And the Misjudged Comment of the Month Award goes to...

As the press is wearily reporting this morning, Royal Bank of Scotland, recipient of taxpayer's largesse, has reported the following:

• It lost £1.1bn in 2010
• Nevertheless, it paid out just shy of £1bn in bonuses
• 100 of its bankers got more than £1M in the last year

And what does Chief Executive Stephen Hester have to say about all of this? Well, he said the following [and please, if you are holding a mug of coffee or have anything potentially dangerous if it's lobbed across a room, do put it down now]:

"It can feel pretty beleaguered working at RBS with external and internal pressures, that's one of the handicaps we work with"

He also said that the bank was a 'political football' and that things were 'tough'.

You see, what the story of the last few years tells us, is that these people don't do contrition. They are the living, breathing embodiment of everything that is wrong with 21st century capitalism. And there is, apparently, nothing we can do about it.

Anyone else think that Brown might have made the wrong call when he threw vast amounts of taxpayers' cash at the system? We've been left with a neo-liberal government intent on slashing the public sector into little pieces in the name of 'deficit reduction', and a banking system that is, in effect, almost completely unreformed.

But, let's face it, not many in 2008 - including the then-Prime Minister - could have predicted that greatest collapse in market capitalism would end a few years later with a resurgent political Right launching a concerted attack on the public realm in countries across the western world.