Levelling the bankers' bonuses

Submitted 9 December 2009

Read a letter by Malcolm Clark, Director of the One Society Campaign in today's Guardian, about the positives for bankers of losing their bonuses.

Peter Preston (The rewards of banking, 7 December) has a point: bankers are human too. Most of them want exactly the same as us: a decent quality of life. But bankers are not islands: they have to deal with (or are inconvenienced by having to avoid) the same challenges and problems in society that we all face. In fact the huge salaries paid – and the beauty-contest "I'm worth it" factor that perpetuates these salary levels – actually make the situation worse: bankers, along with the rest of us, struggle to keep up.