Max Hastings: Stalin would have shot the bankers for their greed
No matter whether the measure is fair, enforceable or even legal, action to punish the greed of the City's fattest felines is assured of popular support.
The Chancellor's initiative is ruthlessly political. It represents his blunderbuss answer to an issue which is causing sleepless nights for finance ministers throughout the Western world, and to which there are no easy answers.
The international banking community has shown itself to possess a crocodile appetite, jungle morality and skin thickness to make rhinos envious.
Successful bankers have always been well paid, but only in the past 20 years have they institutionalised the bonus culture, whereby successful dealers and traders qualify for annual awards which can amount to £10 million or even £20 million, and average £500,000.
Many of the recipients possess limited talents - if they were cleverer, the financial crisis would not have happened.
Today, of course, even such vast and supposedly highly profitable businesses as Goldman Sachs would be ruined, but for taxpayer bail-outs of the financial system.
Hence the public outrage on both sides of the Atlantic, about these proven losers continuing to award themselves telephone number pay.
Since the system collapsed about their ears, the bankers have displayed an absence of shame which would command admiration among the accused at the Hague war crimes court.
They shrug: 'We are worth it. Our businesses cannot be allowed to fail. We have mansions and yachts to support. What's your problem?'
No employee, far less boss, would get onto the payrolls of such institutions as Goldman Sachs or J.P. Morgan if they subscribed to conventional standards of human decency.
There they are today, still rejecting voluntary, self-imposed curbs on remuneration, while maintaining a ruthless squeeze on loans to businesses in the real economy.
They brush aside assertions of the simple truth that they would have no profits from which to award bonuses, but for taxpayer-funded cheap money and systemic guarantees.
Stalin would have shot them. Lacking that option, most national leaderships are baffled.
The Obama administration, together with the German and French governments, have implicitly concluded that there is little they can do, though Berlin has capped the pay of bankers who received direct taxpayer support.
Most Western democracies have rejected more drastic measures - first, on the grounds that the financial institutions represent vital national interests which must be supported; and second, because punitive fiscal measures against one class of rich citizens are judged discriminatory and unconstitutional.
Alistair Darling, however, has chosen to adopt a ruthlessly political attitude, which Labour is confident fits the public mood.
Bankers have behaved antisocially and their threats to quit Britain should not be taken too seriously.
How great is international demand for the services of men and women who have presided over the worst financial catastrophe of modern times?
If nothing is done to curb bank behaviour, a year or two from now Britain will be a divided society.
So far, pain from our ghastly financial position has barely begun to be felt among the public. The Government is arranging matters so that it will not work through until after next year's general election.
Thereafter, almost every family in the land will suffer its share of grief with more job losses, higher taxes, further businesses going bust and public sector employment slashed.
It will be deeply damaging if the country finds itself divided between a real world in which hardship prevails, and the banking community still paying itself rewards so large that ordinary taxation scarcely affects lifestyles. Some attempt had to be made, however clumsy, to call time on the bankers.
Yet it would be foolish not to recognise the dangers inherent in Darling's measure. For 40 years after World War II, Britain was cursed by the 'politics of envy'.
Prohibitively high tax rates prevailed, choking enterprise. The socialist ethic held that if everybody could not become rich, nobody should.
Margaret Thatcher broke that culture in the 1980s, reducing top tax rates progressively from 83 per cent to 40.
Few pundits doubt that her boldness and imagination in raising incentives for success played an important part in rescuing the British economy from its slough of despond.
The fear now must be that cutting the bankers down to size will revive the broader Old Labour tradition of taxing the rich 'until the pips squeak', which would be a long-term disaster.
The Tories must thank their stars they are not in office yet. They support the charge against the bankers, but recognise the danger that, if a government goes too far down this road, the ghastly old 'equality of misery' doctrine which ruined Britain for two generations will once more take hold. It is a difficult balance to strike.
I think Darling is right to have done as he did yesterday, imposing a levy designed to punish the bankers' hubris, and fire a warning shot about future behaviour.
Given the cupidity and incompetence of thousands of City and Wall Street moguls which created the financial crisis, it is remarkable that only former Royal Bank of Scotland boss Sir Fred Goodwin's house has had its windows broken.
But Darling's strike against the bankers must be clearly perceived as a symbolic one- off. It should not represent the onset of a new socialist purge of 'the rich'.
It is foolish for the Government - for instance - to threaten to cap the salaries of top-earning civil servants, modest enough by private sector standards. We desperately need good people to run big councils and Whitehall departments. The gold-plated pensions of state employees are a much bigger scandal than their pay.
The bankers have brought public opprobrium and its consequences on themselves. But once this round of blood-letting is over, we should cherish at least a slim hope that they learn the lesson, so that they and the Chancellor can call a truce.
It is in nobody's interests, least of all those of the British economy, for the bankers' well-deserved six of the best to become a sustained caning for the nation's executives and wealth-generators, who have done nothing to justify being crippled by socialist crossfire.