Tell them to pack their bags

The minister told the assembled MPs that, unless something was done, over 5,000 senior British bankers would earn more than £1 million this year.

That's not to say that it will make them all new millionaires. Most of them are millionaires already.

In an exercise in avarice which can have few parallels in history, 5,000 people will trouser a million pounds each in just 12 months. That's £20,000 a week, give or take the odd few hundred quid.

And for what? Why, for taking the country's and the world's economies to the brink of disaster, ruining thousands of people and driving into unemployment hundreds of thousands of others.

For gambling on the stock markets with other people's money and losing. And for plundering the taxpayer for billions to bail them out when the whole house of cards came tumbling down.

The directors of the Royal Bank of Scotland are now threatening to resign if the Treasury blocks the 84 per cent publicly owned bank from upping bonuses to 50 per cent above last year's total, aiming to pay out £1.5 billion to its top investment bankers.

It would be hilarious if it wasn't so damn arrogant. But you've got to give the board brownie points for sheer brass neck. The facts are astonishing. According to the BBC pundit Robert Peston, an RBS currency trader in New York took home $20 million last year and a commodity trader was paid $40 million.

The directors claim that they really have to give these absurd bonuses in order to retain top-level staff in the face of huge competition for their services.

Well, if their services are what drove the banking system into meltdown, it should surely be obvious to even the meanest intellect that we, as taxpayers and the owners of the bank, would be a sight better off without them and their dubious services.

Lord Myners put that fairly well, but his further comments reveal exactly what the real problem is.

"I think," he continued, "the real responsibility here must lie with the shareholders. Accordingly I have written to the National Association of Pension Funds, the CBI and the TUC urging them to use their influence to persuade trustees to ask their fund managers: 'What are you doing to stop these quite unreasonable and unjustified levels of remuneration?'"

All well and good, but it shouldn't be necessary, in the case of RBS at least. The bank is now 84 per cent owned by the taxpayer, so we are the shareholders. It should need no pressure, just a simple instruction.

Top bankers earn salaries that the rest of us can only dream of. Let them live on them and stop this pernicious bonus culture dead in its tracks. If they don't like it, they can leave and join the ranks of the "resting."

They can be replaced easily enough, despite their overblown estimates of their own importance.

And they can be replaced by a new generation of bankers working for a publicly owned bank, placing investment capital where it can revive manufacturing, develop a new generation of green enterprises and give employment to some of the millions of unemployed in the process, rather than placing capital merely to generate speculative profits.

All it takes is the will in government. Unfortunately, it is that will which is evidently lacking. Given Business Secretary Lord Mandelson's comment that he "understood" the point of view of the RBS directors and his admission that "the government does not run RBS, it is run by its management and its board," perhaps the not-so-noble lord ought to do what he has done all his political life and crawl to wherever the movers, shakers and money men are.

He's welcome to join them on the dole queue.