There can be no solutions that are not painful to bear

I'm not suggesting that you are ill-informed. I'd never heard of Ms Drew either; there are so many of these bankers being paid eye-watering bonuses for losing even more eye-watering amounts of money that it's impossible to keep track of them all. You will however (having your finger on the pulse) have heard of the people of France and Greece. They have just been to the polls to "reject austerity" in favour of "growth".

There is a connection between the two. It isn't, though those on the Left will try to tell you otherwise, as simple as saying that the idiocies of the bankers led to the woes of the French and the Greeks – and, for that matter, most of the rest of Europe and us. Governments did that, by borrowing and spending far beyond their incomes; the banking crisis was simply the first indication that chickens were coming home to roost in their trillions.

What links bonuses paid even when the banks mess up and politicians promising to improve their citizens' lot without austerity is much simpler: it is a straightforward failure to acknowledge reality.

Many of us may think that the rewards paid to those who work in the financial sector are grotesque, and likely to divorce those who receive them from "real life" – or at any rate the concerns of those of us worried about whether we can afford the supermarket shop this week. Some of us may have doubts about the usefulness of bonuses at all, especially when the recipients are hired managers, rather than entrepreneurs creating wealth. But none of that need concern us if the firms and their shareholders make a profit, and have not been propped up with public money.

It is different when our taxes have bailed them out. And when, as one would expect, the financial sector then naturally assumes that governments will provide a safety net, it's not surprising that members of its mandarin class carry on paying themselves ridiculous extra sums just for fulfilling their basic terms and conditions of employment.

What is staggering beyond belief is that they do it when they fail utterly at their jobs. The Occupy Wall Street mob and the 99% movement are right to say that these people are the problem; their error is to say that this system is capitalism. It is, by any analysis, the opposite of capitalism. It is state support of useless workers in a distorted industry every bit as obvious as pouring taxpayers' money into a British Leyland plant in the late 1970s, and even more expensive.

The political classes are guilty of many of the same assumptions, except that the reward they expect is political capital and support. The Coalition Government has at least admitted that austerity is essential; its delusion is that it is providing that austerity, when its proposed cuts (which have hardly started) would only take us back to the public spending levels of three years ago, and our debts, far from being paid off, are actually increasing to around £1.5 trillion.

Even if it sticks to its guns and things get marginally better – or no worse – voters cannot expect to return to the standard of living they had a few years ago, because that prosperity was an illusion built on Gordon Brown's deceitful borrowing. If David Cameron's view is that we can recover any time soon, his vantage point is from Cloud-Cuckoo Land.

But it's gritty, unflinching realism compared with the position of François Hollande, the new French President, and Alexis Tspiras, leader of Syriza, Greece's coalition group of Radical Leftists, who appear to be looking out at Europe from somewhere even more remote; a cell in Bedlam, perhaps, or a wardrobe backing into Narnia.

It's natural that voters in Greece who may not get paid their salaries next month want to believe that austerity is not essential, and that in France they should have been seduced by the claim that the economies demanded by the EU can be renegotiated. But Germany, whose taxpayers would ultimately have to finance these pledges, has immediately made it clear that such plans are non-starters.

The Utopian philosopher Charles Fourier, who influenced the Parisian Communards, thought that the seas would turn to lemonade when socialism triumphed, and Mr Tsiparas and M. Hollande's ideas are scarcely less fanciful. Ed Balls's insistence that stimulus spending can create growth at least has a supposed model in the real world; he points to America. But unless he plans to give Britain American levels of public spending (considerably lower than the Coalition's proposed "barbaric" cuts) and taxation, that is just as much a mirage.

Perhaps it is not surprising that voters don't like hearing that things are terrible, and that they are going to stay terrible for quite a long time. But if anything, it should make us more suspicious of those who present any solution to our current position – whether it's more public spending, less immigration, independence, or taxing the rich at 100% (actually suggested during the French election) – other than blood, sweat, tears and facing up to the truth.

One of the best things on television at the moment is Game of Thrones, an adaptation of George RR Martin's fantasy novels. It has dragons and magic and fictional kingdoms at war, but I think the programme is successful because it's so much more realistic than the rest of the world. It consists of terrible things happening all the time, especially to the nice characters. The nearest thing to a hero, Lord Stark, was beheaded at the end of the first series. His motto and constant refrain is "Winter is coming", not something anyone else wants to hear. It's coming yet, for a' that.