What to do about Bankers?
Tuesday 8 December 2009
In my day job, I have worked regularly in the City for many years. As an IT specialist, I'm just the hired help but its enabled me to see first hand how the many diverse organisations that make up our financial sector operate. And of course there are good ones and not so. Many companies I work with are supporting fast growing businesses and creating real jobs and opportunities. Others, however, are trading and speculating between themselves, adding no social value, whilst generating huge profits and bonus pools.
Whilst the bankers and financiers have enjoyed huge personal rewards in recent years, our communities are now paying the price in lost jobs, shattered savings and service cuts.
There is now no justification for huge bonuses for individuals, built up on the back of government funded liquidity intended to protect out financial system from meltdown. Especially when its many of the same organisations and individuals whose high-risk behaviours have been responsible for getting us into this mess.
Dealing with this is very difficult. Knee jerking into punitive taxes and caps on personal or corporate earnings - popular though that may be - risks throwing out the baby with the bathwater. What we need is an intelligent approach which drives long term, structural change in the financial service industry, its behaviours and its contribution to our economic health.
I am hopeful that the baleful influence of the City on Labour thinking has finally been broken. The governments comments in the last few days on the importance of building up manufacturing & industry is welcome and long overdue.
A litmus test for me will be how Alistair Darling brings a Labour solution to this over the next few days.
