Is it fair to villify the bankers?

'The week that shook the world' is the modest term being used by one of my favourite online publications, 'The First Post', to describe this week's events starting with the collapse of Lehman Brothers Investment Bank. The economic turmoil and mass panic that has ensued has inevitably led the press, hungry for the 'goodies and baddies' formula that sells their papers by the dozen, to pin the blame on whoever they hastily declare to be guilty within minutes of the news breaking. No prizes for guessing who they decided to pick on.

Will Self of the Evening Standard, for example, said: "All you bankers have had your fat years. Now get ready for some very thin ones."

Alice Miles wrote in The Times of "compensations in watching the comeuppance of the hubristic and the avaricious".

Now, anybody who knows me also knows that I'm not in the business of painting multi-millionaire investment bankers as an innocent and victimised minority. Indeed I must confess that when I first saw the pictures of all the newly unemployed brokers on the front of the papers, I reacted with a distinct sense of schadenfreude rather than the compassion my better judgement mandates of me.

I also agree that the corruption, greed and complaceny that has poisoned the City over the last couple of decades, following its rise to pre-eminence during the Thatcher years, is predominantly to blame for this crisis. However, the sadist, self-righteous and personal nature of the media's attacks with their "Don't let the spivs destroy Britain" headlines has truly made me wince over the last few days.

This is not only because bankers are still people with families to feed and mortgages to pay(despite their many shortcomings)nor the fact that it is hard to deny that the success of the City is what kept this economy so strong for so long right up until the crash. Rather, it is because the last thing any of them were actually worried about when the story of the biggest crash since 1929 broke was the suffering that would be felt across the country as a result.

Where were these crusaders, apart from the odd legitimately concerned journalist, when the City's excesses led the nation's wealth gap to widen into a chasm, when the bankers - now villified by all - were paying less tax than their cleaners on their salaries and no tax on their bonuses, and when the rest of us were being hopelessly priced out of the housing market? There might have been a day's headlines to be sure, but nothing compared to the vitriol heaped on benefit 'scroungers', unruly youths and unwelcome immigrants that filled the tabloids' pages on a daily basis.

Those were the days when it might have been appropriate to pour scorn over the financial sector and even then it was the system and woeful lack of regulation that was to blame rather than the people themselves (not that I doubt that investment banks have had more than their fair share of sociopaths amongst their ranks). Now though, is the time to be getting behind those who have lost their jobs and their employers who have lost everything else. For should they continue to fall down the big black hole they admittedly dug for themselves, there is little doubt that the whole country will follow right behind.