People who lack the essentials of life – because they cannot financially afford them – are vulnerable to anyone who has a clever way to exploit that need.
It is a lesson from centuries of history that we should all be able to rely on that those who lead us will have learned. But regrettably, we cannot.
Indeed, government was created as a way for us to all collectively help others in a time of need. But the time when mechanisms such as the Welfare State and even the NHS were able to operate and fulfil their function without being exploited in some way, have sadly long since gone.
Like me, you may have noticed that so-called ‘Buy Now, Pay Later’ ‘opportunities’ have started to appear and are available to cover the cost of some of the least expensive items that we have gone online and even to the high street or local shops to buy.
To those who have been fed the unscrupulous line that taking out credit and paying it off before you are charged interest is a good thing AND can do so, it is likely that just adding another way to delay paying bills with free money will be seen as no more than an added bonus. But what happens when these offers and the growing number of Buy Now, Pay Later apps are used to pay for food, travel or even energy that the people buying these goods and services don’t have the money to afford?
The willful blindness to a situation that politicians themselves have directly and indirectly created is not just a problem. It is fast becoming a damning indictment of how as a society we have become obsessed with quick money and the status that its fluidity affords us, when we believe we can afford it, whilst this obsession has picked up speed and just about enslaved us all.
The debate over whether the £200 relief on energy bills should be a Tory driven Loan or a Labour derived subsidy fails to even scratch the surface of the dreadful realities that increasing numbers of British people now face.
Food and the essentials that each of us need to survive and remain healthy each day are going up in price aggressively, whilst the value of the money we earn or are given is rapidly going down.
To add to the torment and human misery that little more than political stupidity and the greed of big business and bankers have created, the latter are now exploiting what is left for those who already have nothing left with this Buy Now, Pay Later trap.
They are doing little more than exploiting the vulnerability that accompanies need. All so they can continue to raise already bloated profit margins for themselves.
The travesty of this all, is that the money being ‘loaned’ to the people who will become debt ridden and then ostracised, by the very same commercial credit scorers who qualified them, doesn’t actually exist.
Our politicians have literally given these sadists a license to print money that they then loan out, charge interest against and simply destroy lives without any further thought, when it’s not paid back.
It’s all done as if the money was real, and they had been put at a genuinely loss and have reason to be aggrieved in some way.
This travesty is made worse, only by the reality that our Politicians either don’t understand how the perversity of this system now works, or that they do, but overlook it all on the basis that it either helps them to do so, or that it is too difficult to deal with.
To say that we are on our way to hell in a hand cart would be bad enough, if it weren’t for the fact that to say all this was avoidable for a very long time is the absolute truth.
Instead, we have politicians who are scraping around trying to fix life-changing problems for everyone by printing even more money whilst making them even worse.
Making life fair and affordable for all was always within our Politicians power.
They have either deliberately ignored the problems or are just too stupid to be aware of and face up to the true cause.
Adam Tugwell 