Richard Meadows

Bankruptcy is one of the great unsung achievements of civilisation. It’s an implicit recognition of the fact that people change – a release valve that prevents one version of us from holding all our future selves hostage for eternity.

Nowhere is this more glaring than in the case of student loans.

How much do you have in common with your 17-year-old self, really? Teenagers are not renowned for their impulse control or foresight: their frontal lobes don’t finish developing until their mid-twenties.

And yet they’re given free rein to take out large unsecured loans, in exchange for a piece of paper which may or may not prove to be worthless.

Successive Governments have cracked down on responsible lending, while hypocritically encouraging schoolchildren to bind themselves into indentured servitude.

And so, I’m not going to waste any ink on the ‘responsibility’ argument against discharging student loans. No doubt some tiny handful of miscreants deliberately set out to exploit the system, but most people who end up in this position are not doing it for a lark.

There is a social stigma that comes with bankruptcy, which is fair enough. But even that’s not the end of the world. Just ask the President of the United States, who has declared no fewer than six business bankruptcies (while somehow managing to stay personally solvent).

Forget pride, or a misplaced sense of honour.

Successive Governments have cracked down on responsible lending, while hypocritically encouraging schoolchildren to bind themselves into indentured servitude.