THE BLACK HOLE OF GOGARBURN

Gogarburn: Head office of RBS

I listened to an interview with the chief executive of RBS, on the Today Programme the other day, as a further £25 billion of our tax pounds was deposited in it.

It was literally unbelievable. I was pinching myself to make sure I wasn’t still dreaming. The need for the bonuses was an absolute, according to Mr Hester, despite that fact that they are being paid by our taxes; taxes of people who earn a tiny fraction of what the bonus is, to people who are effectively civil servants and not very good ones at that. “We have to pay competitive bonuses or they will go elsewhere “, he whined, over and over.

There was no question of negotiation; no humility about the fact that we are paying bonuses to executives of a bank which has lost so much money, and continues to lose so much money that most ordinary people can't begin to comprehend the figures. They mean nothing to us.

It was Alice in Wonderland stuff from a bank that made the biggest loss in history. “We have to keep our good people.”

WHAT BLOODY GOOD PEOPLE? I was shouting at the radio. The ones that lost so much money that no one in the world knows how much it will come to in the end? Those good people?

At the same time I read about the reduction in the Scottish block grant of around £3 billion over three years. The cutting of expenditure in Scotland, is a tiny fraction of the money being poured into RBS, and, along with a downward spiral of unemployment, more poverty, and more unemployment, it will cause untold grief to some of the most vulnerable people in Scotland.

Old people's care doesn't just employ carers, it cares for old people. Old people will have to be kept in hospital, and take up beds sick people might have used. Free school meals don't just employ dinner ladies; they may be the only meals that some poor hungry kids get.

Reduced price prescriptions have meant that more people, handed a script with 3 or 4 medicines on, may not have had to choose which ones they can afford.

Untold misery will come from these decisions.

But we can't have bankers going without their Porches, can we? Apparently not.

I wonder if this reduction in spending isn't some sort of punishment to the Scottish people for voting SNP and for continuing to think that they are doing a good job.

Is this Brown's way of saying ... this is what you get if you don't vote Labour?

In the amount of money that they are chucking at banks, three billion is such a tiny sum that no one would notice it. But we should have known. It was a mistake to humiliate Gordon Brown, and now we must pay.