Political Hypocrisy

The level of ignorance of some sections of the British population never ceases to amaze me.

Yesterday I was reading some of the BBC News website comments about Stephen Hester’s £963k bonus. For a start, most of those expressing righteous indignation were under the impression that this guy was responsible for RBS’ collapse – they’d obviously never heard of “Fred the Shred”, nor that Hester was put in place to turn RBS around, which he seems to be doing.

Many lamented their paltry salary when compared with that of Hester – but not the comparative levels of responsibility, which makes their comparisons somewhat asinine.

Some went as far as to say he should be paid the equivalent of a nurse, in which case we’d any old Tom, Dick or Harry running our nationalised bank, with an application list as long as a queue comprising most of the working population of the UK. We could additionally say bye-bye to the £45bn RBS owes us.

Yet others were decrying the fact he got this bonus while making several thousand people redundant – well, how the hell does one turn an operation from making a loss to making a profit without getting rid of some people? It’s a bank, for God’s sake, not a workers’ co-operative. Even charities make people redundant in hard times.

The fact is that this bank went from losing £1.6bn a year to making 2bn – that is quite a transformation. It still, however, owes us £45bn. Fine – put a monkey in charge and pay him or her peanuts, but then don’t ever expect the £45bn to be repaid.

All the while, politicians of every hue are cynically scapegoating Hester for a contract they either oversaw or failed to regulate. I’m heartily sick of the hypocrisy of politicians and the knee-jerk reactions of union bosses.