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2022-07-01

My email box today included yet another worthy exhortation peremptory demand - this time to sign yet another petition to government to save us from fraud ourselves.

Apparently too many of us are falling for scams, and it's up to the government to do something about it - in this case to "Create a new Fraud Minister to help tackle fraud".

Likewise "Make it law that all UK banks have to pay back in full all victims of fraud".

In other words, the fact that I've been scammed is nothing whatever to do with me and somebody else must ride to my rescue.

Hmmmmm.

I note that they are not even calling for more police to investigate frauds and catch the criminals responsible, which might seem a useful response.

So I'm not convinced that these two pseudo-solutions would do anything to prevent the next chancer from calling me up and spinning me another yarn. 

What they certainly would do is shovel yet more taxpayer's money to some self-important politician, make it fractionally less easy to hold anybody to account for increasing fraud levels, and (perhaps) make it fractionally less difficult to get a bank to compensate me.

But above all, it serves to cement the narrative in the minds of the public that the government can and must save us from all our failings, which are nothing whatever to do with poor innocent (not to mention naïve) us.

The government has spent the last n...n years conclusively demonstrating that it cannot and should not; it is up to us to take responsibility for ourselves. The terrible truth is that we could do so much better for ourselves many of those things which we are currently led to believe only government can do for us, and in so doing we could reduce the size of government by a huge percentage and we would all be far better off overall.

Perhaps we should be petitioning the government to stop doing some things?

Somehow I'm not sure that idea will catch on.

Nonetheless I'm not by myself in this analysis, as this timely article in the Daily Sceptic attests.

Still, I can't help feeling that "sceptical thinking" and "rigorous debate" may be notions too far for those in charge of our education system - even turkeys may be wary of voting for Christmas.