So, I see the undeserving poor are getting more hard-working taxpayers’ money . If that’s what you want to call them and it. I think we can take it that these people at the top with their hands out haven’t been and won’t be treated with the same level of high-handed contempt as those much further down the ladder also needing help.

Of course, the way the small time benefits scrounger is treated - the patronising, the vilification, the incompetence and the depressing - has the dual function of giving petty bureaucrats a frisson of sadistic power and, also, to teach said scrounger not to do anything as stupid and as careless as hit hard times through no fault of their own ever again.

So, here’s another idea for helping solve the global economic crisis. Let’s treat the leading banks just like unwashed dole scroungers. Don’t invite them to Downing Street for high-level talks. Make them walk a mile in the rain to a grubby office where they will be met by the distressingly surly indifference of a claims officer (if that claims officer isn’t off ’sick’). Make the bankers do this at the same time every two weeks. Don’t offer them any advice when they’re there or, if you do, make it ambiguous or just plain incorrect.

Hand the banks’ finances over to undertrained and demotivated staff in a government call centre. Make sure the system is as half-arsed as possible. Delay the payments to the banks for a day or two. When they phone up panicky and asking what’s happened to their much needed money treat them off-handedly. Make sure they know their place. If they can be reduced to tears so much the better. Stoke the crushing uncertainty of it all. Promise to phone back when you have more information but don’t. Send them a payment but make it smaller than promised. Make two payments just to unsettle them further. Insist they can keep the money and then write to them a week later demanding it back. Do it just before Christmas.

If after 18 months this situation isn’t sorted the banks should be handed over to a private sector agency charged with getting the banks working again by all means necessary. They will be paid by results and will receive their money when the banks are working again - whether the agency had a direct hand in helping or not. Again, make sure the staff are undertrained, bored and lacking in any empathy whatsoever. Leave it hanging over the bankers that they could lose their money at any minute.

Start a widespread campaign to plant in the public consciousness that banks and bankers are scum. Find out if any of them are foreign. Shame, shame and shame again. Sodding bankers sitting around leeching off the tax-payer. Add to their already towering misery as much as possible. Apply pressure from which they can’t escape. Make things ten times harder, more long-winded and as frustrating than they need to be. Break these scroungers, in other words. Compensate them by allowing them to get their anti-depressants for free.

The bastards won’t do it again.