Greed is good!

During Nationwide’s Annual General Meeting in Manchester, members attacked the £7.9million in pay and bonuses received in 2012 by five executive directors.

One said:

“This happens year after year, their snouts get deeper and deeper into the trough.”

Alan Debenham, honorary secretary of the Building Societies Members Association, described the payouts as ‘daylight robbery’ and ‘morally obscene’. He added:

“Yet again, and this year in times of great national austerity, our directors have awarded themselves, as greedily as ever, extremely excessive bonuses, more than doubling their excessive annual salaries, which already had an outlandish 30 per cent uplift last year.”

On 24 July 2013, Nationwide Chairman, Geoffrey Howe, (paid £300,000 a year for working less than three days a week) responded thus:

“This is a society problem, this isn’t a Nationwide problem.

There is a huge mismatch between what pop stars earn, footballers earn, business people earn, bankers earn and what the man on the street earns. A lot of people just find it hard to understand why there is such a big differential between what the man in the street earns and what senior business people earn, whether they’re bankers or whether they’re in other jobs.”

All of which is true. In a democracy, society is organised according to the vision of the politicians. And, since 1979 at least, the vision of our traitorous politicians has accorded pretty much with that of their banker bosses.

In a society where the politicians kow-tow to the bankers, the bankers get to force ‘their snouts… deeper and deeper into the trough’ and their spokesmen get to wave away our criticisms with a not-me-guv, ‘society’, snigger.

You voted for LibLabCon, you members. They freed the Fat Cats to fleece.

If you vote for the greed-is-good folk, you get Gordon Gecko.

It’s as simple as that.