Choose life...
...blue-chip shares and property, says Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh
IRVINE Welsh, the novelist, would confiscate the property of the super-rich and redistribute it to everyone else if he were made Chancellor.
The radical thinker and author of Trainspotting says he would like to introduce a universal allowance to enable people to stop working for wages and write poetry, become entrepreneurs or even just blow their cash unwisely.
A universal allowance, he believes, would regenerate the economy and allow the Government to scrap the existing benefits system. Welsh, who confesses that in his youth he used to spend every penny he got on alcohol and drugs, still has not got over how much money he made from writing Trainspotting in the 1990s.
He describes the amount he earned from that book as both ‘outrageous’ and ‘disgusting’. All his books, he says, are cash cows, but he hates having loads of money in the bank and prefers to give it away.
Now 58, he lives in Chicago with his wife Elizabeth. He is currently in the UK attending rehearsals of Performers, his new stage play which will premiere at the Assembly Ballroom throughout the Edinburgh Fringe from August 3 to 27. Tickets are on sale from the Edinburgh Fringe box office.