That will be £25 each please

It's funny isn't it? No matter what happens there is always a silver lining. Take the banking crisis for example. It seems the bosses at Royal Bank of Scotland are threatening to quit if they are not allowed to pay out their £1.5 billion bonuses to their investment bankers.

Switch the lights off as you leave lads and pop the keys through the letter box.

They are the financial brains, remember, who would be on the streets selling Big Issue if we, the taxpayer, had not stuffed a £36 billion loan into their sweaty palms in addition to the £45.5 billion funding we have provided.

RBS was belly up, kept afloat on taxpayer life support, so it did not take the whole financial sector down the pan with it. Now, a year later with the taxpayer owning 84.4 per cent they want to shell out £1.5 billion in bonuses to investment bankers. That's almost £25 for every man woman and child in the country - normally it is the shareholders who receive a dividend not provide one.

The bank's lawyers - doubling up the rogue count at a stroke - claim they have to pay the bonuses as their duty is to all shareholders . . . neatly forgetting the fact that the share certificates of the other 15.6 per cent of shareholders would have been hanging on a nail in the outside privvy long ago if we had not intervened.

The claim that the bonuses have to be paid to keep staff is also a bit hollow. These are the same staff who brought the bank down which would make you unemployable on most CVs so they are lucky to have a job at all.

Time to bring banking back into the real world. They almost destroyed the economies of the West and have had a massive impact on jobs and pensions. They have forced firms to close and the impact of the greed, arrogance and stupidity will be felt by ordinary people for a generation.

For them though, despite floating on a life raft of public funding, the world is back to normal. So what we need is a government strong enough to regulate the banks and the city so they can never hold us to ransom again - which, if we are honest, means that RBS will be allowed to pay their bonus with ineffectual strings attached and no matter who is in No 10 when the music stops, they will do it again next year and the year after and the year after until the whole house of cards comes tumbling down again in five, ten, a dozen year's time.