SIR – Ed Miliband has advocated a tax on bankers’ bonuses to bring down youth unemployment.

The funding of youth employment opportunities would therefore rely on the continued obscenity of bankers helping themselves to millions of pounds in addition to their salaries for doing their job.

What if the bonuses, in cash or shares, had to be clawed back under arrangements penalising longer termfailure?

Would youth development be shut down for lack of funding?

Just taxing bankers’ bonuses misses other bad practices such as boardroom greed and the fortunes being made by landlords from the £23 billion spent annually on housing benefit by paying at corporation tax rates, or basing themselves in a tax haven.

Similarly, the proposed mansion tax is shot full of loopholes.

The only way to deal with these excesses is through a progressive tax system that applies to everybody by restoring the 50 per cent tax rate and adding higher rates to counter multi-million pound salaries and bonuses and the cynical ‘business as usual’ attitude of bankers.

Ed Miliband’s ideas are just Gordon Brown and New Labour all over again promising more equality and the end of child poverty while doing the opposite by allowing the rich grow richer during the New Labour years.

PETER NIELSEN

Worcester