How Very Dare They

It is a disgrace, we rescued them and now they are paying themselves bonuses. The PM is a wimp and should put a stop to it especially as other people are loosing their jobs. "Bankers at the state-supported Royal Bank of Scotland may still receive bonuses, the chancellor of the exchequer said yesterday, and that the RBS are unable to alter existing contractual obligations. The government is under pressure to rein in the award of bonuses after reports the bank had set aside a bonus pot of £1bn for its 177,000 employees. There is growing anger that bankers who mishandled billions in the run up to the recession might get this reward. Gordon Brown insisted today that there must be “no rewards for failure” in Britain’s banks. The Prime Minister's comments came despite reports that big banks that were bailed out with billions of pounds of taxpayer money are to pay more than £1 billion in bonuses to senior staff. Speaking to an audience of economists in London, Mr Brown said that Britain was leading the way "in sweeping aside the old short-term bonus culture of the past and replacing it first of all with a determination that there are no rewards for failure and secondly that there are rewards only for long-term success”. Mr Brown said that the policy not to reward failure would be pursued "aggressively", so that banks in which the state now holds a majority stake would pay no bonuses to board members and no dividends to shareholders this year." In the meantime, Barclays, Britain's third-largest lender, said that it would waive bonuses for its executive directors as it reported a 14 per cent fall in full-year pre-tax profits, announced £8.1 billion of write downs and scrapped its dividend.