiment to offer for 2009 — apart, of course, from warm compliments of the season — it is that I’m bloody fed up of apologising for bankers. I’ve been thinking this since October, when I told an audience at the Ilkley Literary Festival that I would rather let banks reform themselves than see them subjected to punitive taxes and fierce new regulation — only to be set upon by two elderly ladies telling me I was part of the smug conspiracy that was the root of the problem. So let me be plain. The ‘one-off supertax’ on bankers’ bonuses panders to ugly sentiment, sets a rotten precedent, and will yield a fraction of the half-billion claimed by the Chancellor in his Pre-Budget Report. But come on, chaps, what did you expect? Masters of slick presentation that you are, how well do you feel you’ve made the case for your own defence? The fact is that you have been paid, collectively, far too much; that reasonable people believe prospects of excessive reward warped your collective risk judgment; and that there is such a thing as a national sense of fairness, and you continue to offend against it. So my Christmas message to the City is: stop whingeing, read Budge Firth’s sermon on page 55, and if you’ve already found six ways to avoid writing a bonus-tax cheque to the Chancellor, write a bigger one to your chosen charity instead. Then you might no longer need me to speak up for you.