Heading towards a nanny state?

In my view, this is just another manifestation of the nanny state helping people to shed their responsibilities and to believe in fairy godmothers and does nothing to help the public understand finance, money or quite simply to have to live with the consequences of their own failings.

While I don’t advocate a return to the debtors’ prison, one has to wonder why:

• People aren’t encouraged to have some savings for a rainy day.
• If the government is so concerned about debt, why not bring in credit control? In other words, you can’t buy anything at all whether on credit card or anything else unless you put down at least a 30 per cent deposit.
• While feeling sorry for these people, perhaps circumstances are viewed in a vacuum. Let’s ask those in debt ‘do you smoke?’, ‘How many times a week do you go to the pub?’, ‘How new is your flat screen television?’, ‘What did you spend at Christmas?’ and ‘Where did you go on holiday?’, merely as an example of a few salient points. It would illustrate what we all have good reason to suspect – people spend first and think last.

The government bleats about people understanding finance and financial matters which is a perfectly laudable and sensible thing, but it then dreams up initiatives such as this which completely destroys the principle of financial education. ‘You can only spend what you have’ should be lesson number one. But, of course, the government relies on spendthrifts to keep this Mickey Mouse economy afloat.

Harry Katz

Norwest Consultants