"Difficult social issues" said Mr. Bean, with typical British understatement

I let fly a snort of rage the other morning, thereby plastering my computer screen with quivering snot.

The cause was Mr Bean, deputy governor of the Bank of England, who had said "millions of families will be put under social strain because of the present economic crisis." How very perceptive. If all one of our leading financial experts can say is what anyone with an ounce of sense has known for months, why doesn't he find a job more fitted to his talents - like cleaning toilets?

What is putting millions of families under a lot of strain is the unbridled greed and incompetence of bank bosses paid million pound salaries plus million pound bonuses for doing a 125% shit job.

I think masked vigilantes should way-lay the creeps who run the banks as they chortle their chauffeur-driven way home, then empty their wallets before pushing them under passing buses.

Number one target should be Appleshite who screwed up Northern Rock and is still being paid hundreds of thousands for relaxing while he works out how to spend his million pound pension. After him should be "Sir" Fred Goodwin - famous for his love of firing lots of people, but markedly unwilling to quit himself. He should get a dose of the medicine he so relished pouring down others' throats.

If there were any justice (which I assure you after my experience with the divorce laws there isn't) every one of the slobs would have their homes repossessed and be put out on the streets, in somewhere appropriate - say, New Cross - to see how long they survived dealing drugs. Forget Big Brother. That's my idea of a reality TV show.

They only get away with their shit because of the craven attitude of those who should be exposing and punishing them. This includes the media. The other day the TV programme Despatches, normally excellent, did a good job on the current crisis, then fell at the crucial last fence.

The reporter had tried and failed to get any of the rogues responsible to talk to the cameras - including Hector Pants who runs, or rather failed to when it really mattered, the Financial Services Authority and like all the bankers got a fat bonus for causing the maximum possible misery to those he is paid to protect through sheer sloth.

In the end he - the reporter - was reduced to talking to a hatchet-faced cow who talks on the banks' behalf for The Central Bankers Lying Trust or something similar. When asked why none of these greedy toads had been fired she said, straight-faced, that we needed men with experience who know what they are doing in times like these. Experience of what? Financial masturbation?

Sheer, unalloyed, disgraceful bollocks - but the reporter said absolutely nothing. I mean on that basis we should let Mr. Pants run the economy ...

I know it's quite unreasonable, but what I sometimes wonder is:

1. If the government can retroactively tax oil firms because of their profits - which are, by the way no more nor less than they have ever been - prices are relatively lower now than 30 years ago...

2. Why can't they tax the banks for their obscene rapacity? And stop them paying silly money to overpaid incompetents?

Is that so impossible? If they can chase, however ineffectually, people who don't pay child maintenance, why not?

Mind you, since those who run things in the country couldn't locate their own arseholes without three coordinated SatNavs, fat chance.