Darling’s speech: populism meets old fashioned politics

Populism does not come more de-robed than what we will get on bankers from Labour’s pre-election conference.

It starts today with the Chancellors speech. There will be an elaboration of the bank bashing theme.

Mr Darling will promise that “it will mean an end to automatic bank bonuses year after year. It will mean an end to immediate payouts for top management. Any bonuses will be deferred over time, so they can be clawed back if they are warranted by long term performance.

“We won’t allow greed and recklessness to ever again endanger the whole global economy and the lives of millions of people.”

There will be a firm direction to bankers to rein in any overflowing bonus pots before new legislation is pushed through parliament in the autumn.

As I wrote last week, there is a real sense that bonus pots announced at the end of the year will ignite an electorally significant backlash.

Much of this is reiterating the steps outlined by the G20. Some of it sits uneasily with the very pay policies enacted by state owned and state controlled banks.

Many will argue that it’s a bit late to be going down this road now. To date, George Osborne has sounded tougher on particularly the public sector bank pay bonanzas.

But almost every senior figure I have met here so far has been quick to point out that the introduction of the 50p tax rate has polled the best of all recent policy initiatives in internal polling (even if its money raising potential is debatable).

So is the public ready for some old fashioned class war politics? One senses that the PM’s inability to rein in these excesses of pay before the financial disaster may return to haunt him.