While we’re complaining that our hospitals are dirty, our schools are failing, there’s too much crime and our troops don’t have the right equipment, we’re also letting a tiny minority of people cream obscene sums of money from our society.
So what could we spend the money on instead?
£6 million, the bonus due to RBS chief Stephen Hester if he does absolutely nothing, is more than it would cost to provide free mosquito nets to a million people.
Alistair Darling has just promised £40 billion to further bail out RBS and Lloyds. That ten times the amount that the End Child Poverty coalition predicts that we need to spend to halve child poverty by 2010.
The bonus pot for banks looks to top £6 billion in 2009. What do you think we could we do with money like that?
How many mosquito nets could be bought for £6.bn, and how many lives might that save in Africa?
We could fully fund the Probation Service properly, so that they could follow up adequately on violent criminals and offenders against women, which as of now they can’t afford to do.
We could issue a small business loan to every farmer in the developing world.
UNICEF’s wordwide inoculation programme costs just $93 million.
Provide anti-retroviral drugs for all the world’s AIDS victims, several times over.
What better uses than giving all this money to a few already rich bankers could you think of?
Well, since we’ve borrowed the financial stimulus money that we’ve pumped into the banks from our own children, we could invest in green jobs so that they’ll have a future worth growing up in.
Now that’s what I call ’socially useful’.