City knows it's taking the piss

Pollsters ComRes were startled to find that between half and two-thirds of respondents in London's financial heartlands said that "City types" were too highly paid, even though 64 per cent admitted that their main motivation for joining the industry was the high salary and colossal bonuses.

The St Paul's Institute - an economic think tank linked to the central London cathedral - commissioned the survey of over 500 London financial workers to gauge their professional ethics.

It controversially scrapped the report's launch last month while urging Occupy London protesters to disband their protest camp and making threats of legal action to evict them if they didn't.

But today's findings suggested that many in the City were actually on the protesters' side - at least in theory.

Sixty-six per cent said City bond traders did not earn their keep while 63 per cent felt the same about FTSE 100 bosses, 55 per cent about stockbrokers and 50 per cent for investment bankers.

Nor did free markets make for fair trading, they said. Fifty-one per cent thought that deregulating financial markets led to less ethical behaviour.

Yet a whopping 82 per cent insisted that their own company maintained high ethical standards.

New Economic Foundation researcher James Meadway told the Morning Star that the City's response was "peculiar" but unsurprising.

Individual City workers seemed to understand their industry's reputation for greed, he said - but did not understand how their own work fuelled it.

"It's like 'somewhere out there there's a problem,' but we're never going to say personally: 'Yes, you are a part of it'."

The double-think over pay was just one such example, he said.

"There's a kind of conflict taking place - there's an indication that, yes, they want the money, but they know it's not a good thing."

Mr Meadway said it was important not to "fixate at an individual level" because the industry's most damaging excesses were pursued for the sake of shareholder returns.

The report follows new backing for the protesters from Labour leader Ed Miliband (pictured), who wrote in the Observer last week that social and economic inequality had taken centre-stage in the political debate.

"Now inequality is not just between rich and poor but the richest and everybody else," Mr Miliband wrote.

"Some of those in the top 1 per cent display the wrong values and that percolates through to the rest of society. The unfair way rewards are handed out is partly why the middle is being squeezed."

The Labour leader concluded that Tory PM David Cameron was not driven by a vision of a "more responsible, fairer capitalism."

n Police and protesters are braced for a showdown this Saturday at the City of London's lord mayoral inauguration.

The Lord Mayor is personally selected by the City's "livery companies," a medieval mix of industry lobby group and masonic lodge, and is traditionally an international ambassador for the finance sector's interests.