Europe’s cap on bankers’ pay is merely a harbinger of the Great Persecution to come

‘Possibly the most deluded measure to come from Europe since Diocletian tried to fix the price of groceries across the Roman Empire,’ was Boris Johnson’s assessment of the proposal to cap bankers’ bonuses at 100 per cent of base salary, or 200 per cent with shareholders’ approval. This blunt exercise in market interference was tabled by a committee of MEPs led by a British Lib Dem, Sharon Bowles (perhaps in revenge for the fact that she didn’t win the Bank of England governorship, for which she applied) as a condition of agreeing a new set of bank capital reforms. With the support of all member states other than the one most affected — that’s us — and despite token resistance from George Osborne, it will now pass into EU law. And Mayor Boris must be right that it will drive business from London to rival centres, even if he’s wrong that one of them will be Zurich — the Swiss having just voted enthusiastically for a referendum proposal to impose their own strict controls on executive pay.