The new political year produces a timely reminder of a new political truism. Opposition politicians love to bash the banks while ministers struggle to do very much about the way they behave.
This morning Ed Miliband called on the chancellor to repeat Alistair Darling's bankers' bonus tax, despite the fact that the former chancellor recently told a financial services conference that his tax was a "one-off", as intended, and did not work:
"I think it will be a one-off thing because, frankly, the very people you are after here are very good at getting out of these things and... will find all sorts of imaginative ways of avoiding it in the future."
The shadow chancellor Alan Johnson's reply to that is that he and his leader are proposing "a two-way bet" - in other words even if the bonus tax doesn't stop banks paying big bonuses (which it didn't last year) it will, at least, raise some much-needed cash and (he, not surprisingly, didn't add) make a good headline too. Indeed, Johnson got good headlines last year when he said the banks should be taxed around £7.5bn more over the course of this Parliament.
Yesterday the prime minister was very very careful to downplay what government could and should do about bankers - warning of scapegoating one industry, stressing that it wasn't right to micro-manage the banks and the importance of a successful banking sector - while still insisting,
"I want to see socially responsible banks behaving responsibly, lower bonus pools than last year's, responsible levels of remuneration, proper agreements on lending to businesses large and small and being good citizens in the community."
Both Cameron and Miliband agree that the government should use its stake in RBS to keep bonuses in that bank down but both were utterly vague about what that means.
Ministers don't expect RBS to announce their bonuses until late February - after other banks do. If other banks hold back so will RBS. If they don't, the board - including the taxpayers' representatives on it - will be told that RBS bankers will be poached by other banks if they are paid too little. Ministers will be told, in other words, that they can choose between assuaging the public's anger and crippling RBS, or ensuring RBS can one day be sold back into the private sector at a profit but disappointing voters who want to see bonuses slashed.
That was true last year when Labour was in government and Tory and Lib Dem politicians surfed the wave of public anger about the banks. Now it's Ed Miliband's turn.
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/nickrobinson/2011/01/betting_on_the.html
No comments:
Post a Comment