Heaven forbid that I should accuse the Centre for Policy Studies (founders, Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher) of having a sense of humour. But it could hardly choose a better week to launch its report Why Do We Feel So Broke? Today is not all pancakes: to the liturgically literate it is Shrove Tuesday, harbinger of Lent. Carnival excesses are merely carne vale, a farewell to fleshly pleasure. A Victorian Nonconformist summed it up with delicious February gloom:
There’s winter on the hills today/ The sad wind soughs o’er churchyard knolls/ And weary nature seems to say/ “Tis Lenten-tide for sinful souls.”
Rather less poetically, the CPS says that stagnating earnings, tax increases, excessive debt, rising interest rates and utility bills are squeezing average family finances to the tune of £1,300 less disposable income. Rightish newspapers claim that the “coping classes” are only just scraping by on £88,000 a year, particularly if they dare not consign their young to a failing local school or their aged parents to the mercy of social services. Meanwhile left-wing commentators retort that if it’s tough for them, it’s worse for the poor. And for the nostalgic we have helpful figures showing that in unglamorous 1958 households spent a much larger percentage on booze, fags and fun.
Then, of course, there’s the credit crunch and the banking panic, aggravated by the fact that it now looks as if the Government can’t even give away Northern Rock by promising to pay its debts for ever. The latest amusing manifestation of this bankerly flap is from Egg, which (while still advertising its 0 per cent interest deals and instant loans, I notice) has abruptly sacked 161,000 credit card customers on the ground that they are “high risk”. Whereon hordes of them converged on media outlets, bristling with indignation and waving immaculate records of full monthly repayment, thus demonstrating that the “high risk” that worries the online bank is the risk of itself not making any money out of these spoilsport wise virgins.
That’s the nub of it. Banks have flown high for 30 years by promoting carnival excess, and politicians have been glad of it because consumer booms create an illusion of general wellbeing. But too much of it is insubstantial puffball. I was in my twenties when the first popular credit cards appeared (before that only sugar-daddies had Barclaycard or Diners). I remember how Access scandalised the cautious with the brilliantly corrupting slogan “takes the waiting out of wanting”, a philosophy now embraced by everyone from Derek Conway’s sons to the late-night lad whose knife takes the waiting out of his wanting your iPod.
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A few years after that there was another frisson of scandal and (perfectly accurate) predictions of debt when supermarkets started letting shoppers use the plastic for food shopping. Now we know that we throw away a third of all the food we buy; join the dots. Credit card use was trumpeted as merely “convenient” and “secure” - which is indeed the case for the minority who pay off monthly in full and lose the banks money.
Mainly, credit has just helped to confuse the concept of money-I-have with the rival concept of stuff-I-want. It led us straight to the dreadful feature writers’ insistence on applying the description “must have” to every luxury item, from flimsy shoes to £6,000 liposuction to reduce blokes’ flabby chests (4,000 last year). Shouting “No, I bloody mustn’t!” and throwing the Sunday supplements at the wall has had no effect on curbing this. Nationwide, plastic twinkles ever brighter until the inevitable moment when it melts. Now we have regular reports of mortgage interest and even tax payments being met by credit card.
Mortgages themselves went mad 20 years ago: I well remember dinner-party pundits saying that the only sensible thing was to take out as big a loan as you could get, preferably 100 or 105 per cent of house value, because on property you “never lose”. When I asked what would happen if prices dropped, there were pitying giggles as if I had suggested going back to a currency of cowrie shells.
And, to take the irrationality still further, we now know that bankers themselves can behave like students flashing their first plastic: step forward Adam Applegarth of Northern Rock, who lent out millions in money he didn’t have but reckoned he could probably borrow. Until he couldn’t. Thanks to a guilty panic by the Chancellor, the “coping” taxpayer classes will now lose thousands apiece to keep the Rock afloat in the cause of “consumer confidence”. Ironic, since consumer overconfidence got us in trouble in the first place.
But cheer up, coping classes. The architects of the liturgical year got it right: after Christmas comes Lent with fasting and repentance. The churches, I notice, are working up a more cheerful spin with a campaign “Love Life Live Lent”, trying to play down the austerity and associate the 40 days of wilderness with upbeat acts of kindness and wacky new Facebook applications. But they may be missing the Zeitgeist. My memory of convent-school Lents is actually rather satisfying: you give up a few pleasures, reacquaint yourself with mild hunger, remind your body that it is there to serve, not dominate, you, and make space for reflection, only occasionally dreaming of chocolate eggs to come.
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That’s the answer: wallow in the Lenten atmosphere. Put the waiting into wanting, ignore fashion, make sinister Spanish omelettes out of everything in the fridge including half-thawed oven-chips and aged broccoli. Bid farewell to luxury, carne vale, shrug on that must-have hairshirt. In a perverse way it might be quite fun.