Erikka Askeland: Bank on the bankers keeping a tight grip on their finances

IN A nice turn-up on the Biblical adage, it seems the rich bankers are always with us.

The new chief executive of Lloyds Banking Group, Antonio Horta-Osorio gets a 9.7 million pay package, while his predecessor, Eric Daniels, graciously accepts his leaving bonus of 1.45m. And the top-paid guy at Lloyds - we are not given his name, but we assume it is a "he" - gets close to 5m.

Is there nothing that can be done to bring sky-high bank remuneration closer to the ground? Apparently not. Jens Hagendorff, senior lecturer in banking and finance at the University of Edinburgh Business School, says that the issue is complicated. "There is a widespread belief in banking that individuals make a big difference and will increase performance," he observes.

He argues this comes from the history of banking, where the profits of once privately-owned banks, particularly the old Goldman Sachs-style investment banks, went to the proprietors.

Unless the UK or Europe wants to see its bank employees go elsewhere, global salaries must be comparable. And anyway, caps on salary don't work because there is plenty of evidence that remuneration committees come up with even more ingenious ways of rewarding their top staff, through options and the like.

In the end, it is the fault of the shareholders, argues Hagendorff, who don't want to risk losing the bankers they pay so handsomely and vote to let them pay as they do.

Lloyds' own remuneration report insists it uses other UK banks, as well as comparable FTSE 250 companies, to make sure its pay is not out of whack. In this, it turns out that Lloyds' pay remains well below that of many rival banks. Barclays' new boss, Bob Diamond, and two other top directors were paid a collective 28m last year. But whether this drives one to tears for the poor fate faced by Horta-Osorio and Daniels is, let's face it, unlikely.

Changing fashions as clamour grows to adopt nuclear power

AS RADIATION from the Fukushima meltdown starts raining gently down on our shoulders, the Scottish Chambers of Commerce (SCC) has backed the nuclear option in it its Holyrood election policy document.

The Scottish Government is strictly no-nukes and with hysteria mounting over the spectre of radioactive particles in the water, surely the chamber's argument that it's time to build new reactors in Scotland is misguided?

The SCC says that although it's keen on renewables, it provides a fretful list of things that need to be addressed before green energy can be made a dead certainty.These are mainly to do with the need to expand and upgrade the grid - not just in Scotland, either - and the uncertainty of costs around the development of wind farms, on and offshore, let alone questions of the viability of using tidal energy, which we have only just begun to capture.

Before Fukushima, a very strange thing was happening to the image of nukes. For as long as I could remember, all the right-on, tree-hugging people who professed to care about their children and the environment repudiated nuclear production as mad, bad, and dangerous to know.

But in the past few years, some high-profile environmentalists started to take a long, hard look at demand and production of energy and said that nuclear was at least a low-carbon form of electricity production - a more pressing concern than nuclear toxic waste, which could just be cemented over. It was as if the light that struck down Saul on the road to Damascus was from a mushroom cloud.

Some experts are even arguing that Fukushima shows us how safe nuclear actually is - and if a creaking, 40-year old reactor can take the battering it did from a 45ft tsunami and hold out, then new ones will be even more robust.

Failing that, radiation now isn't as scary as I recall it. Back in the 1980s. cult films such as the Toxic Avenger or the Meryl Streep film Silkwood about the death of a plutonium factory worker betrayed the widespread anxiety around the effects of nuclear waste and the industry that produced it.

Now, we are reminded that taking a transatlantic flight will give you a greater dose of radiation than if you took a stroll around the Fukushima site. And if you were still worried about it, seaweed or even, apparently, Jaffa cakes are a good source of iodine, which help the body metabolise radiation.

For those who aren't using a harsh light to look at the gaping flaws in current UK energy policy, it is still just possible to take a soft-focus approach. It could be argued this is what the SNP is doing, as it places all its eggs in renewables, with a wish and a prayer that the money will be scraped together somehow to mend the holes in its energy policy basket when the time comes.

It is a tempting argument - if you put all your time, money and effort into renewables, that it will work out somehow. Except it is a nagging worry for most that "somehow" is just not enough.