Forever in our debt

Now stay with me on this ’cos although it sounds complicated it will, in fact, solve the nation’s credit crunch problems at a stroke. Well, two strokes.

It started when some bloke on the radio called in to suggest that instead of bunging the banks cash to sit on and pay fat pensions from, the Government should pay off everyone’s mortgages.

Brilliant. Paying off mortgages would mean the banks getting rid of most of their debts and they could start again. And it would leave every householder in the country with a large dollop of disposable cash to throw about – thus reviving the economy in an instant.

It’s sheer genius!

Of course, there then followed some sour, grumpy City suit saying it wasn’t possible, too expensive blah blah blah.

Oh, and £1.5 trillion added to the national debt for bail-outs isn’t, then?

My guess is that £1.5 trillion (don’t worry about it, it’s just a load of noughts, and the money isn’t real anyway) would clear the mortgages of most of England (sod the Scots and Welsh, they have their own governments) quite comfortably, certainly all up to about £150,000. (Populist, me?).

And if we then chuck another £200 billion (like a trillion, but not as many noughts) at car owners – that’s, say, 20 million of us getting ten grand apiece – we could all buy new less polluting cars that are standing about at Avonmouth docks and some disused airport in Gloucestershire.

In turn, we would have to hand our current cars to recycling centres (green stuff, y’see – it’s bloody infallible, I tell you) thus giving that industry a major boost.

Now some misguided souls may point out that those without a mortgage and those with no car would dip out in all this and thus it is unfair.

Yep, it is. And so is life – get used to it.