Money has been devalued. I do not refer to inflation here.
Money has been devalued because people don't value the things they can get too
easily. The people who control our economy - the top politicians and businessmen - have served themselves extremely generously over the last few decades, and now for them money is commonplace. Because it is of little value they carelessly give it to some (themselves and their associates) and thoughtlessly take it away from others (the rest of us Britons). They do this with no more concern than casting a shadow.
People with vast amounts of money think people with merely lots of money are poor. In a campaign speech Mitt Romney, an American presidential candidate, said he thought the average American earned a quarter of a million dollars. Presumably he regards $250,000 a year as a very modest amount. Thus he and his ilk blindfold themselves to the consequences of their actions with the assumption that the poor only have lots of money, rather than pots of it, allowing their consciences to let them rip off an extra few hundred pounds with an increase in ticket prices and utility bills. And rip off another extra few hundred pounds with freezes in pay and cuts in benefits and pensions. Money isn’t important, they tell themselves, therefore it isn’t important if I help myself to some more of it.
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But just as people don’t value the things they have in
plenty, they do value what they have little of. For 90% of Britons, whose income
has stagnated in real terms for decades, money does have value. And when it goes, it hurts.
Britain is going through some painful changes. One of which
is a public intolerance of lying and cheating. Vilification is everywhere:
bankers (for a compendium of dodgy activities that have come to be known
generically as ‘banking’); media moguls (phone hacking, bribing officials, etc.); suppliers ripping off the government (MOD paying £22 for 65p lightbulb, etc.); insurers (inflating repair costs to hike premiums, etc.); MPs (fiddling expenses; lying about anything
including swearing at cops; providing commercial favours; complicity in
kidnapping and rendition, etc.). Pity the banker/MP/mogul who
now find themselves in deep doo-doo for doing precisely the same thing they
were openly doing when they were fêted as ‘leading citizens’. Pity? Perhaps
not.
Bankers have been manipulating LIBOR for years, an open
secret that was shouted across trading floors with bankers offering one another a choice of rates like sweets from a tin of Quality Street. Strawberry Delight or Orange Crunch, up a little or down a lot? Fabulous profits tumbled in from the
Payment Protection Insurance scam, insider trading, grotesque charges on
pensions and investments. All these scams were hardly a secret to an insider or an insider’s
friends or his friends’ friends, their spouses, paramours and personal trainers. The perpetrators of these scams were not just
quietly indulged, but were proudly trumpeted as the jewels in the British
industrial crown. To keep them, we are told, we must pay them generously and
regulate them pusillanimously.
Unimpeded and celebrated dodgy behaviour became an open
secret that spread like a flu virus infecting the upper echelons of Britain. Ripping off clients, customers and constituents was in order to harvest as much
money as the bankers. Confusing rewards with merit, they proved their
‘excellence’ by the amount of money they could grab. And then justified the
amount of money they could grab by their ‘excellence’. Even our sainted family
doctors got in on the act with a 58% pay increase over 4 years for doing less work. British culture itself went through a
sarcastic period, Sarc-Art, when unmade beds, stuffed sheep, lights going on
and off, and crumpled pieces of paper were selling for ludicrous prices to people with too much money to value it. As soon as our Brit-Artists
realised that their sarcasm was profitable, perhaps they too believed in their
own excellence?
