27 October 2023 , 10:14
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A Question Time audience member was applauded after asking whether the "freedoms of Brexit" involved "the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer".
A young man wearing a suit and pink tie chimed into a discussion about scrapping the cap on bankers' bonuses, which was confirmed to be going ahead this week. Rishi Sunak gave the green light to Liz Truss's policy to remove the bonus cap, which was inherited from when the UK was a member of the EU.
On the BBC weekly political show, which came from Bradford, West Yorks, he said: “The scrapping of the cap on bankers’ bonuses was described as one of the freedoms of Brexit that we now have. Am I to believe, as someone who lives in a relatively impoverished part of Britain, that these benefits of Brexit involve the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer?”
Weighing into the debate, Tory ex-Cabinet Minister Baroness Warsi said: "This particular cap was bought in after the 2008 financial crash when banks were seen to be working in a way which was like casino banking and bankers were taking huge risks with people's money... and off the back of that it was appropriate within the European Union to say that these bankers should not be getting these excessive bonuses and therefore we should cap them and let's not forget what was agreed - these bonuses are capped at 100% of the bankers' salary. So if a banker is on £50,000, he can get an extra £50,000 in his pay packet... there was even a possibility to have it two times your salary, as long as the shareholders agreed to it."
She said it was "shocking" the Government was going to allow the cap to be scrapped when nurses aren't getting big pay rises. "I find it really shocking [that] at a time when the Prime Minister is saying to public sector workers: 'We cannot increase your salaries because we're trying to get our first priority of getting inflation under control, so we can't put more money into nurses' pockets, because we think that we'll have an inflationary pressure 0 but we can put more money into really rich bankers' pockets because that won't affect inflation.'"
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Conservative Minister Lee Rowley said he "absolutely understands the challenges of how we make society fairer and how we make society work". "But in order to do that, the honesty that I need to tell you is that there are trade offs in politics. Politics is the art of infinite and very, very worthy demands with very, very finite resources. And that's the job of politics," he said.
"So what we're trying to do is make sure that we can support not just education but also the huge challenges we've got post Covid within in the NHS and many other areas and the reality any politician that tells you that all of this can be done to the place where everybody wants is a politician that isn't telling you the truth and what the government is trying to do after an extremely difficult time post Covid is balance all of these different things in order to get through and bring inflation down so that we can have a brighter tomorrow."