The above headline must seem a bit strange, but bear with me.

Total UK credit card debt in May 2016 stood at £67 billion.  Per household this amounts to £2,397 per household for credit cards bearing the average interest.  It would take 25 years to repay this if you only made the minimum payment every month.  The UK was ranked third in the list of countries which rely on credit cards (Turkey is highest – 56% of Turks have outstanding debt on their cards). The British have an insatiable appetite for credit and the card companies are only too delighted to indulge the appetite.  There are more than 50 million cards in circulation in the UK, and almost a third of all unsecured debt is on these cards, compared with only 1.6% in France. One in five adults (8 million people) have unsecured debt of more than £10,000.  The total British consumer debt is a massive £1.1 trillion. Consumerism is the best friend of every bank and lender

Immigrants partake of this orgy of unsecured spending, often having two credit cards being used simultaneously. Availability of credit makes it very easy for them to move to the UK, and because of credit, they have time to find lodgings and a job, and cover rough periods where they have higher than normal expenditures, by borrowing. 

I know someone who operated like this, paying one credit card company off, loading a second card, alternately for ages. I doubt she could have done this anywhere else in Europe.  It allowed her to learn English and establish herself in a job. (Later, this hard-working and intelligent person got married and stayed in England). Without the credit she would have had to return to her own country.

What we don’t know is how many short-term migrants return home without paying off their credit card debt.  But in any case, it is clear that this ability to secure credit the day you land is an encouragement to migrate. If this is the case, then the government should have regulations governing borrowing by non-citizens.  The reality is that businesses want these immigrants and would resist if credit was withdrawn. Instead of a decent wage they rely on credit cards to keep their inexpensive foreign workers working. Dreadful, isn’t it, but they would argue that these people have jobs they wouldn’t have in Poland etc, and can learn English on the spot.

I personally think that immigration has been a good thing. Most (not all; some are dishonest freeloaders) are young, smart, educated and responsible, and make first class citizens if they stay. In the London area they take nearly all the retail, hotel and catering jobs, so much so that to be served by an English waiter, for instance, is now rare. And this is the political and social problem.

Schools were once places where girls in drab A-line skirts could concentrate on other things than looking perfect. Not any more. We now live in a world “where eight-year-olds worry about their weight, 11-year-olds feel they need to pluck their eyebrows” and teenage schoolgirls are expected to be “selfie-ready” at all times. And attempts to counter this trend get short shrift. A recent school-trip letter which laid down that girls should wear no make-up except “subtle lip gloss”, and could wear either cropped tops or short skirts but not both, was ridiculed as sexist on social media. In the 1980s, my school friends and I would have killed for the freedom to wear lip gloss and short skirts: we just didn’t know how lucky we were in being free to be frumpy. (Gaby Hinsliff, The Guardian)

I have noticed, among the (small) number of young people I know, that grumpy, monosyllabic puberty seems to be starting at eight or nine, and that as early as fifteen or sixteen civilisation seems to be taking tenuous hold. I personally remember being boorishly rebellious at the great age of seventeen, but not at nine. But now it seems that kids, especially girls, are growing up incredibly early, and may not be getting any dreamy youth at all to speak of, which is incredibly sad. Of course, it’s all about Facebook, I suppose. One gets teased if you don’t have a Facebook presence, teased if you have less than five hundred “friends”, and socially dead if you don’t, in person and on your page, look like a model on a runway. The sexualisation of young girls is no light matter. The suicide rate among teenagers is disturbingly high, and it appears to be social pressure that causes the problems. How have we allowed this to happen and what, if anything, can be done about it?