Needless to say, Elnaugh backed the idea, had several more meetings, hell, she even paid one or two Snowbone bills as promised. However, the investment promised so gallantly on BBC airtime never materialised. Safe to say, she promised time and time again – so much so that Snowbone even went into production at her direction. she then left them high and dry owing tens of thousands of pounds that she had ordered them to spend. We, like many others, are still waiting on our �5k Miss Elnaugh.

It pains me to see Rachel on the current series, lauding it up as if she has a few million for this type of project – when in fact she’s sacrificed personal glory for credibility and at that, has left a number of decent hard working citizens up the creek without the proverbial paddle.

How the BBC can still use her after current debacles I know not. Do the right thing Rachel Elnaugh and pay your bills.

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I was in Hong Kong once and, wandering around suddenly saw, through the windows of a building, lots of white people pulling levers like mad and sweating profusely – some were ladies so I suppose they perspired. My first, rather John Buchanish, reaction was that the fiendish Chinese were engaged in torture and I tried to work out what Richard Hannay would do. My colleague pointed out that it was in fact a health club and these were paying customers.

I think that the reason China kept to itself for so long was that they all thought we in the West were bonkers. I don’t blame them!

I did have this idea of a sea holiday where you had a huge rowing boat and you chained the paying punters to the oars and then carried stuff around the world charging transportation for it.

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Oh.

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Of course all banking services carry ‘an element of risk’. Your charges will usually cover you against this, but if all else fails and the borrower (private or small business) gets into difficulties, you simply look down your nose at them, sniffily tell them they should have known better, then quietly inform the credit referencing agencies’ computers that there’s been a default. The defaulting customer will then have to spend many years living on cash money and personal cheques that you will only honour after they’ve been in your system, earning interest, for at least a week.

That’s the way to make a business work. If I had my time over again, I’d definitely heed my father’s advice and become a banker. But not the responsible, personal kind of banker they used to have in my father’s day – I’d be a thrusting modern banker, managing credit scores for untold millions of consumers I’m never likely to meet and couldn’t care less about. Just so long as the P and L account stays in the black.

D’you see now? You silly billy failures and bankrupts? It’s all YOUR fault!

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You state:

“We need an enterprise culture, but you should bring it about first by reuniting effort and reward, and cutting taxes, not encouraging shysters to go bankrupt at the drop of a hat.”

I agree 100%.

For those folks who think that there are shysters (here in the US where I am) who are taking advantage of bankruptcy loopholes here in the US, you are correct.

However, maybe one might wish to look at that matter from a different perspective?

It’s the same principle as with freedom of speech. That means we don’t always like what we hear or read, but should we do away with freedom of speech because there are many things people say which we find reprehensible? Of course not.

That some dirtbags weasel their way through loopholes in a system designed to encourage entrepreneurship, does not mean we should do away with a system…that encourages entrepreneurship, even though it is not a 100% fool-proof one.

On a related matter, The US Trustee’s Office, which administers bankruptcy laws, just a couple of weeks ago implemented comprehensive changes in personal bankruptcy laws here, called “The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005″, which will make it far more painful for a person to declare personal bankruptcy-not absolving them automatically from debt repayments for example.

This is critical, as here as in the UK no doubt, something like 80 plus percent of all people work in small businesses. So when a small business-all in private hands-go broke, the owner can no longer just file for personal bankruptcy to avoid the small business’s failure and subsequent debts. Basically, this will mean that people who have started their own businesses will now be “strongly encouraged” to make their business work, as opposed to cutting ‘n running with Uncle Sam stepping in to keep the debtors at bay.

Finally, there’s no such thing as a singularly perfect mechanism to encourage job creation. Like freedom of speech, toying with job producing instruments requires exceptional care, for as imperfect as the principle of free speech may seem-like when we read the drivel of Monbiot for example-freedom to do business should not be trampled upon.

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One of the problems with this is that there are many different kinds of insolvency:

There are honest businesses that fail (like yourself, as I understand it), and could do with a little help sorting out the debts and getting restarted.

There are the shysters Boris is correct in identifying, but incorrect in linking to the Enterprise Act. People like Rachel Elnaugh have been playing fast and loose with company law for as long as I can remember and way beyond that too. It’s a by-product of free enterprise, and trying to link it to an act introduced by the current government is fatuous.

And there are the personal bankruptcies exploding all around us – which have nothing to do with the enterprise of the individuals involved, and everything to do with the utter moral failing of our financial institutions.

However on one point I’m inclined to disagree with you. Of course it makes sense to protect yourself from companies going bust by using a credit card; but at the same time we need to closely examine the whole notion of credit. Personal bankruptcies are booming precisely because it’s so easy to get in debt. The banks will deny this till they’re blue in the face, but as long as they’re allowed to bombard us with opportunities to buy money – and in many cases actively target the people most likely to get into trouble – then the fault lies at their door.

This is a big, bigt issue – and much more complicated than one ill-advised piece of legislation. I’m afraid Boris is guilty of some rather lazy party point-scoring by trying to pin it all on Gordon Brown. The chaos in our personal finances goes right back to the deregulation of the financial services sector that Mrs Thatcher so glibly sanctioned at the height of her power. We’ve become a society built on financial sand, and the bankruptcies that Brown has almost inadvertently encouraged are the first tremors as the foundations give way.

I’m sorry to bang on so long about this, everybody, but I’ve been there myself and I know how painful it can be. I sincerely hope Boris takes the time to talk to people – a LOT of people – who’ve been through bankruptcy or an IVA or a failed business. Notwithstanding Rachel Elnaugh, I suspect he’ll find that the vast majority of people trying to rebuild their lives in the shadow of the credit referencing agencies are guilty of nothing worse than incompetence and gullibility.

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