LONDON: Britain's opposition Labour Party plans to force a parliament vote calling for the boss of state-rescued Royal Bank of Scotland to be stripped of his bonus, a party source said Sunday.
Labour is set to stage a debate the week after next to heap pressure on conservative Prime Minister David Cameron's coalition government in the row over the payout to RBS chief executive Stephen Hester.
It was announced Thursday that Hester would get a £963,000 ($1.5 million, 1.15 million euros) bonus this year, on top of his £1.2 million salary.
The House of Commons vote would not be binding on the Conservative-Liberal Democrat government, which has faced criticism for declining to block the bonus, but it could prove embarrassing.
A Labour source said: "David Cameron's failure of leadership cannot be allowed to stand. We will force a Commons vote to let MPs show the public's disapproval of Mr Hester's bonus."
British taxpayers own 82 percent of RBS since it was bailed out at the height of the global financial crisis in 2008, and since then it has slashed tens of thousands of jobs.
News of Hester's bonus -- despite government calls for pay restraint amid continuing economic gloom -- sparked outrage from trade unions and Labour.
The fact that the sum was less than half the £2 million Hester was given a year earlier failed to dent the criticism.
Ministers spent Sunday defending the decision.
"The judgment we had to make was: should we go further, as many of us would like to, and say, let's have no bonus at all?", said Danny Alexander, chief secretary to the Treasury, on BBC television.
"Have the government taking control directly of RBS, and therefore causing potentially much bigger financial risks to the taxpayer?"
Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith said the government could not interfere with the RBS board and so would have to get rid of the body altogether to strip Hester of his bonus, a move which would cause "chaos".
Labour leader Ed Miliband in a blog challenged the government "to practice what it preaches about the role of shareholders in restraining top pay."
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