The world’s bankers are casting off their sackcloths, wiping off their ashes and preparing to rake in the bonuses once again. Beneath the sackcloth, the pinstripes are still sharply tailored. Beneath the contrition, the smug smile of business as usual is waiting to break through.

We paid for the bankers to have an expensive gastric band fitted to curb their excesses and save them from death by gluttony. Now, as Goldman Sachs earmarks $6.5 billion for pay and bonuses, we’re watching them gather at a Michelin-starred all-you-can-eat buffet, preparing to guzzle the foie gras and the truffles. Goldman Sachs may be the first to reveal an engorged bonus pot, but it will not be the last.

Standing between the British bankers and the buffet is Sir David Walker, brandishing his report into corporate governance. Those hoping he can check the stampede will be left disappointed. Sir David is measured in his recommendations. There will be no public flaying of named top earners; no thumping law to force the bonuses down; no committee of low-paid civil servants will be appointed to decide how big is too big; no banking executive will be forced into a pay cut nor to accept a pension that resembles an income, not a phone number.

Sir David calls instead for a package of measures designed to link pay more explicitly with performance. If his proposals are adopted, banks will have to disclose far more details about top-earning executives, including those not on the board who have hitherto escaped scrutiny. He also proposes that banks defer the payout of earned bonuses for three years. This would allow banks to claw back any promised cash if deals go awry after they have been signed.

But the bulk of the report concentrates not on pay, but on the governance of banks. It looks at the tricky issue of strengthening the culture of the board, tackling the cult of the chief executive and increasing the prominence of risk management. The focus is elsewhere because bankers’ pay is only part of the story of the credit crunch. The banking world fell apart because the hyper- profits of previous years were built on a huge and leveraged bet on property. Risk management was non-existent, regulation was so light touch it was featherweight. Above all, senior management had no grasp that the web of complex financial instruments was held together by gossamer-thin strings of debt. Bonuses were the free booze and crisps that kept the gamblers at the table playing a game they didn’t really understand; they were not the game itself.

So why exactly are we so furious about the new round of bonuses coming through? If Sir David’s recommendations are accepted, and pay is linked to longer-term performance, the systemic risk posed by inflated bonuses linked to short- term performance will be stripped out. Does is then matter how big the bonuses are? If all taxpayers want is to prevent another credit-crunch style crisis, then this should be the end of the pay story, and the handwringing should shift to regulation and the culture of bank boards.

But we want our pound of flesh. And as these are bankers, who roll in filthy lucre while we slave at real life, we want thousands of pounds of flesh. The taxpayers’ rescue of the banks has plunged the nation into the red. Unemployment is stalking the labour market. The fallout from the credit crunch has contaminated every corner of British life. And the bastards who caused it should pay, and carry on paying until they weep real tears of contrition. Somewhere there should be a graveyard of the bankers’ previous lives, where empty jeroboams of champagne lie next to rusting Aston Martins and muted BlackBerries.

But all the righteous, justifiable anger breaks down at the question of how we extract our terrible revenge. The wrath of the taxpayer may be mighty, but it is curiously pointless.

We cannot legislate to cap bonuses or pay. There is no room in a free society for a law that curbs the pay proffered in private companies. Besides, although it has misbehaved, we need the financial sector, as an employer and as a corporate taxpayer. No matter how fleetingly gratifying it would be to watch the bankers scrabbling for the exit, London and the wider country would be even poorer without them.

There is a free market in bankers’ pay. Many labelled as “bankers” earn nothing like the stratospheric sums we accuse them of. The multimillion- pound bonuses we now associate with the profession are generally only paid to some of the investment bankers, and the senior staff of the combined retail and investment banks. The market is amoral. The top investment bankers do not deserve million-dollar bonuses, just as the 8,200 workers at Lloyds TSB who have been made redundant since the bank bought rival HBoS have done nothing to deserve their dismissal. We cannot expect pay to be dictated by morality in any industry except, perhaps, the Church. Whatever their virtues or vices, the bankers are worth what the banks will pay.

History is littered with people who deserved better or worse than the fates delivered, and each incident is as galling as the last. Hence the enduring popularity of religions that deliver up a sucker punch to the wrongdoer on death. But financial regulators struggle where God delivers. It is an impossible task to satisfy our desire to make the bankers suffer, without inadvertently drawing down more suffering on ourselves. They got us into this mess, but we need them to help to get us out of it, with new lines of credit, new mortgages and growing profits at the state-owned banks.

In the pursuit of revenge we are left with small comforts. A £10-million bonus does not make a banker happy. It wasn’t an £11-million bonus. He works 18-hour days. His wife may be happy, but it’s impossible to tell beneath the Botox. I know, your heart is resolutely not bleeding. But hatred and thirst for revenge belittles us more than it hurts them. We must shrug our shoulders and let it lie.

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