Having spent much of his adult life campaigning on issues including the arms trade, the illegality of the Iraq war and the misdeeds of Coca-Cola, comedian and activist Mark Thomas has now turned his attention to the ongoing financial crisis.
With banker bonuses and government bail-outs there has been a huge amount of public anger about the credit crunch. But at the same time, esoteric terms such as derivatives, quantitative easing and fractional reserve banking mean many people are also very confused and ignorant about the issue too.
“I don’t think it is that complex, but the jargon is baffling,” Thomas tells me backstage before one of his shows at the Tricycle Theatre in London.
“I think people get it automatically. It is very, very simple: the bankers have got the money, we’ve got the recession. They’ve got the increase in wages, we’ve got the increase in unemployment. You don’t need a degree for that.”
A Practical Policy 