"Higher contributions will go straight to the Treasury to pay off the deficit caused by the bankers".
"The bankers" (that term is starting to fucking annoy me) didn't cause the deficit, did they? Is the deficit not just the fact that the country spends more than it earns, basically it runs at a loss? That wasn't caused by "the bankers", that's just the way the country runs (& the way a lot of countries run as far as I understand it).
Also (again, if my understanding is correct), you can't "pay off" a deficit. It's not a debt. You spend £500 every year, yet you only earn £400, therefore you have an annual deficit of £100. You can reduce that, you can get rid of it completely, but you can't "pay it off". Am I missing something? Or have I just got this completely wrong?
I don't have any deep insight into this really but first on the deficit: if you spend more than you earn then you have to borrow unless you have cash reserves. So yes, in that case deficit means (or rather implies) debt.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_debt
Second, think about a country running at a loss. It must therefore have bought more than it's sold. The two remaining options are that it sold more than it bought, or that it sold and bought in equal quantity.
At any time all countries are either breaking even or there is one set of countries gaining and another set of countries losing.
Because countries are not all made equal, and due to accident or natural forces of whatever kind, the situation where all countries break even never happens. Between countries there are always winners and losers. Winners are in a position to leverage their wealth by exploiting the losers. This is what Britain, or more accurately the British ruling class, did to it's Empire. It took a while but the Empire collapsed, we lost our wealth and other parts of the world are now making gains. They will do so at our expense.
The end result of this competition between nations is that real people suffer, in fact let's be clear: they die. It's probably coming to us*. Nations and nationalism along with empires and imperialism are evil!
Edit: Sorry forgot to actually answer your first question about bankers, to which the above does relate. It's not the bankers which have fucked us it's nations and nationalism, empires and imperialism and fundamentally capital and capitalism.
Final edit: Just as a final thought on the whole thing, the entire spectacle is a murderous nonsense which if a child were to see it would be immediately obvious to them. The sum of all human labour is clearly more than sufficient to keep us all housed, warm, fed and happy without crisis after crisis, war upon war - if we spent our working time providing for each other as communities. But most of us don't, not that we really have a choice. I have worked hard for 20 years doing what? Essentially, helping to take wealth from one large set of people and putting it into the pockets of a much smaller set of people. The first set didn't magic that wealth into being, they worked hard for it too. As diplomacy is war by other means, so capitalism is theft by other means. Theft of your time - I hesitate to call it slavery, as have many others hesitated, so it's lucky we have a less loaded term for it, wage-slavery.
Footnotes
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* Of course it already has to earlier generations, and to a much smaller extent to the current generation, what I mean is it is probably coming wholesale to this generation.