It takes a thief to spot global theft

The name Darius Guppy probably doesn't provoke much recognition in Ireland, even though he lived here for some time.

A brief precis of his life thus far might run:
Privileged schooling at Eton,
followed by more of the same at Oxford where he chummed around with top Tories David Cameron and Boris Johnson as part of the odious Bullingdon society,
followed by his father's spectacular bankrupcy,
which in turn led to Guppy Jr scamming Lloyds insurance to make up for the cash he believed Lloyds had stolen from his family.

Guppy was caught, prosecuted and jailed, then vanished into obscurity on release, firstly in Ireland and latterly in South Africa.

In short, he's the sort of rum bloke that the British aristocracy churn out all the time - the well-spoken crook.

But he's no fool and no idiot. And his introductory essay as a journalist for the Sunday Telegraph today is one of the more important articles to be published today or any other day.

Guppy's not the first to argue as he does, that the core problem with our global economy is the banks and how they invent money out of nothing in a form of alchemy that better resembles a card sharp's sleight of hand.

But few others have ever made the case so convincingly, so accessibly and so simply.

He argues clearly that you cannot allow banks to invent ever more amounts of money when the planet itself is finite. But this isn't an eco-hippy argument in favour of culling children so that the whales may feel free. This is a warning to everyone - the global economic collapse isn't over; it's barely started.

Perhaps it takes a thief to tell the rest of us that the banks are thieves on a truly colossal scale, and that a root-and-branch overhaul of the entire way money operates is now needed to prevent global meltdown.

His article is essential reading for anyone with a bank account, mortgage, personal loan, savings or property. If you haven't dropped out of society entirely, he's speaking to you.

Or, like the banksters, you might prefer to embed your head back in the sand and hope for business as usual to resume. It won't of course.

Money is debt, and allowing banks to create unending supplies of it is what's wrong at the core of our world. If you've got more time, perhaps you might like to view the following documentary, which expounds even further on the same points Guppy makes so excellently.

Britain has the wrong Bullingdon yobs running for office. Guppy would make a much better PM than Call-me-Dave Cameron. Because his criminality is so much less serious, and because he at least is prepared to acknowledge the real wrongs.