Be a jolly middle-man at Christmas

The British climate at this point in December consists of days that are just lumbering into their stride….but then the sun drops in the sky, one draws the curtains, and the thought is ‘Was that it?’

Now one has decked the halls with holly of course, there are decorations around to remind us that ‘tis the season to be jolly…and sparkly little Chinese tree-lights to flicker away uncertainly in the reflected light of the fire.

But days spent largely inside lead to all sorts of dark thoughts about money and the economy – and what the point of any of it might be. I’ll try and explain what I mean.

Thanks to the beneficent State, I have £250 to squander on lots of wood for the fire – which at £170 a load doesn’t go far; but then every year I get the cheque and think ‘Why are they sending me this?’

I have the same sentiment when I go to the pharmacy and pick up a hundred quid’s worth of medication free: ‘Why is this free?’

There are enormous bills for Britain to pay, and folks around (not many in this country, but they exist) who’ve been left behind by thirty years of Thatcher-Blair’s Inherited Greed Disease. And I’m getting free firewood and medication from the bankrupt result of it all.

Why?

“I don’t see you giving it back” a walking cliché said to me the other day. No mate, you damn well don’t – because that would require yet another additional civil servant to process it. But as I put this latest cheque in the bank, a long and winding thought-process unfurled.

Here is this branch of a bank I’ve been with for nearly forty years. It would no longer exist as a viable entity had the Government not given it tons of money – my money. And now the Government is giving me money, and I’m putting it in the bank. I seem to exist purely as the middle-man in all this; and I suspect that’s precisely what we all are.

The car industry is flat on its back, so the Government gives us money that used to be our money to go and buy a car more cheaply and thus sell more cars; the only flaw being that these are foreign cars.

There was a point during the summer when I was near to expecting the appearance of posters saying ‘Spend for Britain – it is your duty’, or possibly ‘Did you blow everything you had during the Great Recession Daddy?’ This was achieved on a very minor scale by (once again) taking what used to be our money and using it to fund a process whereby we could hand over less money for goods, in order to give some of what money we had left to retailers – so they could stop losing money, and thus not have to turn to the banks who didn’t have any money to give them anyway, having already had lots of our money.

And as the mind hikes round that enormous circle, one thinks ‘You know, without us they’d be stymied’.

Which they would, make no mistake….but there’s more to come. Some 30% of the population lives on the money and pensions amassed after forty-plus years of fighting off the Treasury shovel. They deposit much of that with banks, so the banks can lend it on, make profit and pay interest to the depositor. But the Government has dropped the interest rate to zero, and the banks aren’t lending any money. So the Government has just slipped RBS and Lloyds/HBOS another £25.5 billion of the tax monies paid by the folks twenty years younger than the interest-seeking fossils, in order that the banks should continue having free money from the depositors….which they can then squirrel away in their balance sheets as there is no money sitting on those sheets at the minute, because they lent it all to people who couldn’t pay them back.

Now the whole point of middle-men in the real world is that they make a turn on that function: a little commission here, a little fee there. But the Government hasn’t got any money to pay us for being – variously – rabid and wild-eyed consumers, moneylenders, taxpayers and bank depositors. They have to pay us in kind for being such supine middle-men.

In my case, it’s firewood and pills. So I’ve just spent this column answering my own question, ‘Why am I getting this?’: I’m getting it as an equivalent payment of £1450.

Except that the bank bailout has cost me £5500.

Next time, I want to come back as a bank.

Copyright John Ward December 2009