[PEN-L:33509] State control of credit cards in UK

[Chris Burford <cburford@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Yesterday, quietly as the news featured post Christmas sales, the news was
released that from the new year, presumably in a matter of days, in
response to government pressure, UK credit cards will exchange information
about which customers are failing to make their minimum monthly payment,
and even, apparently as a pro-active move, which customers do not pay off
their bills in full at the end of the month.

This was accompanied by news story from a credit card debt counselling
agencie saying how some customers just open up one credit card after
another. The example was given of a woman with 9 credit cards. She just
managed to pay the minimum monthly payment, at the expense of her total
debt rising inexorably.

The move is a dangerous one when the UK economy is so dependent on consumer
spending and optimism, as well as government deficit spending. But it is
typical of New Labour type intervention in the economy. Yes there is no
monolithic state centralised corporation. But it merely requires giant
monopoly capitalist corporations to go with their monopoly tendencies,
catalysed by government guidance.

It is similar to a move pushed forward in the UK last year, that mobile
phone companies agreed to exchange numbers of stolen phones, to suffocate
the booming trade in stolen phones.

Concepts of monopoly capitalism, and state monopoly capitalism of two or
three decades ago, need to be revised, in view of the revolution in
electronic control systems. It is perfectly possibly for advanced
capitalist economies to converge towards state guided capitalism favouring
large monopoly capitalist corporations, but with every appearance of market
flexibility, even down to the tens of thousands of small businesses which
exploit themselves only to go bankrupt each year.

We also see crucially government involvement in guiding the total mass of
credit in the economy in a far more sophisticated way than by itself
directly raising or lowering the interest rate periodically. This new
measure, slipped in so innocuously and so constructively during the
Christmas sales, opens the door to the government having influence over the
total volume of unsecured credit card credit. This side by side with the
establishment of the Financial Services Authority, and Gordon Brown's very
long term ten year perspective on managing the total figure of government debt.

This starts to impact at the margins on the total volume of all capital in
the economy, and the distribution between capital accumulation and meeting
the wants of the masses of working people.

Run by an executive committee committed scrupulously to the centre of
public opinion polls, and never opposed to the longest term interests of
monopoly capitalism.

It is rather remarkable.

Chris Burford

London