Thinking About It Only Makes It Worse by David Mitchell

Author:David Mitchell [David Mitchell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783350582
Publisher: Guardian Faber Publishing
Published: 2014-08-18T04:00:00+00:00

Occasionally, just for a moment, I think it might be a good thing if money ceased to exist, if the eurozone sovereign debt crisis spiralled so hopelessly out of control that there was an international bank run of catastrophic proportions, and so all of the numbers – and, in millions of cases, negative numbers – next to our names on screens became academic because the screen-owning institutions had run out of the pieces of paper that the numbers were supposed to represent – and indeed weren’t even sure for how much longer they’d receive the electricity to run the computers that stored these now notional numbers.

Maybe, I catch myself thinking, such a great levelling would remind us of the fundamental truth that we’re just a few billion humans clinging to a rock spinning in space, with certain requirements and problems, and certain resources and skills with which to address them. The bottom line is not the proverbial bottom line. Our obsession with money has even infected our idioms; it’s made us believe that cash is something concrete. (The builders got to that one before the accountants, which makes a bit more sense.) When you think about things in this way, you’re harder to sway when people argue that the British economy depends on a vibrant financial services sector or that environmental campaigners don’t understand the real world.

The reason I try to romanticise this potential cataclysm is that I’m depressed by how money always latches on to power – how affluent people and institutions aggressively and unashamedly lobby to sustain and advance themselves. With money gone, this couldn’t happen. Admittedly, the chequebook’s demise as a sign of power would mean a return of the mace. Might would be right again, which is hardly a fairer system – but at least it encourages people to take exercise.

For now, money remains sovereign. Chris Huhne’s girlfriend, Carina Trimingham, has made the papers for sending a “Nod nod, wink wink, I know lots of cabinet ministers” email to a lobbying company in the hope of getting a job. Meanwhile, we had cross-party cross parties in response to Sir Christopher Kelly’s proposed reforms of their funding. He wanted a cap of £10,000 on money given by individual donors so that people are primarily giving to support rather than influence a political cause; state funding would make up the shortfall.

The Trimingham email isn’t much of a scandal; it’s just another own goal by the Lib Dems. I doubt they’ve got the organisational skills to be properly corrupt. Like the priests at St Paul’s when Occupy moved in, they’ve just been flustered by the unaccustomed limelight into briefly abandoning all their principles. And, while there’s a thriving market for governmental influence, Trimingham doesn’t strike me as a major stallholder. I doubt that the networking overtures of the younger woman your colleague just left his wife for seem any more inviting in political circles than they do anywhere else. She’s just another hapless jobseeker, a victim of history: a

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