I was fortunate enough to be able to take a day’s annual leave last week, in order to catch up on what I will loosely call ‘personal admin’. My planned day of gym-dentist-bank predictably soon became a day of Jeremy Kyle-This Morning-Loose Women.
It was then I realised the monster that has been created.
I’ve never been one for the telly, and adverts tend to be the time I unnecessarily make yet another cup of tea. But if you have spent an hour or two watching daytime TV in recent years you will have doubtlessly been bombarded with adverts offering you fun, quick and easy ways of ruining your life.
If you watch daytime TV, there is a decent chance you will be unemployed, underemployed or retired. Furthermore, there is a decent chance you will in some way be struggling to make ends meet. But fear not – if the adverts are to be believed, all you have to do is download a bingo app and you can win heaps of money, all while having fun and (somehow) making new friends.
If, of course, the bingo doesn’t quite yield the financial returns the adverts suggest are likely, you can always take a trip to a payday loans website which can transfer money directly into your bank account within 10 minutes. All at a bargain 2500 per cent APR (or in one case, 16,000 per cent). ‘It’s just so easy’, the young lady on screen tells us – it’s basically free money. And if you find yourself unable to pay off your loan, and get stuck paying off the astonishing interest, you can always go back to your friends at bingo and win your money back. An advert will be along in a second to tell you how.
Of course, if it all goes terribly wrong, never fear, you will almost certainly have been mis-sold payment protection insurance. Or fallen off a ladder. You can always sue your way to prosperity, I suppose. A friendly team of lawyers awaits your call.
The sheer relentlessness of it all frightened me. One after another, after another, all morning long. While politicians sip on their morning cappuccino thinking up their next tweet, a huge number of vulnerable people are being encouraged to gamble, borrow and sue their way out of difficulty. It is a culture driven by a thoroughly unhealthy fetish for debt, but moreover promotes an even more unhealthy approach to money and how it can be made.
With bookmakers already lining the streets of poor areas, increasing ease of access via the internet and deliberate target advertising, it is no wonder that a recent survey found 450,000 people in this country have a gambling ‘problem’. £1bn is lost by gamblers ever year on slot machines alone. These figures come at the same time as a 116 per cent rise in calls to debt helplines over problems resulting from payday loans.
Instinctively, I believe in personal responsibility. But at a time when unemployment is high and poverty rising, it is morally bankrupt for payday loans companies and betting websites to be targeting those already riddled with financial difficulty.
As Progress members, we find retreat to be unpalatable – the onward march of progress rarely heads back the way it came. But the liberalisation of advertising laws combined with the Gambling Act 2005 is a failed experiment that has allowed the poorest in society to become targets of the greedy, and the promotion of gambling and quick loans has become a promotion for debt.
I am unaffiliated to Stella Creasy’s excellent campaign on payday loans, where she rightly calls for a cap on loans interest. But while parliamentarians can campaign for caps and limitations, we also need to change the culture that is being instilled in ordinary people sitting at home. Debt is not OK, especially when you have no means of repaying it. There are no quick fixes to the problems families face. As well as campaigning to make these companies more responsible, we must also campaign to tighten advertising laws to the point where debt and gambling are finally seen for what they are – a route into, not out of, poverty.
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Jonathan Roberts is a candidate in the members’ section in the Progress strategy board elections 2012. You can find out more about all the candidates at the dedicated Progress strategy board election microsite