No taxation without …?

The announcement this week that the police will only respond to banking and credit-card fraud reports made to them by the banks themselves – i.e. they will not respond to reports made by the victims – can be viewed in all manner of pragmatic lights. But it is in truth a profound, and deeply unsettling development.

Pragmatics first.

● this only regularises current practice: Inspector Knacker hasn’t been interested in crimes of this sort reported by you or me for several years now;

● it's a kind of outsourcing to the people who have the greatest incentive to act: the banks themselves. And they are mostly inside jobs, so it’s inevitably down to the banks to nail the crimes;

● banks readily (all too readily) compensate the victims in full, so who cares, what’s the damage?

● best of all, for the government, crime figures are slashed at a stroke.

But there is a difference, when this is formalised. Banks all too often have every incentive for just firing the miscreant and keeping everything quiet. Paying up is easy - & we know who ends up footing the bill: bank customers every time. So, effectively decriminalising bank fraud in this way opens the doors to a tax on us all, levied (almost risk-free) by organised crime.

We didn't vote for this tax.

We have crossed an important threshold.

ND