bail in, not bail out

Everybody has been discussing who should be 'bailed out' of the current financial crisis. I could do with some help myself after Mrs Clewley came home with a bootful of frozen fish fingers after hearing that Iceland was about to go under. I just hope to goodness that drowning under it's failed banks somewhere in the world there's not a country called Lidl or Mrs C will surely ruin Clewley Towers' precarious finances once and for all when it makes the news. The thing with bail-outs is that they cost us all a lot of money and carry no guarantee of success. I propose therefore the Clewley plan for economic regeneration.

The Clewley plan involves not a bail-out but a bail-in whereby recession-proof schoolteachers who expect worried hard pressed tax payers to stump up for their term-time piss-up in Spain, Financial regulators who you wouldn't trust to oversee the liquidity rations of the proverbial whelk stall and local authority staff who stash billions of pounds of taxpayers money, which said tax payers could ill afford to part with, in a geological curiousity in the middle of the Atlantic with a population the size of a minor english county who are little more than pirates, believe in fairies, and whose contribution to global culture entirely comprises a tone deaf twenty-years-too-late fingernails-on-blackboard-voiced plastic punk and the host of a dull seventies quiz show, shot in darkness to save the sensitive scandavian's sunlight deprived eyesight are bailed in to the real world. They would lose their cast iron job security, their pensions would be subject to taking a hammering from government tax policy and from stock market crashes just like the rest of us, and they would have to do something vaguely useful to society in return for their money for a change. Think of it as rehabilitation.

The Clewley Plan would benefit both us taxpayers as it would save an absolute fortune, not cost one, would result in much more considered decisions by those who have power over us, and it would be warmly welcomed by the recipients as well because although they include the word 'community' in every sentence they utter they don't know what it is like, looking at the 'community' from behind the toughened sound-proof safety glass of their government employment, what it is to lay awake at three in the morning wondering if they'll have a job in a week, a home in a month or a pension scheme in a year's time. I believe the recipients of my plan will welcome the chance to share the risks and concerns of the 'community' they say they care about as much as the banks welcome our recapitalisation funds and I'm absolutely sure Gordon will back my plan when he realises he can say for the first time 'we're all in this together' because at the moment there's one group of people making the fuck-ups and another writing the cheques and I don't want to play this game any more because I always seem to be on the losing side.