The Morality of Bankruptcy

Bankruptcy, as I have noted before, has become a fact of life for many people in Britain over the past few years. Once it was just the realm of businesses, but now thousands of people each year are going personally bankrupt. This is not surprising in a country where food, fuel and accommodation are already among the most expensive in Europe and where salaries rise very slowly and 80% of the population earns below the average salary. The UK is a country where the companies which control the basics of living such as water, sewage, gas and electricity are making millions of pounds of profit whilst people are shoved into fuel and water poverty. Repossessions of houses have risen 48% in the past year and are set to increase meaning that more people are thrown on to the very diminished public housing sector and into private rented accommodation where landlords/ladies can abuse them and increasingly where rented properties are also being repossessed by banks leaving tenants homeless without even notification of the process going on until they are evicted, even if they have been paying their rent religiously throughout.

For our young people, we have got to a situation where you cannot get a job or at least a decent job at all without a degree. However, studying at a university is will put you into at least £20,000 (€32,000; US$40,000) in debt. It is clear why this is wanted, it effectually makes graduates indentured and dissuades them from doing anything risky or radical and certainly not protesting against the state. However, it does saddle them with debt from the start of their working lives (assuming they can get a job with unemployment rising sharply) and is effectively meaning that 5-15 years from now even fewer people will be able to afford to buy a house than at present and yet no-one is making provision to increase either the social housing or the private rental market. It can be seen as a big boost to those rentiers currently snapping up houses and flats put on the market by people who had a 'buy-to-let' property which they cannot keep up. It will put many more people into the hands of the unscrupulous (and you show me a decent landlord/lady, I have yet to meet one, they are greedy and mean and have no consideration at all for the tenants who provide their income treating them all as if they are criminals and seeking to screw every last penny from them) landlords/ladies. They will have increased demand in the next decade that they can exploit to keep rents (that have no control on them in the UK) high and the quality of what they provide very low.

You have to earn over £15,000 in order to start paying back a student loan and most graduates (and I spoke to a man who researches this) earn only £17,000 per year (about £7000 less than the national average salary). Of course the debt does not go away until either they reach 65 or are so disabled that they can no longer work. Even if they go abroad it hangs over them. I can see the rise of UK student loan exiles in France, Spain and the USA rising. Of course taking a degree should be seen as an investment in your future, but of course it is not, because now everyone has them. It is like having to pay £20,000 to buy a school-leaving certificate. Rather for UK people it is a beginning of the process of British society draining as much money from them as possible with giving minimum back. We are the donors to keep the wealthy very rich. There is no sense that you can ever be without debt in the UK. You are hooked up to the blood-draining device at the age of 16 and are never let free because if you were then some rich people might actually have to work for their income rather than suck it from you. I can see where the writers of 'The Matrix' got their idea for humanity being a resource drained by parasitic controllers!

Currently there is one escape from all these pressures on people: bankruptcy. Though student loans are exempt from bankruptcy. Now, I have noted a trend to try and plug this gap. Of course bankruptcy is not the easy solution. It means that for six years you will find it very difficult to get credit for a mortgage, a car or anything and in the UK that effectively bars you from purchasing so many things. Bankruptcy also bars you from entering professions such as the law or accountancy, as if most of us had a chance of getting into either of those, though they are popular with graduates, so for them this is an issue. Also many of your possessions will be taken, that new computer and that ipod and the DVD player will no longer be yours. You can have old furniture and an old car (well I am in a fine position, my car is now 11 years old and rusting and my furniture was second hand when I got it 6 years ago and is coming apart, I can afford nothing newer). Make sure no-one dies and leaves you an inheritance while you are bankrupt because that too will be taken. Avoid winning the lottery too, unless it is such a big win that it can wipe out your debts. So bankruptcy is a way out but it is not an easy way or a decision that is taken lightly.

Now, to stop people using bankruptcy to escape the indenturement that society wants to shackle them with, I have noticed that people have started talking about how 'immoral' bankruptcy is. I heard this first from the Inland Revenue's sickly-named Time-To-Pay Helpline. If you ever want to be told how foolish you are and how you are trying to cheat the state and are a despicable you are and do not happen to have an irascible elderly relative handy then call these people up. They portray you as a tax cheat if you dare even mention bankruptcy. I noticed even the Money section of 'The Guardian' talks of the questionable 'morality' of bankruptcy. Putting this moral censure on people is utterly perverse. Who questions the morality of utility company and petrol company bosses awarding themselves million pound bonuses as they squeeze ordinary people into poverty? Who questions the morality of landlords/ladies who charge high rents and then provide no service to their tenants and then come after them for fictitious charges?

In the UK it is clear that the perspective on morality has become totally twisted. What is clearly moral now in the view of the civil service and the media is to exploit ordinary people to the fullest extent that you can. It is no longer a question of 'I'm Alright Jack', what we are being told to adopt is 'I'm Alright Jack, but I must get more money from you and you are going to suffer as a consequence'. Any attempt to escape from such rapacious behaviour is being condemned. In the UK society insists that you make yourself amenable to being exploited and to not having a stable let alone comfortable life. If you dare challenge your exploitation then you are the ones portrayed as immoral. This is sick. This is a sick society, stay away from it if you have any sense.

1977 Anarchy in the UK; 2007 Bankruptcy in the UK

Today's news broadcasts are highlighting statistics from the Citizens' Advice Bureau that they are now getting 6,600 enquiries every day in the UK about problems with debt. Personal bankruptcy has reached an all time high. Whilst we have not returned to the thousands of repossessions of houses as experienced between 1990-3, the number is rising steadily. The house we are renting will be repossessed from the landlord when we leave, for non-payment of the mortgage. This time round this is not meaning cheaper houses coming on to the markets, instead banks sit on the reposessions until they reach a certain level and then sell them so that they do not reduce the ever rising price of houses. Back in the early 1990s at least those who could not afford a house had some chance getting a repossessed one at reduced rate and even that channel has now gone.

So what is to blame for such vast debt in the UK? Are we all simply spendthrift? Well, about a quarter of the problems stem from credit and store cards. The UK, seemingly in sharp contrast to its European neighbours, does seem to have got obsessed with constantly buying. Electrical goods, furniture and DVDs/music seem to be in high demand with people upgrading and upgrading. In France, almost all shops are closed on a Sunday, in Germany many still close at lunchtime on most Saturdays and do not reopen until Monday. In the UK shops are filled every Sunday with people shopping as a hobby. They are not out walking or playing football or sitting reading or even slumped in front of the television, they are walking around looking for things to buy. In Europe the UK is consumer society at its most extreme. Credit is easy to come by, you can get a string of credit cards and advertisements for loans fill the television, newspapers, the radio constantly.

In the UK you are defined by what you own. If you do not own a house you are treated as a second class citizen by letting agents and other people. There is immense pressure, going back to the 1980s on becoming an owner of property and then to start 'buying-to-let' as if it is right that everyone should strive to be a landlord. Of course both these trends keep pushing up house prices which have now not fallen in 15 years; the news media gets jumpy when there is a slow down in the increase, not a fall, as if the constant inflation of house prices is vital for the UK economy. This obsession with owning property and your status in society being defined by it is another unhealthy situation in the UK that adds to debt. It goes into things like cars. You can travel from the UK to France in 35 minutes these days and you see a sharp contrast. British roads are dominated by very large 4x4 cars (SUVs) in France there are very few. In Britain if you do not drive one you are made to feel you are letting down your children and on the road you are hassled by the people who own these vehicles as some kind of annoyance. They are expensive and terribly uneconomical to run and yet not owning one seems to mean you yield up any claim on respect whether actually in it or not.

All business people want to maximise profit, but in the UK it is greed, greed, greed, hence rents being pushed higher and higher. Utility bills make up a third of the sources of problems with debt. I have already commented on how water, sewage, gas, electricity and phone companies keep pressing prices up. Not only that but they lock you in to fixed contracts now (as do landlords) which means you cannot get out of them, are often paying for services in advance and you lose money each time you move house. A small rise in any utility price hits people hard especially when combined with the other rises they face. As I have often commented, I earn 50% higher than the national average salary for the UK, however, in my house we now cannot afford to flush the toilet because the water bills are so high. If any of us urinates we do not flush it as each flush uses 2 gallons (9 litres) and like most people we now have a water meter and we are charged once for that water by the water company and then 95% of the price again by the sewage company (in our town the water and sewage companies are separate, until this year the sewage company charged 108% of the water bill price). If we as a well-off household with two incomes cannot afford to flush our toilet, heaven help anyone poorer.

So consumption is a key problem whether it is voluntarily on luxuries or almost compulsory on rent/mortgage and utilities. (I have not even mentioned again very high train fares which contribute to some people's costs). The situation is exarcebated by the fixed contracts and payment in advance that so many companies insist on. However, all of this is compounded by government policy. The UK government only has one tool with which to manipulate the economy - changing the bank base rate. From this all interest rates are set. The government handed this control over to the independent Bank of England in 1997. No-one in the past forty years has ever bothered trying to alter terms of credit, for example, the minimum you have to pay back each month or to vary tax on items, nor really put effective pressure on utility companies to moderate prices and certainly not on landlords to keep raising rent. The government has not contested the attitude promoted in the Thatcher years (1979-91) that it is your civic obligation to own property and consume as much as you can. The government needs to start sending out very difficult signals about what is important and worthwhile in our society. You may say that is not the role of government but it is them who complains about crime and social problems and has to pick up the pieces. No-one in UK government or in its think-tanks or the civil service has any ideas of how to alter the UK economy and society in a more sustainable direction.

All of these factors mean that consequently the UK economy is constantly overheated with so many baseline costs for the bulk of the population rising all the time. This means that there is always a heavy inflationary pressure no matter what anyone does. Any minor fall in sales is seen as a recession and steps are taken to keep us consuming. The constant inflationary pressure means, as this year, the Bank of England (whose only concern is inflation, nothing about social issues) increases interest rates; in 2007 this has happened five times. This tool cannot reduce that inflationary pressure, only dent it a little, and in fact the heavy rain of this Summer has done a better job at doing that than the Bank of England. Interest rises means everyone pays more and it all comes at once, your rent, your utility bills, your food, all tends to go up together. No wonder so many people are sliding into bankruptcy. All statistics hide human misery and it is those at the bottom who suffer most. Why do people wonder why the drugs trade and armed crime are so high when we are pushing so many families and individuals into a situation where crime is the only way to survive and seems fine as you have no vested interest in a society which defines you simply by your possessions. I was shocked to see a map of the UK showing the highest concentrations of the so-called 'Exclusive Wealthy' apparently these are 'People with so much wealth that they can exclude themselves from the norms of society'. No-one should be permitted to be able to exclude themselves in that way.

Other countries in Europe have problems but they have not created a society that is rushing to burn itself out, that is so obsessed with possessions that no economic approach can succeed without also addressing people's outlook. The UK as a sick society is beginning to outstrip even the USA. The number of murders committed in the UK by children under the age of 10 exceeds even Iraq which is basically a warzone still. 2,840 crimes were committed by children under the age of 10 in 2006 (which is the age of criminal responsibility in the UK these days compared to 16 years old in Anglo-Saxon times) of these half were arson or criminal damage, 66 were sexual crimes committed by the child not to them.

We need to move to a society which values other things beside possessions. I was all for Sunday opening for shops but now I think they just fuel unhealthy consumption. Of course in the age of the internet you can shop all day and all night every day of the year. We need to encourage more hobbies than shopping which is the sole leisure activity of the bulk of the UK population. We need a government which does not adhere to the 'greed is good' rhetoric or at least actually condemns it rather than accepting it passively. We need to restrict utility and transport bill rises to tolerable levels and try to stop the constant pressure on rent and mortgage prices. The government needs some different economic tools and to not be afraid to get in there and interfere with the granting of so much credit. As many countries have demonstrated, you do not need a command economy to get the economy and so society (which is so driven by economic pressures) to move in a healthier direction. If we do not do this the UK will be the first to enter the Cyberpunk dystopia for real with people either beggars on the streets or behind fortified walls being driven from place to place in blacked out, armoured vehicles, with an attitude of 'must have' everything and status only defined by your latest purpose not any actual human attributes. However, I envisage as always the British public will simply keep consuming and fighting to consume freely so digging itself deeper into debt and segregating so much of society into the 'have nots' (always a majority), the 'haves' (who struggle to keep up with the next category) and the 'have-the-latests'.

Drop the Princess Obsession

While I can claim no credit as a child psychologist, I did train as a teacher in my youth and was a volunteer at a primary school in the 2000s (there were no male teachers and boys were seeing reading as something only girls and women did, so a number of men from my company were invited to come and read one lunchtime a week to show that men read) and now I sometimes take my housemate's son to primary school when it is raining, so I can claim some knowledge of schoolchildren. However, my posting today, though starting there spreads out into the adult world too. If you live in the UK you probably have noticed how pink everything is these days. When I was a boy, girls would sometimes wear pink, but also lots of other colours too, especially denim blue. These days they often turn out in pink shoes, dresses, tops, trousers and coats and quite often are dropped off by mothers driving pink cars (I must say shocking pink cars, a couple of which are in my neighbourhood and another passes me on the road each morning are slightly alarming). Okay, so pink is in. However, it is part of wider trend, one you can see emblazoned across the back windows of many cars not only these pink ones: 'little princess on board'. Some even have little tiaras fitted to their seats. The supermarkets are filled with stationery and lunch boxes and drinks holders all echoing this theme. I know parents are now afraid to let their children out of their sight and in the UK we are growing up with a generation who can do very little for themselves and are frightened of the real world, but this princess obsession goes further. By default it is saying that her parents are king and queen. I know people should be proud of themselves, but we also need to be grounded. There is nothing wrong with girls pretending to be princesses, but what we are seeing is overload. Why cannot she sometimes pretend to be an astronaut or a doctor or a warrior? The pricness overload also says to girls, that the only legitimate way for a woman to be is, as my housemate's son calls it 'a girly girl'. This is a very male chauvinist attitude towards women and is not a healthy one for boys to adopt. It is as if the whole feminist campaign going back to the 1900s and certainly since the 1970s has been overturned and the only role model for girls that is presented by the media and retail sectors and collaborated in by parents is as a pampered princess unable to act for herself, having her every whim fulfilled and only valued for her prettiness, no other attribute.

Now, you might say, it is just a phase and girls grow out of it. However, this is where the difficulties creep in. I have seen some of these 'little' princesses grow into women and yet their attitudes remain juvenile. They expected to get whatever they want just as they did when they were 5. They find it difficult to leave home and even when they do, the demand support, both financial and practical, from their families. They run up huge credit card bills and getting into vast debt is a common problem in the UK today. In 2006 over 90,000 people filed for personal bankruptcy and many more are in difficulty, partly because their parents never said 'no' or 'you have to wait until Christmas' or 'save up for it' or 'get a paper-round and earn the money for it'. Instead they say 'yes and do you want the rest of those in the series?' This pandering to every demand does not only have financial implications but physical ones too, 23% of UK women (and 25% of UK men) are now obese. Much of this is motivated by the consumer industry as women given this mindset make far better consumers than slim women who save and analyse what they really want rather than constantly being driven by fashions.

I remember clearly one example of a woman who grew out of all this princess merchandise into being a spoilt adult, sitting in her flat with her family buzzing around her as she commanded them to move items to her new flat. In the hours this took, she contributed absolutely nothing to the effort. Her parents were on hand to praise how skilful she was in selecting which commands to throw out. I had been brought in as a friend of her fiance's and someone with removals experience and I remember abandoning the task after about three hours when she complained that we had not hefted all the expensive furniture fast enough (despite the difficulty of very narrow doorways) and I remembered I was not being paid for this job and insults cost in my book. Having married my friend she decided she also wanted a lover to live in the house and imported him from South America. You might say that my friend should have left but as you know from these posts, getting a house, getting out a mortgage is very difficult in the UK so he is locked into a house with his separated wife and her lover who lives rent free while my friend pays the mortgage. This is where the princess obsession ends up. You might say 'good on her', but I would say she is not a strong woman, she is a parasite.

So before you go out and buy another item of pink clothing or a sign saying 'princess on board' for your daughter, niece or grand-daughter, think twice. Think about doing something that will enable her to be an independent, strong woman of the future who can handle money and know the true value of things both financially and in human terms. Start now and buy her some dungarees or a football or a book on amphibians. Ultimately she might turn her nose at not having her princess-side pandered to still more, but she will lead a better life as a consequence.