Rich people defend other rich people getting richer

So, the vice chairman of Goldman Sachs and (surprise, surprise) former adviser to Thatcher and now conservative peer Lord Griffiths has said that the public must learn to 'tolerate the inequality' of bonuses

Well, excuse me if I thought that there should be some kind of reform after excessive risk taking fuelled by the lust for bonuses caused a recession. Excuse me Lord Griffiths for thinking that we should take a more prudent approach to banking and take steps to stop us inflating another debt bubble that will burst again in ten to twenty years time. This time it really has to be an end to boom and bust.

Griffiths seems to be promoting the idea of ‘trickle down’ economics, a theory which is dubious at best. Even through the Blair years, where wages steadily increased, the gap between rich and poor continued to rise. There is no evidence whatsoever that exorbitant bankers bonuses are good for society as a whole and the poorest people in society.

Even worse is his pathetic patronising idea that because his father and grandfather were miners he knows what inequality is like.

His reasoning for not stopping bonuses is that companies would move to low tax countries such as Switzerland. Well why haven’t they so far? Britain already taxes far higher than countries like that, so the must be something else keeping big corporations here.

There have been some very good ideas about how to deal with bonuses including, taxing them heavily – I suggest 95%; a global tax on financial transactions that goes to help the poor (far too utilitarian to ever be taken seriously, mores the pity); banning bonuses over a certain amount, or as my dad suggested “Make bank payouts over a certain percentage of salary non tax deductible for the bank.” I’m not quite sure what that means, but he used to be an accountant so I’ll trust him.

What is clear though is that reform is needed, and radical reform at that. What Lord Griffiths is proposing is that we all turn a blind eye to what the banking industry is doing and has done for the last 20 years and wait for the next recession.