TONIGHT, at Farnworth Cricket Club’s annual bonfire, there will be no guy on the top, burning away.

Instead, organisers have decided to set fire to an effigy of a banker, complete with pinstripe suit and bowler hat.

I think that’s disgusting. Burning an effigy of a banker? What an insult.

They should be setting fire to the real thing!

OK, it might be a little traumatic for some of the smaller kids if they did that but wow, people would be talking about it for years wouldn’t they!

Plus, it might make some of our hopelessly amoral city gents take a look over their shoulder the next time they decide to take a decision entirely driven by self interest and greed instead of for the good of the economy and the country — which is the whole reason they are so highly rewarded in the first place.

A few FTSE 100 company directors and chief executives could also get piled on there for me.

The one national news story that made me bleed out of my eyes with anger this week was about a report by a pay research company which found directors’ pay for the top companies went up 50 per cent in the past year. Chief executives saw their pay rise an average 43 per cent.

Directors’ bonus payments, on average, rose by 23 per cent to not far off £1m.

Blimey, some of those firms must have done really well to be allowing bosses to be so handsomely rewarded, eh?

They must all be expanding massively and creating thousands of new jobs. Companies such as RBS, which saw its shares tumble by 38.9 per cent in the last quarter. Or BAE Systems which announced it was shedding 3,000 jobs in September. In fact, FTSE 100 companies collectively saw a 13.7 per cent fall in their value in the last three months.

And if that’s not a reason to give the bosses untold riches, then what is?

Where else is such failure rewarded so brilliantly?

Can you imagine hospitals paying bonuses to drunken surgeons for carelessly lopping off perfectly healthy body parts; or ships’ captains being given a holiday home on a small Caribbean island as a thank you for repeatedly running their boats aground? No, nor can I.

Really, we should be more furious about this, as a nation, than we are.

If this was France we’d be setting fire to sheep by now AT LEAST!

But it’s not, so we burn a large sockstuffed puppet in Farnworth instead. Or sleep in a pop-up tent outside St Paul’s Cathedral for a few days.

That’ll show the capitalist pig dogs we mean business! Apart from the ones with shares in tent companies, obviously. They’ll more likely be rubbing their hands with glee.

Which is sort of ironic really.

■ Friday Film: No film torture last week — it was a draw so it carries over