It was a old con trick in London’s East End. A street urchin would ‘hobble’ somebody’s parked car (usually by crawling under and pulling the connectors from the starter motor) and while the stricken owner was wondering how they were going to get home that night, up would pop said urchin, now as Good Samaritan, who would offer to get them going again…in return for a modest fee.
Those motorists were the lucky ones. The rest of us have been forced to hand over sums that are far from modest to urchins that we actually elect and as a result of an almost identical modus operandi.
Since HM government has dedicated much of the last 50 years to sucking every last drop of blood from our veins and is now shocked, SHOCKED to discover that the simple desire to save for one’s retirement is complex and forbidding. Of course it is. Since every successive Finance Act introduces new mechanisms for wealth-grabbing, financial service providers have had to twist and contort like Rumanian gymnasts in order to keep shirts on their customers backs. Just as an anti-body bombarded by viruses develops an ever-more impressive arsenal of chemical defences in order to stay one-step ahead.
The result is a business of pensions and savings that is so brain-gougingly complicated that many professional accountants and bankers admit that they no longer understand it.
So now the grift. HM government comes to the rescue on it’s White…sorry, Diverse Charger to save us poor peons from drowning in a sea of pure gobbledegook. Hooray for the government!!
Tom Burroughes has a dream for the government, I have a message: F*ck off and leave us alone. We’ll build our wealth quite nicely without you.
