Banking bosses have lining up to flagellate themselves this week and point out just how scratchy the hair shirts they are wearing are to naked skin more accostomed to Jermyn Street cotton.

All well and good and the public expect nothing else. But it is not just the banking fat cats who have been pocketing huge cash bonuses in recent years. Across corporate Britain the bonuses have been showered on directors over the past five years on a scale that would have been undreamed of to an earlier generation of plutocrats. By 2007 the average package of a FTTE-100 chief executive was £2.5 million, of which only £780,000 was base pay, the rest bonus and other incentive payments.

So at a time of soaring unemployment and plunging workplace morale is it not right that Britain's industrial bosses should also consider waiving their bonuses even if they have been well deserved? I put this point this week to the head of one of Britain's household name companies.

A thoughtful man, he pondered for a second and said his board had given consideration to such a gesture but thought it unlikely. He picked up a bonus of more than £500,000 last year but argued that almost all his bonuses and a large part of his salary had been reinvested in shares, so he was really not so well off as it appeared.. Friends in the private equity world laughed as his meagre rewards he said. He had worked extraordinarily hard, helping to turn round a business that was struggling before he took the helm. As they say in the L'Oreal ads, he was worth it. He had given up weekends, sacrificing seeing his children play sport and the other pleasures of parental life. In addition, he said, giving up bonus would send the wrong signal to the labour market, detering potential high flyers from joining the business.

Finally he argued whether giving up bonus would actually make any difference to how the workforce viewed the boardroom.

He is a decent man and a fine leader of the company in question. However, I disaagree fundamentally with his analysis. It is the thinking of a different world order.

Even before the events of the past six months there were growing signs of cynicism and even outright hostility to free market capitalism.

Virtually every major consumer business - from the high street banks to British Telecom -  was increasingly seen as screwing the end customer while rewarding shareholders and directors with ever more lavish returns.

The banking collapse and the resulting recessionary jobs fall-out will only stoke the anger, which politicians and yes, the media, are not holding back to exploit. It is time for the higher echelons of capitalism to make - as they said in the trenches - a futile sacrifice.

Most of the bosses of the FTSE-100 companes will have enjoyed many years of bumper remuneration growth. To give up one year's bonus is not seriously going to compromise the life-styles of any of them. But at a time of massive fear about job prospects it would send a hugely important signal to the rank and file, particularly if they are going to suffer pay freezes and redundancies. On his final point he could not have been more wrong. It is difficult to think of a single action that could do more to restore the reputation of Britain's well heeled corporate elite.