The Customer Experience

I don't know about anyone else but to me a customer is someone who buys something:  I go into a shop, select an item, pay for it, have it packed for me and I take it home.  Or I go on line and as I did a few months ago buy a robot vacuum cleaner which is the most wonderful invention ever devised by humans and it is delivered to my home.
Last week I became a "customer" in a very different sense and it started me thinking.  I have been unemployed for over one year and I have been placed on A4E's "JobFit" scheme to help me find work.  The induction meeting was held by a trainer who guided the eight other "customers" and myself through a series of forms.  This was the first time I have ever heard myself described as a "customer" in the context of a work scheme and it didn't make sense - I am an unemployed person looking for work and struggling to get by, I am not buying anything from A4E, in fact if I get a job they will make money off the back of my efforts.  When I left the meeting I began to think part of the problems we face in this society is we have stopped calling things by their true names and therefore our judegement and understanding gets clouded when we try to define ourselves and our experiences.

In Buddhism clarity of thought and expression is extremely important but at the moment everytime you listen to any politicians, banker or other feral rich creature trying to protect their wealth and justify their position of power there are only illusions, half truths and buck passing coming out of their mouths.

Without going into every nook and cranny of the various scandals which are coming to light from phone hacking to drug money laundering I think we should start to re-evaluate our society and find new ways forward which will take our economy out of the Depression we are in, you notice I call this time a Depression just like the Depression which started on Wall Street in 1929 and continued into the thirties.  I want to make suggestions about the economy because that is the driver for everything else - education, free health care, good affordable housing, sane happy people to name just a few.

Lets get rid of Income Tax and instead use VAT which would be charged on everything the entire population buys as the "New Income Tax" system. We know now that there are trillions of pounds hidden away in tax havens and offshore accounts that will never be recovered by the taxman, okay, leave the money where it is but think how all of us would benefit if every time one of the feral rich bought a bottle of Bollinger, a tub of caviar or a new luxury car they had to pay VAT, we would have that tax paid to the Treasury automatically (no more deals with  top HMRC officials over long lunches).  We, the ordinary people really would be "consumers" in the truest sense of the word able to use our full wages as we saw fit in our own communities.

We would also have to rethink what we wanted to spend the VAT on everyone wants free health care, education, council services and affordable housing but we have to ask questions and debate honestly for example, why do we still have costly, in every sense of the word, nuclear weapons and want to spend billions updating them when, we are continually told it is the terrorist who is our greatest enemy.  You can't nuke a single ragged fighter with a rocket launcher - these are the sorts of debates we have got to start having and soon if our economy isn't going to continue to stagnate for decades to come and I will be an old woman writing a follow up book to "Days of Thrift" entitled "100 Years of Thrift".

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