What motivated those in charge of Britain's financial policy? Why were they so obsessed with saving bankers and nobody else?  . . . It is hard to think of a policy fashioned by so few that has cost so much to so many. It is plain daft.

Daft? Not from a Darwinian perspective.

Sorry, I'm forgetting, we are not supposed to view human behaviour, certainly not that of bankers or other pillars of society, from a Darwinian perspective . . . Which is a shame, because it is the only way to really understand it and put oneself in a position to correct it.

Bankers are only human, and humans, as Darwin is supposed to have taught us, are animals, which evolved, like all animals, to exploit their environment in a primordial struggle for survival, advantage (especially over their fellow humans!) and reproductive success, only now, misplaced and perverted in the artificial environment of human civilisation itself, where it has been largely reduced to the pursuit and exercise of POWER, i.e. money (e.g. bankers' bonuses, MPs' expenses, etc.), the moral high ground (which not only established religions specialize in), social and professional status, etc.

Why is this (to me, now obvious truth) so difficult to recognize? It's because we are ALL ("progressives" as much as anyone else) engaged in this struggle to exploit our (socioeconomic) environment, which in order to facilitate, we have to deny, maintaining the (self)-deception (over the centuries, ever since the state arose) of society as our "tribe", which we are primary concerned to serve rather than to exploit.

The truth is the opposite: our primary concern (no matter how much we may rationalize and deny it, even to ourselves) is to exploit, rather than to serve, society (which subconsciously we see more as an environment, to be exploited, than as our tribe, which the state falsely claims it to be).

Bankers are just human, driven, like all "successful" individuals, by their Darwinian nature to exploit society for whatever they can (legally, since its best to play safe) get out of it.