Cor Blimey! Innit?

Street urchins dreaming of what it must be like to live in debt. As opposed to poverty.

You wait ages for one and two come along at once. CBI stories that is.

Here we have the voice of all that is greed and work and toil and debt telling us how we can burden our children's futures still further. "Never mind that they won't have a pension worth the name by the time they get to retirement age," the CBI say, "we can saddle 'em up with student loans at the start of their working lives as well!"

The CBI engage in suitably duplicitous capitalist doublespeak freely. They argue that additional funding for universities should come from the students themselves in the form of reduced subsidies on student loans and higher tuition fees while also claiming they do not want a drop in student numbers. Naturally that makes sense as a debt-riddled workforce is more likely to be compliant and the higher numbers there are the better. Conversely, you would expect a drop in student numbers if the cost of a university education reached a given threshold and this would ensure the managers of the future were the ones who could afford it. So capitalism has it sewn up quite nicely.

Given that we now pretty much know we can't run an economy on debt alone - (I'll tell you a secret. Lots of people, like me, already knew we couldn't but we just enjoy riding that old boom and bust rollercoaster with everybody else. But we do dream of building a new ride.) - why do we have the CBI again extolling the virtues of debt? I mean, can you imagine a rosier future? Picture it. Millions of drones working the first however many years of their lives to pay off their student debt and then working the remainder to try and accrue some meagre pittance for old age.

Once we have children paying back loans with interest, they are terrific consumers after all, then we will truly be able to claim that we have capitalism from the cradle to the grave.