by Alistair Darling is set to ask bankers, really very nicely indeed, to crack down immediately on large bonuses in a key speech to Labour’s conference.
The chancellor hasn’t quite got round to putting legislation in place to prevent massive bonuses, and has suggested the bankers have no need to wait for the ‘rules’ and should act now.
“I am appealing to their sense of right and wrong, their underlying sense of fair play and decency.” Darling told reporters.
“Ha ha ha ha ha,” said many, many bankers.
“He wants us to voluntarily stop giving ourselves obscene amounts of cash for no reason whatsoever? Err, Ok!” They concluded.
Plans
Many of the country’s most successful bankers are already preparing for the inevitable legislation, whenever the Chancellor finally gets round to it.
“We have teams of lawyers ready to pore over every last line of legislation,” said one of them.
“Their sole purpose being to find the loopholes that will allow us to continue awarding ourselves vomit inducing sums of cash.”
“And let us be clear, there will be loopholes, because if they were capable of drawing up legal documents without loopholes, they’d already be working in banking.”
“Would you really expect anything else from us, really?”
“Look on the bright side, the Chancellor will probably be able to get some of these bonuses back from taxation.”
“Well, maybe from the less capable bankers who haven’t got a decent tax avoidance scheme in place. But at least it’s something.”
