WHEN the Offspring were small I belonged to a mother and toddler group, which included among its membership the wife of an investment banker.

He worked for that well-known High Street bank Barclays, the very same institution currently at the centre of a bonuses row.

After a few months the family moved to Switzerland where, I suspect, most British bankers probably wish they could live at the moment.

A mutual friend went to visit them and came back to report that the husband was raking in a ‘telephone number’ salary, which made us wonder what it was he did that made his time so much more valuable than ours.

According to Firstborn’s girlfriend, who was raised in Switzerland, the country tries very hard not to be welcoming to any poor people.

If you are not a Swiss national and find yourself unemployed or facing tough times then you can expect no help from the state.

Property prices there are so horrendous that only the exceedingly rich – and there are quite a few of them – can afford to buy their own houses. Everyone else rents from the exceedingly rich landlords.

And this, of course, is the sort of world inhabited by investment bankers generally. It is a world of property portfolios, private schools, and no poor people, except those cleaning the pool or minding the children. They are completely divorced from the reality of life for those who earn in a year what they make in a week. (It has been calculated that it would take someone on the minimum wage 33 years to earn the bonus of a rescued bank boss.)

And it is why not one of the 24,000 managers at Barclays, whose average pay is £200,000, will think that refusing a bonus is the right thing to do when their bank has reported a fall in profits and all around them there are ordinary people losing their jobs and struggling to pay their bills. And why when we see the Government cosying up to the bankers we just know our politicians don’t understand how the other half live.

Incidentally, Barclays has admitted that it pays ‘a relatively small amount’ of UK corporation tax , despite saying it is committed to ‘citizenship’.

Even at the Royal Bank of Scotland, which was one of the three banks bailed out by the British tax payer to the tune of £37bn, there has been a lack of understanding at just how angry we are at the greed of banks. The RBS chief executive Stephen Hester only declined to accept the 3.6m shares the bank's board decided to award him after intense public pressure and a move by Labour to force a Commons vote on the payment.

It would have been refreshing indeed if he had simply refused the bonus on the grounds that he didn’t deserve it.

Hester, after all, runs a bank that is 82% owned by the taxpayer, and our stake is now valued at around half the £45bn it was worth when it was bailed out.

But now the shareholders are in revolt and there’s a small but growing movement among those who want to see a fairer society and more ethical banking.

Customers are cutting up their banking cards and closing accounts, moving their wages and cash to institutions that make, for example, ecologically-sound investments.

At long last we’re doing what I like to call a ‘Jamie Oliver’ and condemning a system that we have all known was unsustainable and damaging to society but never thought to question until now.

School dinners were out-dated and unhealthy. Our banking system seems to me to be much the same.