There are few friends to be won these days by defending bankers. Or banksters, as some are now calling the Masters of the Universe from Canary Wharf to Wall Street. I’m as furious about their behaviour (and envious of their wedge) as you are. There seems little doubt that they hold the prime responsibility for the global economic mess we’re all wading through at the moment. Revolutionary fervour is in the air as Goldmans eat their cake and the rest of us struggle to find a mouldy crust in their refuse bin. Even Mammon’s mouthpiece, the Wall Street Journal, expressed some moral concern about the Goldman Sachs profits this week.

But, while there may be a few worthy suggestions within the Walker Review on policing bankers published yesterday, one has to question the value of turning the sans-culottes on the boys in the bespoke suits and marching them off to Madame Guillotine by parading (and then snipping-off) their bonuses.

The FT leader on the subject today is entitled 'Perils of populism on bankers’ pay' and the pointy-heads from the Pink 'Un do indeed have a point. Walker's proposal that the details of top bankers' salaries and bonuses should be made public is wrong-headed. It’s pure, cynical Brownism: a kind of naming and shaming favoured by the spit-flecked, rabble-rousing News of the World when trying to enact 'Sarah’s Law' and provide its readers with the names and addresses of paedophiles so the righteous can pop round and put the nonce’s windows out.

If a non-publicly owned bank is making pots of money by virtue of its slickness in the casino of modern-day finance, and if it’s doing so by legitimate means and then paying its taxes, what right have the rest of us to demand to know how much it is paying its below board-level staff?

Doubters will say: 'Yes but when they get it wrong and screw up they come to the taxpayer to bail them out. So we need to know'. But can you really tell if a bank is in peril by the size of bonuses paid to its staff? You certainly couldn’t deduce that Goldman Sachs was about to go bust because it paid a couple of million in bonus this week to some testosterone-dripping wild animal on its trading floor. Quite the reverse. I’d be more worried about the dupes who bought/sold from the Goldman guy – the one who wasn’t the smartest guy in the room. It’s simply perverse to suggest that because an organisation is paying out big bucks it’s about to go tits-up. It’s all much more complex than that. Anyway, I’m not convinced that Walker thinks remuneration lies at the heart of the problem. It just plays well to the gallery. 

Everyone has nodded that Walker's recommendations about beefing up the role and training of non-execs on bank is terribly sage. They can’t have known what was going on, and even if they did they were lily-livered. This is now an age-old chestnut. But as Robert Peston has pointed out, the non-execs at RBS were hardly a bunch of kids in shorts with the milk wet on their cheeks. The RBS line-up of non-execs, Pesto writes: 'included three former bankers, an erstwhile treasury official whose responsibilities included financial regulation, the one time boss of an insurance giant, and the titular head of Goldman Sachs in Europe. At the time, these were not individuals who would have been described as either ignorant of finance, shrinking violets or nincompoops. Some have alleged that the non-executives were terrified of the steely chief executive of the time, Sir Fred Goodwin. This, I have to say, is less than compelling. I know some of these non-execs. And I can tell you that they are materially tougher and less pliable than old boots.'

Of course something has to be done – not just to placate public opinion but to make sure the whole finance edifice doesn’t come crashing down again any time soon - but I’m just not sure Walker knows what. Neither do I really. But I’d be very careful about slaying the now-reviled golden goose.

So to end, a couple of questions. What exactly do we want banks to do? Is it really in anyone’s interest that banks do badly by making small profits? Especially those institutions in which we the tax-payers have such huge stakes? Do we want our economy to be less reliant on and dominated by the financial services industry? And if so, what alternatives are currently being proposed for Uk plc? Making cars? Wind farm accessories? The next Google?

We need to be careful what we wish for. One almost certain result of any draconian legislation that arises from Walker will be that banking’s London-based high fliers will simply think enough is enough and decamp to New York, Frankfurt or Shanghai. They’ll be making the decision and leaving the rest of us to get on with it and cope alone with our medicocre prospects.

In today's bulletin:
Battered BA seeks £600m cash after record loss
Editor's blog: It's no time for a lynch mob
Recession makes us drink less
Why disengaged employees are costing UK plc billions
Coping under pressure, with YouTube