On a cold Monday in late November, an email appears in your inbox.
The message purports to be from a long lost cousin. He’s asking you for money. Nothing new there – you receive 20 or 30 spam emails a day asking if you can send some outrageous sum of money to a bank in Nigeria in order to claim your inherited wealth from your dying distant relative. Somehow, though, this email is different, and you can’t quite think why.
The specifics of the email shed little further light. Your ‘long lost cousin’, who calls himself Al, has landed himself in a spot of debt. Nearly £25,000 of debt, in fact. He’s asking you to pay it back for him, but there’s something ominous about his tone. Confused, but unwilling to spend any more time on the matter, you shake your head and ignore the email. You throw it in your spam folder and you forget about it.
Until you receive a phone call.
The phone call is from a bank. They’re after the £25,000 your cousin owes. Straight away, you tell them to sod off – it’s not your debt, after all, it’s Al’s. You haven’t spent more than you can afford, you haven’t borrowed and failed to pay it back. It’s not your debt. Besides, you can’t afford to suddenly spend £25,000, you have bills to pay. Al’s debt is not your fault, you insist, and it’s not your problem.
Ahh, they say, but you did spend all that money. Al got into all that debt by constantly donating money to the local council – it’s because of Al’s debt that your bins were taken away in a timely manner. It’s because of Al that you were kept safe by the police. Thanks to Al, your local school has been able to provide your children with education. You spent Al’s money, and now you have to pay for it. What’s more, the bank insist, if you refuse they have the power to have you incarcerated.
“But I didn’t ask him to spend all that money!” you cry. Furious and indignant you flatly refuse to agree to paying the money – it wasn’t your decision to give the council all that money, and regardless, all the police officers seem to have been replaced with impotent PCSOs, the bin collections have gone down to every other week and the local school’s standards have dropped through the floor to the point where they’re turning out children who can barely speak, let alone write. If you’re going to pay off all of Al’s debt, shouldn’t the bank force Al to justify the wasteful way he spent it in the first place?
None of that matters, says the bank. Somebody has to pay for it, and that somebody is you. Exasperated, isolated and humiliated, you try your last defence: “Why is it me that’s paying all this”, you say. “Won’t anybody else share the burden?”
But they already are doing. Al isn’t just your cousin, he’s everybody’s cousin. He hasn’t just spent £25,000, he’s spent £1,000,000,000,000. One Trillion Pounds Sterling. Twenty Five Thousand Pounds for every single person aged between 15 and 65 years old in the entire United Kingdom. Now, together, we have to pay all of Al’s money back with interest, and there is absolutely nothing anybody can do about it.
How would that make you feel?
patently
November 28th, 2008 | 9:09 am
Good summary.
You already know how at least I feel about it!
)
Stu
November 28th, 2008 | 6:51 pm
Thanks patently!
I wish I could feel like things were about to change. Like the outcry over the PBR and now the arrest of a Shadow Minister could be channelled into really making a difference and getting our voices heard.
We can but hope.
ladytizzy
November 28th, 2008 | 7:40 pm
One Trillion Pounds Sterling. Twenty Five Thousand Pounds for every single person aged between 15 and 65 years old in the entire United Kingdom.
But how much for the married’s? And, more seriously, why that age range? Further, I don’t have kids: I’ve never moaned that my family directly benefits from the myriad family tax credits, schooling etc. I accept that I have been the recipient of past tax-payers.
I completely get where you’re coming from, and I can’t wait to vote these frackwits out. However, I’d like to point out that I’ve been paying for you for quite some time, whether you asked or not – that’s how it works. And that’s why I’m particularly peed off paying twice, thrice, frice, to pay the platinum-plated pensions for public sector employees.
In my time, womens pensions have been changed from being paid at age 60 to 65, the reduced rates for married women has been abolished, making me pay to catch up, but the NIC people have absolutely no idea what is going on.
It’s a good thing the 11+ was around and enabled me to have a decent edu.
Arrrggghhh. **** day – rant over.
Stu
November 28th, 2008 | 7:54 pm
That cycle works in principle, Tizzy – that you pay for me, and that I pay for the next generation. The problem here is not that, though. We all now have to pay for the Government of the past 5 years and the next 5 years. It’s the rampant increases in spending by the government that have put us in this position, not simply the day-to-day costs of keeping the population educated etc.
When you get upset about having to pay so many times over for public sector pensions, that’s the debt that I’m referring to. And the debt caused by nationalising the banks, and the PFI timebomb.
As for why pick the 15-65 age range, that was the quickest statistic I had to hand. It’s also useful in that that you can start working and paying off Darling’s debt at 16, and you can start drawing a pension at 65. As for the “married’s”, since we don’t receive anything like the level of government support given to the “unmarried’s” we have to pay proportionally more than most other people.
ladytizzy
November 29th, 2008 | 1:25 pm
Oops, in my last comment I misrepresented myself (doh!) in the first para. It should read …I’ve never moaned that my family have not directly benefitted… the whole para is a complete mess since I obviously received schooling, oh, you get what I mean by now, surely.
Thanks for reply: no argument frome me, I wanted a rant (lack of nicotine)
Thing is, the pensions crisis has been known about for decades and only a pile of collapsed flans would have created so much public sector employment and give in, without a whimper, to the union demands for their pensions, plus vote for their own wages.
Here’s another typical gvt scam, spending MY money on this steaming heap:
http://www.defra.gov.uk/corporate/consult/welfare-cats-cop/consultation.pdf
(also, substitute ‘cats’ for ‘dogs’ – similar doo-doo’s)
The list below, is of the ‘respected’ consultees who managed to scrape enough words to make a sentence:
/* NOTE FROM STU: I have deleted this list of companies – just to explain why, I have noticed that this post has begun appearing on search engines when one searches for the name of some of the companies Tiz listed (example). Having business names appear in search results under the title ‘The Worst Scam on Earth’ is not fair to the business owners or their employees. If you’ve come here after searching for a kennel or cattery company’s name, rest assured there is no implication that they are involved in any scams whatsoever! */
http://www.defra.gov.uk/corporate/consult/welfare-cats-cop/consultlist.htm
Seriously, how much did that cost us to come up with ‘Have cat. Give it food and water. If unsure see vet.’
The End.