rdn32

The other day I saw a rather alarming report produced by MoneyWeek magazine, entitled The End of Britain, predicting an imminent financial apocalypse. The claim was simple: over the past few decades the level of debt in the UK (private, corporate and government) had ballooned; that the only reason that this appeared sustainable was that interest rates were unusually low at the moment; and that as soon as they rose it would be curtains for Britain.

This report emphasized that there was absolutely nothing that anyone could do to save Britain from its impending financial doom, the result of which would be social turmoil. It rather pointedly drew attention to the level of indebtedness being comparable to that of Germany during the Weimar Republic. The economic difficulties of the Weimar Republic, of course, presaged the rise of the Nazi party.

The report has already been debunked by Frances Coppola. She pointed out that the report was written by the magazine’s marketing department, before going in to some detail about flaws in its arguments.

There is another direction from which one can disagree. Supposing, instead of quibbling about the report’s disingenuous use of statistics, we simply take the claims at face value, then think through the consequences.

The report gives a number of scenarios of how individuals might be affected. For example, one might go on a brief holiday to the Mediterranean, only to find that one’s spending money was limited.

Now perhaps this is just me, but I’d have thought that if society broke down, if all but a tiny minority were struggling to feed themselves, and if civilian government were replaced by a military dictatorship, then people would have more pressing concerns than how much shopping they’d be able to do when swanning off to the Med. Moreover, if someone were seriously convinced that this kind of catastrophe would come to pass, then there might be better forms of preparation than subscribing to MoneyWeek in order to learn of places on earth where they can lay their treasures up “where neither moth nor rust consume, and where thieves do not break through nor steal.”

That said, I must confess that I did once prepare for national catastrophe.

Remember Y2K? If you believed some of the predictions, we were all going to wake up on 1 January 2000 to find that we could no longer withdraw money from cash machines, due to the banks’ reliance on buggy software. With the financial system frozen, we wouldn’t be able to buy food or petrol. There would probably be riots within a week, and come February life in Britain would no doubt make Mad Max look like a documentary.

I prepared by stockpiling some food: six tins of baked beans, and one tin of evaporated milk.

I reasoned thus:-

• It seemed likely that little or nothing untoward would happen. In which case the food I’d bought, which was a long way of its “best before” date, would get used up over a period of time. (I like beans on toast, and evaporated milk is good for making ice-cream.)
• If there was a minor glitch in the banking system for a couple of days then there’s be food enough to keep going until things returned to normal.
• What if it were more serious than that? What if the nightmare scenarios proved accurate? Well, it’s not practical to prepare for everything; even if it were, there comes a point where it’s not really worth surviving.

In the event life as we know it didn’t come to an end. And, as I recall, the ice-cream was very nice.