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This morning I got fed up with Pay Day Loans adverts once and for all and made my own version...

#made by me #audio #pay day loans #wonga.com #amigo loans #bastards #comedy

Here is Terrence pioneering Air Deejaying in the 1980s, an early more advanced form of doing something that isn't deejaying. He presumably never thought in those heady days that a t-shirt reading RUN DET could possibly backfire. In an unrelated incident, rumours abound among UK promoters that a legendary DJ has RUN up a huge DET with many of them. We are unable to confirm this.

With thanks to the silent 'B' in debt. Without your unvoiced superfluity, this post wouldn't make any sense.

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Doctrine of Irresponsibility

I feel as though there is a growing current of thinking in Britain that seeks, perhaps inadvertently, to deny the basic responsibility of individuals. Founded on a dilute sort of populism it explains away financial hardship and societal malaise by simply referring blame to government or big business or immigration or some other more powerful entity. Now, admittedly, it is more often the case that powerful forces change things more than 'the average person' by virtue of them being more powerful. The state is definitely at the heart of much societal malaise and a cynical perspective on power is necessary in all healthy societies. However, I feel as though there is a doctrine of irresponsibility emerging that, above what is reasonable, creates the impression that 'the average person' is consistently the victim of society's problems.

The financial crisis and subsequent recession and strife under austerity is perhaps the most frequent instance of this tendency. It has grown to include the condemnation of payday loan companies such as Wonga. Offering astronomical interest rates on and easy short loans these companies have drawn the morally stigmatising gaze of senior politicians and the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby.

A narrative is asserted from a shallow populist stance through the global financial crisis, austerity, and unemployment to the scourge of payday lenders. We the people are portrayed as the victim throughout and bankers, politicians, the 'system' and menacing loan sharks are our constant adversaries. I'm not suggesting that this binary is always wrong, that somehow 'the people' are complicit in the financial foolishness and greed that brought us recession. I'm saying that when it comes to an individual's choice to take out a loan, only that person is responsible for the consequences. That person may have had every financial burden imaginable, but unless they owed money to someone prepared to kill them over it, their entering into a contract for a loan is an independent expression of free will.

There's a peculiar cognitive dissonance about the whole thing too. Even during the controversy surrounding the Church of England's indirect investment in Wonga, the company was still in business and doing rather well at that. No one wants to say that these companies make their money from the ignorance of their customers. No one wants to admit that the link between the poorest people and use of payday loans is as much about the relative levels of education between socio-economic brackets as it is about the charlatans at Wonga. Neil de Grasse Tyson called this the 'math deficiency' when talking about the sub-prime mortgage clusterfuck. It would be easier if Wonga were somehow breaking the law to do business by coercing or tricking their victims but the fact is that they're not. Their ridiculously high interest rates are stated up front, 5,853% annually, sounds good to me.

When the bosses of the payday loan companies were hauled before MPs last month, Martin Lewis suggested that advertising had 'normalised' payday lending - well you don't say Mr Lewis. A recent Office for Fair Trading investigation into the matter found that payday lenders' business models were based on people who can't afford to pay their loans back on time and so end up borrowing more for longer. Well thank you Sherlock Holmes et al for explaining how interest works.

It would be therapy for the collective soul if payday lending were an unjust scourge on the helpless poor but that isn't really the case. I think its about time we all grow the fuck up and accept that unpalatable fact.