Credit Crunchie

I love Crunchie bars. I know I shouldn't, partly because any except the most expensive kind of organic 80 percent black chocolate (that is to say, minus the soya lecithin chocolate normally comes with) makes me come out in spots.

No. You didn't need to know that, did you? But I thought I'd let you know, anyhow, just in case you were planning to give me something for Christmas. I suppose I really ought to set up an Amazon wishlist and see if I can't create for myself a more intellectual profile than the one I'm sure I'm currently acquiring.

In secret (well, up until this post), I crave Crunchie bars. In public, John Berger.

Meanwhile, Labour Matters posts this interesting idea today:

Wrexham’s Assembly Member, Lesley Griffiths, is asking small and medium sized businesses in Wrexham to take part in a survey she is conducting locally, to establish the extent of problems they are encountering with banking services during the current economic downturn.

The AM will be distributing questionnaires in coming days to a sizeable number of local companies in Wrexham, to gauge the extent of any problems they are facing and also to assess what banks should be doing to improve the service they are currently offering their business customers.

More here.

These are important issues. The current crisis has shown us that the network of relationships which is a consumer society is complex and fragile - and perhaps even vulnerable in ways we never imagined. This BBC report today gives an overview of how complex it is:

Politicians and central bankers in the UK and across the world are battling to get you to spend more money on non-essential items so lack of demand does not send the global economy into freefall.

But even in the current hard times there are still dissenting voices who want to use this opportunity to tackle consumerism once and for all. They say our love of stuff we often don't really need and can't afford is what got us into this mess in the first place. Shopping became our god and must be toppled, they say.

At the other end of the spectrum, there are plenty of people who will stick up for shopping - as something to cheer us up when we are down, as a social activity, as an assertion of freedom and as the "vice" that could save us.

There are so many conflicting interests that it is truly difficult to work out which way to jump. I work for a bank - and some would say my first priority should be the interests of my employer. So this idea of a survey should be anathema to me - I really shouldn't be republishing it here. But I am also a member of a political party, a father and husband, a trades unionist - even a free subject of a parliamentary democracy.

And so it does occur to me: how can we properly identify exactly what the interests of an employer might be? If we accept that society is now far more complex than it ever was before, if we accept that this 21st century places special burdens on our ways of seeing and doing, if we accept that perceiving reality is just one half of the job whilst editing it is just about the other half, then - surely - we need to view our responsibilities and our loyalties in a far more intelligent and all-encompassing manner.

I work for a bank but Lesley Griffiths' idea appeals to me as a father, husband, trades unionist and free subject of a parliamentary democracy. That is to say, it appeals to me in all those capacities, although not - curiously enough - as a loyal worker of a bank.

Sometimes, it's almost as if working for a big company like a bank denudes you of the greater part of everything you feel you have a right to feel, perceive and think. Yet big companies should be more aware than most of their responsibilities to a wider society. Milton Friedman talked about the moral responsibility of a company to its shareholders. I think we all know by now that stakeholders is the concept a democratic 21st century has no alternative but to run with; no alternative, my dear friends, but to capitulate to a true morality.

Being a member of a vibrant society is always going to be far more than simply one set of loyalties, one set of responsibilities. A balance needs to be struck. That balance is sometimes contradictory.

So it is I hate getting spots but now feel almost morally obliged to keep Cadbury's afloat by buying my favourite Crunchie bars.

It's hard, is all of this. Damn hard to understand.

Damn hard to understand our reactions and what society truly needs of us.

Damn hard to know what to think.

Does anyone else feel the same way?
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Further reading: the credit crunch gallery of rogues (from September 2007) | on chocolate tasting and chocolate tasters