Michael Meacher MP

Hester’s virtual £1 million bonus is an icon of everything that is currently wrong with Britain.   He is the personification of a self-engrossing greed that is destroying the moral fabric of society.   He is being paid a so-called bonus, 40 times the size of the total pay of the average worker, simply for doing his job for which he already gets a base pay of more than £1 million – in other words, his pay has been doubled for a performance which has not by any standards been exceptional, having presided over a collapse in the RBS share price even further below the break-even level for taxpayers who contributed £35bn to bail out the bank.   The Cameron-Osborne riposte – that the alternative to making the award would have been “worse for the taxpayer” – starkly demonstrates the government’s feebleness in succumbing to blackmail as Hester and his ilk hold the country to ransom.   And it makes a monkey out of the government that Cable can say on Tuesday that shareholders should use their power to rein in excessive corporate pay and then on Friday the government, the shareholder holding 83% of RBS shares, caves in with such an egregiously excessive handout. (more…)