Training | 2010.01.26
A simpler protest than Billy Bragg's wheeze: switch banks | John Harris
You don\'t have to do a Billy Bragg to register your outrage at bonuses. Just join the Co-op
Here we go, yet again: bonus season at the banks, and wails of outrage from everyone beyond the City walls. After Fred the Shred\'s pension , Stephen Hester\'s salary package and the fuss last summer about huge rises in bonuses and salaries at Barclays , we all know the script: screaming hostility that unites everyone from the Socialist Worker to the Daily Mail, and the usual claims that those endless zillions are needed to secure the "best people". The latter is surely proof of a world that has long since moved well beyond satire: the history of the last two years, after all, comes down to what happened when those self-same "best people" got slightly too full of themselves.
Still, as with those movie monsters who swat away artillery fire like buckshot, nothing so far tried has stopped either them, or their paymasters. The government\'s one-off bonus tax has apparently been taken on the chin, leaving big remuneration pots intact. New obligations to reward execs and traders in staggered tranches of shares are surely weakened by the fact that hundreds of them will be able to cash in the equity almost as soon as they get it – which, in the case of high-rollers at the Royal Bank of Scotland, means handsome windfalls from the now-infamous bonus pot of up to £1.5bn, timed to arrive each summer between this year and 2012.
All the chicanery leaves mere politicians looking feeble, pleading for restraint while their measures are arrogantly knocked aside – despite the fact that so much of the banking sector is state-owned, and its largesse is being subsidised by the public. Meanwhile, the axe hangs over schools and hospitals, and come the election of the Tories we can expect the gap between hand-wringing rhetoric and effective action to grow even wider. Needless to say, none of this is good news for mainstream politics, and when the age of austerity bites, the problem may yet turn poisonous.
So what, to quote a famous Marxist, is to be done? The public seem outraged, but simultaneously disconnected: proof, perhaps, that advanced societies are so filled up with noise and distraction that even glaring moral outrages have no real traction. Even stereotypical leftie-liberals are often prone to think of the banks as a law-unto-themselves: present on the high street, but somehow immune to the actions of ordinary Joes. That plenty of these people still dutifully avoid Israeli fruit and veg, or zealously buy Fairtrade food, seems not to have led to the obvious conclusion: that for the time being, politicians may have to be circumvented, and co-ordinated individual actions might hold part of the answer.
Hats off, then, to Billy Bragg, who this week served notice that he won\'t pay his taxes until bonuses at RBS have been capped at £25,000. By the end of day one, his NoBonus4RBS Facebook group had around 300 members – but word spread via such unlikely outlets as the Luton Town Supporters\' Forum and the New York Times website, and at the time of writing the number was nearer 10,000.
Yes, his potential constituency is limited to those who see to their own fiscal affairs – and at the risk of sounding hopelessly po-faced, people on the left should arguably think carefully before threatening to withhold their taxes. There again, Bragg sees the threat of non-payment as a counterpoint to all those threats from financiers to leave the country – and besides, as evidenced by appearances on Radio 2, 5 Live and TalkSport, this is chiefly a neat bit of campaigning that pushed his take on the bonuses question into places that would usually be off-limits. His intention, he told me yesterday, was "to act as a lightning rod for the sense of powerlessness that seems to be there whenever this issue gets debated".
For those who either meet their obligations via PAYE or fear heat from the Inland Revenue, there is another route: more simple than the Bragg wheeze, and potentially more effective. If you have money in a bank whose pay structures strike you as iniquitous, put it somewhere else. As an RBS customer about to jump ship, my own choice is the Co-operative Bank, freshly merged with the Britannia Building Society. Their executives are hardly paupers (last year, the chief executive of Co-operative Financial Services was paid a salary of £590,000, with a bonus of £183,000), but their pay policy falls short of arrogant insanity – and as proof of their bona fides as both progressives and prudent operators, they make a lot of their ethical investment policy and proud avoidance of the financial instruments that got most other banks into such a mess.
I\'m making the move because a friend did, which underscores the crucial point. If even 50,000 people took their custom away from the usual big-hitters, the banks would notice, and the idea would surely spread. So what\'s stopping us?
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jan/19/what-done-banker-bonuses
