SOMEBODY owes us an explanation about debt.
The United Kingdom of Britainshire is now in the red to the tune of £2 trillion. That’s more than a footballer’s wage. How did it get so bad? Why didn’t they tell us about it before? Were they acting like the state equivalent of someone boasting, “Yes, look at my new car,” while knowing full well it won’t be paid for till 2025?
For the answers to these questions you’ll have to go on your computers and ask Google. Here, meanwhile, all I can offer you is the chance to sit side by side gawping in bewilderment. It’s what I do best. Well, that and complaining.
However, on this occasion, I’d be a hypocrite to whinge about yon powers that be. For I too am in debt. I like doing stuff you’re not supposed to do in columns, so here’s my personal financial details: my credit card is down to the tune of three or four grand — it’s an estimate, because I don’t like looking — and my outstanding mortgage is, say, £133,000. The latter is due to be paid off when I’m 72. Luckily, I plan to be extremely wealthy by then — I figure there are a few bodily parts that science needs more than I do — so that’s that sorted. But what is Britworld going to do?
Well, it could get rid of the irritating and useless body part known as Scotland. Funnily enough, the only time “national” debt used to come up was in scare stories about Scotlandshire going independent. The sums were always trifling — generally 10 or 15 quid. The fact of the United Kingdom’s humungous debt was never mentioned in these tales, which at one point made up 87% of one London Sunday newspaper’s Scottish coverage (and I use the expression “made up” advisedly).
Now, when it’s clear Scotia could have been right wealthy if it hadn’t been for these unpatriotic pillocks, we just have to sit here soaked in squandered oil revenues and be told by England’s famously anal taxpayers that we’re subsidy junkies.
These whingeing jokers inhabit a bizarre fantasy world, in which they alone are virtuously bailing out Johnny foreigner (including us), whereas the truth is they’re now in debt because the English economy is largely based on usury, with its manufacturing output restricted entirely to pub ashtrays and garden gnomes. The introduction of the pub smoking ban dealt a hammer blow to the ashtray sector, thus precipitating the current crisis in the English economy.
Despite that obvious truth, the current mega-debt is being blamed on two uber-unionists, Gordon Broon and Alistair Darling, whose fiendish Scottishness allegedly caused the collapse. Aaargh! They’re torturing us with irony. It drives me mad. But don’t get me started.
Certainly, I wish I hadn’t started a credit card. I haven’t even used it for years. I ran up the debt before many places would let you use Switch — and for a long time afterwards, when I didn’t know you could use it. The expenditure was far from frivolous, and mainly involved paying for ferries and planes during that characteristically confused (Who am I? And where?) period in my life.
But now it’s the mortgage that accounts for the big minus sign in my financial affairs. For the first time in my puff, I feel really tied by it, because I’m told I’m now too old and skint to get another one. I’ve moved house 23 times, and feel the nomadic calling once more — anything to find peace and quiet, that utterly unattainable dream.
But I’m stuck, imprisoned by debt, which is how most of us got to where we are today: stuffed.
Why don’t we all agree to write the whole thing off? As far as I can make out, as individuals and states, it’s the banks that we owe, and we all hate them.
If we could all just be given the chance to wipe the slate clean, we’d never get in debt again, at least until we needed a house, a car or a nuclear weapons system. In the meantime, please help the British economy — buy more garden gnomes.
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