Loan Moan

Something which has really been invading my brain space and fucking me off recently is people who have never known hardship thinking it’s appropriate to tell people who do, or have done, or may do sometime in the future, that they shouldn’t moan about hardship.

Most recently, this has been done by whichever person wrote the Rothschild investment bank’s report on how best to remedy the fact that investors aren’t interested in buying the MASSIVE student loan debt from the government (who will use the money to line their dishonest, career politician, detached from the real world pockets, or to pay consultant friends vast sums to tell them how they can fuck up the NHS, or austerity the fuck out of everyone’s benefits payments, or just generally spunk it up the wall in some other way which makes the general public wonder what in fuck’s name we’re doing voting for these tossbags anyway)

*breathes*

Anyway. What? Oh yes. Selling the student loan book to private investors.

Apparently the private investors don’t want it. Because it’s been set up in a way which means it wouldn’t make them enough money to be interested in it.

Obviously, I’m crying into my Tesco Value cornflakes over that predicament, but there we go.

How nice to be able to turn down an opportunity to make money, because it wasn’t going to make you ENOUGH money. I’d just like something to make me any money. But I digress. Again.

Obviously, the solution to the problem of the loan book not making enough money is to shit on all the people who took out the loans (because they had no choice, because it was the only way they could afford to go to university) by increasing the interest rate.

Which is FINE, by the way. I’ve always expected it would happen eventually. It will probably make little difference to the fact that I’ll likely be paying that bastard loan back at a rate of bugger all pounds per month for the rest of eternity, before passing the remainder on to Cam like some horrible parting anti-gift.

That’s probably not how it works, does it get written off at some point? Or do they come around and chop off your arthritis riddled legs in lieu of cash? Or maybe put you to work knitting Shreddies?

So, yeah, one option is to increase the interest rates. In some truly “of the people” thinking, the author of the report recognises that perhaps this won’t go down too well (he should have asked me, I’d have told him I’m cool with it *eats beans on toast for a week*) and has included useful suggestions on how the government could bring us graduates around to the idea:

"We all live in difficult times, you havea deal which is so much better than your younger siblings (they will incur upto £9,000 tuition fees and up to RPI+3% interest rates)". (The Guardian) 

SOLD!

Oh no, wait, I mean: SHUT UP.

Because it’s stupid to suggest that the reason I ought to suck up an increase in the cost of my repayments is that my younger siblings have a worse deal. By that logic the next step will be to ask the generations who got grants for their university education to retrospectively pay some money back, because they got a much better deal than I did.

A moment of fairness: we weren’t supposed to see this report, it was all written in secret. Even when a Freedom of Information request meant it was sent into the public domain the vast majority of it was redacted (oh, how I loathe that term). It just wasn’t redacted with a dark enough pen. That’s the calibre of redaction the government has working for them. Perhaps I could get a new job as a professional redactor? I’ll even bring my own black markers.

But now the report is out there, and I know there are likely to be loads more documents, floating around the shadowy halls of power, describing ill-conceived ways of letting the plebs and proles know that they’re coming for you. The country is bankrupt and fucked and has no solution aside from taking more of your money.

Because we’re all in it together. All of us. Except those that aren’t. The twenty plus members of the cabinet who are millionaires. The potential investors (who the report suggests are the least good option to bear the brunt of any financial risk, after the government and graduates). I don’t think they’re in it with us. I think they’re eating five course meals and pissing themselves laughing at all the little people.

One day, I’d like to get the opportunity to tell them to fuck off.

Sorry, that was a bit ranty and incoherent wasn’t it? I’ll post a picture of Cam looking cute tomorrow. Cheerioh.