The recent news that UK banks receiving a further tranch of bailout money (strange how £40 billion no longer seems like a lot of money since the banks became too big to fail) are to have restrictions place on bonus payments has spurred the usual bullshit from the banks.

Stephen Hester, chief executive of RBS, said the bonus requirements made it more difficult for the bank – which has a large investment banking division – to recruit the right staff.

Really? This excuse is trotted out whenever any reduction in the bankers' ability to pig out at the corporate trough is in any way impeded. Note, the actual restriction being discussed here is not the ability to pay bonuses for 2010, it's the mere deferral of those bonuses for a year. I think bankers must live in some strange world that's almost entirely devoid of any contact with the real world. Hester might have been better (or at least more honest) to write

“You people just don't understand that a good banker will insist on the right to huge payments before even sitting down at his or her desk. If we can't recruit the right sort of greedy bastard then we will fall behind the banks who are fully staffed with rapacious, backstabbing self-serving minions, and our shareholders will buy their shares instead. It's not easy being a banker, you know, and bonuses are a right, not something you have to earn”.

When I was a kid this sort of assumption of entitlement was chiefly associated with the output of the nation's public schools. In today's classless society anyone, even a lad from Easingwold comprehensive school, can apparently get in on the act. Oxford apparently did Mr. Hester no good at all.