Summary
“Neither a borrower nor a lender be,” advised Shakespeare’s Polonius. These words seem hopelessly out of touch in cost of living crisis with soaring inflation and astronomical levels of personal debt. The charity StepChange has warned that money borrowed by UK households to pay for Christmas could take years to repay. Meanwhile, a study by the Resolution Foundation suggests the British public are the worst in the developed world at saving. How did we get here?
For some, our eye-popping indebtedness begins with a failure of personal responsibility, an absence of prudence, and an inability to discern between our ‘wants’ and needs’. For others, the real problem is systemic, where borrowers are victims of a consumerist society that both pressurises and stigmatises the poorest. Pragmatists argue that debt itself is morally neutral and merely part of the furniture of modern life. Free market libertarians see debt as a democratising force, giving people greater personal agency. Whereas many religious and philosophical traditions have long believed that there is something intrinsically immoral about charging interest on lending.
Is debt inevitable? Or a moral failing? If so, whose?
Producer: Dan Tierney.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. |
| 0:04.9 | Good evening. This Christmas's hangover looks set to last for years. |
| 0:09.2 | Your head may have cleared, but likely your bank balance has taken such a beating. |
| 0:13.2 | It'll take an age to recover, and charities are sounding the alarm. |
| 0:17.3 | More than four out of five UK adults went into 2023 in debt. The average household now owes 66,000 pounds. Our total personal debt as a country is around 2 trillion pounds. At the same time, a new study for the Resolution Foundation think tank suggests the UK has the lowest rates of saving in the developed world, |
| 0:39.2 | whatever happened to prudence. |
| 0:41.2 | The ancients would have said this was immoral. |
| 0:44.1 | They used the same word for debt as sin and guilt. |
| 0:47.9 | Most of the main religions thought lending money, at interest or usery, was sinful too. |
| 0:53.6 | What would they have made of us? |
| 0:55.8 | Is this a failure of personal responsibility, spend today with no heed for tomorrow, |
| 1:00.6 | a self-indulgent inability to distinguish between wants and needs? Or is society somehow to blame, |
| 1:07.0 | rampant consumerism being pushed down our throats, preying on and stigmatising the vulnerable. |
| 1:13.1 | The other argument is that debt is morally neutral, even a democratising, enabling force that helps us to cope and create. |
| 1:20.9 | Is debt a moral failing? If so, whose? That's our moral maze tonight. |
| 1:25.8 | The panel, Melanie Phillips, social commentator at the Times, |
| 1:28.6 | the libertarian Marxist from the Navarro Media Group, Ash Sarkar, the historian Tim Stanley, |
| 1:33.8 | and the priest and polemicist, Giles Fraser. Asch, are you in debt? |
| 1:37.5 | Yes, I have outstanding debts on my student loan. Hopefully, fingers crossed me, |
| 1:43.5 | my partner will be able to get a |
| 1:44.7 | mortgage this year. And I believe you owe me a pint, Michael. Tim. Tim Stanley. I have a mortgage, |
| 1:52.3 | but until recently I didn't even have a credit card until someone who shall not be named |
... |
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