Bernard Dineen: Britain will pay a price for bashing bankers

One of them explains why: "We are motivated by money. If you take so much away, there is no incentive. Look at the tax on a bonus of 200,000. First, there is the new

bonus tax of 50 per cent, which costs my company another 87,000. Then there is employers' National Insurance of 25,600. Then the employee pays income tax at 40 per cent on the 200,000, which is 80,000. So the total tax is 195,000, a 98 per cent tax burden on a net payment of 200,000."

This is all in addition to a 50 per cent tax rate.

It has been compared with when the Eurodollar market was setting up in Paris in 1970s and the French slapped a tax on it.

By contrast, the Bank of England said come over here. The French

and the Americans did, which was the start of London's pre-eminence as a financial centre. The process could now be going into reverse.

We shall be paying the price for New Labour in generations to come and destroying London as a financial centre could well be part of that price.

With a French EU commissioner in charge of the internal market, the outlook is bleak.

AT Israel's Ben Gurion airport, they don't mind if you take a liquid on to an aircraft. They rely on other security checks, with ethnic profiling high on the list. The Detroit airline bomber wouldn't have got within a mile of an El Al plane.

The United States has now been forced to follow Israel's lead and adopt ethnic profiling. Passengers from 14 countries, including Pakistan, Nigeria and Yemen, will have to undergo extra searches at boarding gates.

They should have added Britain to the 14 because, as a recent survey showed, Britain is the biggest source of Islamist extremism in Europe. Not for nothing is the capital nicknamed Londonistan. But ethnic profiling has only to be mentioned for the human-rights lobby to scream blue murder. They are endangering the safety of air passengers.

The build-up of extremism in Britain over the past 30 years could have been likened to a nation trying to commit suicide. Extremists and terrorists were allowed to enter Britain with the virtual consent of the security services. MI5's reasoning was that they had their hands full with the IRA and could not cope with anything more. So the Islamist extremists were allowed in, with the promise that they would not engage in terrorist acts in Britain itself.

Using London as a base, they engaged in planning and organisation of terrorist acts elsewhere. The French, Israeli and Egyptian security services protested to Britain, but to no avail. We are now stuck with the result. The promise of immunity for Britain expired long ago.

The build-up in British universities has continued relentlessly. Ed Husein, the courageous Muslim journalist who was radicalised at universities but turned his back on extremism, and is carrying on a brave fight against extremist groups, has described the grip these groups hold on vulnerable students.

One group is led by Anjem Choudary, who achieved notoriety recently with his threat to march through Wootton Bassett with a hundred coffins. He is a trained lawyer who knows exactly how far to go without falling foul of the law, and how to manipulate the media.

My guess is that he never intended to march through Wootton Bassett at all: he knew that by merely threatening to do so he could achieve everything he wanted – throw the country into turmoil, the media into hysterics and poison relations between Muslims and non-Muslims. His group Islam UK has now been banned, which will not trouble him at all: names are easy to come by.

We not only tolerate men like Choudary: we finance them. He is paid 26,000 a year in benefits and 15,000 in housing benefit. All the Luton agitators convicted of threatening behaviour are also on benefits and even boasted outside the court: "The taxpayer paid for this court case. The taxpayer will pay for the fines, too, out of benefits."

Is it any wonder they despise us as spineless defeatists?

A DIRECTOR of one of the biggest computer companies once told me that selling to the public sector was child's play. Selling to firms like Marks & Spencer, you had to be on your toes because you were dealing with professionals who could not be bamboozled.

With the public sector, it was entirely different. Bumptious know-alls like Ed Balls were easy meat. So were brilliant civil servants with Firsts at Oxbridge: when it came to the commercial world, they were babes in arms. The result is that Labour has wasted 26bn of taxpayers' cash on botched IT projects. Scheme after scheme was either millions over budget, or cancelled altogether. What did you expect?