Recent days have seen yet more attacks by politicians and the media on the evil bankers.
What a surprise!
Who have been the most vilified pariah groups in the UK over the last year? Yes, you've got it. Despite competitive bids by others such as fat and happy trade union leaders, the three really in the stocks have been greedy allowance abusing politicians, eavesdropping and people-harassing journalists and the source of all financial evil,- the bankers. It is they who can pay for everything and probably single handedly eliminate Britain's defecit.
So what do groups under attack do? Those with access to platforms form an unholy alliance against those without. That's what has happened, pure and simple.
The politicians in particular are playing a dangerous and irresponsible game, many equating bankers with "the rich" . Populist attacks on the rich have come even from people who should be mature and know better. Step forward Nick Clegg this week. George Osborne also looks like giving the bankers another gratuitous kick in his autumn statement (mini budget) this week.
The UK needs both the bankers and the rich. The former for their vast contribution to the national economy despite their disastrous failure to understand the damage that a seriously out of control bonus culture is doing to their own status and to the national psyche and their complicity in the fiasco of ( politician-fuelled) massive and risky lending since 2000 when Brown abandoned "prudence" and thought he had discovered an evergreen money tree. The portrayal of the rich as being somehow undeserving parasites unless they have got there by being a footballer, celeb or X-Factor survivor is very corrosive. The effects of this flow swiftly through all age groups and most disastrously of all down into classrooms, where already too many potential high performers ruin their futures by bending to peer pressure,-often bullying,-and abandoning their books.
The message therefore to the political and media bullyboys is, whether they like it or not, to lay off a group of people who Britain probably needs more than it does them. Didn't their mothers tell them not to play with fire? Is that the sound of flights departing to Hong Kong and Switzerland we hear?
