Bonuses are Back Pig Party: I’ve never understood why people who are already paid obscenely high salaries get awarded huge bonuses for the work of people lower down in the organisations they lead. Even less that they still get them when these organisations are obviously failing – as with the water companies. So it was a small piece of good news in February 2024 when the then government announced they would block further bonuses to the water company after they had received £26 million since 2019 despite sewage spills.
Of course many of us felt that they should have been made to repay those bonuses and that the companies that have racked up huge debts while paying out billions to shareholders should be taken into administration to be run to serve the public.
Back in 2008 it was the predatory activities of the banks that led to the financial crash, but in 2009, “Despite everything that has happened over the past year, bankers are still getting bonuses, often at quite obscene levels, far in excess of most people’s annual incomes.”
And on Friday 17th July 2009 ‘The Government of the Dead‘ came to the heart of the City of London to ‘celebrate’ that “City pigs are truly back with their snouts in the trough” with “a ‘Bonuses are Back Pig Party’, wearing pig masks and setting up a trough with ‘Pig Pounds’ mixed with pig swill and getting snouts down and bottoms up to wallow in it.“
The ‘Pig Pounds’ – were deliberately low-tech paper copies of fivers with a pig over the bottom half of the Queen and the pig swill was possibly the real thing but looked like some rather unpleasant and lumpy porridge with cornflakes mixed in.
Some of the protesters had come in fancy dress – city suits – with Chris Knight with his usual top hat and Camilla as Miss Piggy. Many put on latex pig masks and got their heads down in the trough in front of the Royal Exchange, scooping up the swill and the fivers.
More or less together they sang a number of cleverly reworded pig songs “including a number of hits by Miss Piggy, Pinky and Perky, The Simpsons and Piggy Pie“, as will as singing, dancing and miming along with some of the originals between sessions at the trough.
‘Lets Twist Again’, once recorded by Pinky and Perky became
“Come on let’s scam again
Like we did last summer
Come on let’s scam again
Like we did last year
Come on let’s scam again
Scamming time is here.“
“Bonuses Are Back” Chris Knight and the others shouted at City workers on their way home, inviting them to “come and swill in the trough, all provided at the taxpayers expense thanks to Gordon Brown.“
Tourists were bemused, but some stopped to enjoy and photograph the scene, with a few putting on the latex pig masks on offer and joining in.
Even the City of London Police seemed amused rather than worried by the protest, standing back and watching – and without their intervention there was no threat to public order.
After around an hour and a half of watching and taking pictures I decided it was time to go home. I’d taken too many pictures and the fun was wearing off.
Of course the bankers – and other bosses – continued to do well, while the rest of us had to suffer fourteen years of Tory austerity with public services being starved of cash and the NHS, prisons and more deteriorating at pace.
The Labour Party deliberately threw away the chance of getting into government in 2017, when the party under Corbyn got many more votes than in 2024. Starmer didn’t win the election, it was lost by the Tories who were poleaxed by Reform and had become clearly unable to run their own party let alone the country. I have no confidence that our new Labour government will be more than a very slight improvement over their predecessors, though it would be good to be proved wrong.
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