What sort of stuff should seven year olds be talking about? Sweets? Toys? Santa? You don’t want to hear them saying how they have put £4300 on the  Stock  Market and are £300 worse off due to falls in the value of their shares. You don’t want them to know that the interest rate is now only 1.1% and that this is affecting the value of their savings. They know this because they read it on their last statement when they should have been reading about dragons or Jack and the beanstalk.

Three poor rich brats were dragged onto the evil Moneybox programme on Radio 4 to illustrate some point about a government scheme which gives seven year olds £250 on their birthday to encourage kids to save. On everything I hold dear I give you my word that I’ve never listened to this audio version of the Daily Mail before and never will again. In some parts of the world you can understand why parents are forced to send their children out to work at the age of seven but even there they are not expected to be familiar with fluctuations in the Dow Jones. What sort of sick, money grubbing middle class weirdo thinks it’s either cute or good to get primary school aged kids acquainted with the really dull financial bit at the end of the news.

New Labour has set up the Child Trust Fund. It’s a  beautifully neo-liberal twist on childhood. You have a tiny pot of money which you invest. If you are suitably entrepreneurial you can build up a nest egg that will pay off your student debt, allow you to buy somewhere to live and still have enough left over to go out drinking every Saturday. In practice it is a way of getting kids to think that gambling on the value of shares is a socially useful way to make money and that an individual’s financial choices are much more significant than the social wage that a society can provide.

It’s repulsive enough listening to the posh smarmy adults on a show like Moneybox drooling over their lucre. Hearing them brag about bringing up kids while indoctrinating with the same values makes you want to get the social workers round.

Give the kids a piggy box and let them save up ten pence pieces. They can worry about high finance when they grow up.