Not without reason, some might think, given the excesses of greed and incompetence that have marked the banking industry in recent years.

But Simon Culhane, chief executive of the Securities & Investment Institute, is right to call for calmer heads so that we don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater in a puritannical bonus clampdown in Britain.

It is a timely call for moderation by the City’s ethics watchdog rather than an appeal for society just to be patsies in face of the bonus-veined banking culture.

I think one of the main problems is that most people never really understood the extent to which banking remuneration has been driven by bonuses.

Then the sub-prime explosion stripped the curtain away. The Emperor was found to be wearing no clothes.

The spotlight previously focused on boardroom remuneration at the high-flying banks.

Well-known names earning mega-bucks as the billions of pounds of profits rolled in.

But I don’t think it was ever truly appreciated by the wider public how deep the bonus culture went in the banking sector among hundreds and hundreds of senior managers below boardroom level.

Culhane has pointed out before that it is an omission that banks are not currently legally bound to any sort of transparency on bonuses below director level.

Nobody is asking for reams of senior managers in banks identified by name in reports as to their bonuses.

Few would welcome that invasion of privacy in their own professions so it is unfair to expect it of the financial sector.

But surely it would be healthy for the broad ‘bandings’ of bonuses to be given so that consumers (and regulators) appreciate exactly how dependent on the bonus culture any given financial organisation is.

This could give bonus totals in individual sectors of the bank _ and how many bankers fall in those individual bandings at the bank _ so that everyone is aware where the most bonus-related risk-taking lies.

Current American political moves for a sort of blanket punitive taxation on banks that have received US government bailouts is grossly disproportionate.

What is needed on bonuses in the banking industry as it veers between state and private ownership is clarity, transparency and an appreciation that it can’t all be done behind closed doors any more when the banks are indispensable props of the wider economy.