Patrick Simpson

The credit crunch is forcing humanity – or rather, the British – to new depths. No, this is not going to be a post about voting Tory in the next election, it is even worse.

The Times reports that people are now selling their kidneys in order to make ends meet. Apparently a kidney can net one upwards of £25,000. At the current exchange rate, that is just about enough to buy an imported dose of Tamiflu.

The most worrying thing about this trend is the scale at which it is happening. According to The Times at least a dozen adverts have appeared on the internet offering kidneys for sale from British “donors”. Now, a dozen may not seem like much, corresponding to, say, the number of people trying to make a fortune by investing their life-savings in a fully automated leprechaun trap, or voting labour and hoping for socialism. But go back and read that sentence from The Times again. Go on, I’ll go and make myself a cup of tea and meet you back here.

At least a dozen. That could be as many as ten million. Or more. And that’s not even counting the people who do not advertise on the internet, choosing to sell their kidney to an acquaintance instead, or at one of the organ selling parties that are no doubt already rampant. And people are also advertising their kidneys at local supermarkets, especially at Tesco, which is now offering double points on any organ sold.

So why are these two billion Brits selling their kidneys? Kidneys are vital for removing waste from the body, which is important even for people with such a healthy lifestyle as the British. And, of course, people have two kidneys, but they are both essential. Why else would people have evolved to have two? We all know the credit crunch is bad – for example, I now only get 4% interest on my savings instead of 4.5% – but is it really this bad?

Quite frankly, it is. Meet William, a 43-year-old taxi driver from Lancashire. The Times is a bit sketchy on details, but that is what I’m here for. William, known colloquially as Will or Pignose (due to the resemblance of Fluffy – his pet  pig – to a human nose), is a hard-working family man from Preston who enjoys nothing more than taking his boys Ronnie (7) and Gunther (9) to see North End play on Saturdays, before taking them to the pub for a piss-up. Sure, when living in Preston anything that hastens the onset of death, such as selling an organ or contemplating the fact that one lives in Preston, is generally an attractive proposition, but not for old Pignose, because he is Happy. But the credit crunch hit him particularly hard. Will needs the money to pay off his mortgage and buy a new kitchen. You bankers weren’t thinking of that when you were raping the souls of dead puppies and commodotising home-improvement loans, were you? That people might actually need new kitchens?

Will almost found a buyer for his kidney, in Pakistan, but did not go ahead with the sale. And no, not because the buyer is a Muslim, Will is not like that. Some of his colleagues are Muslims and they make lovely curries. It is because he feared the buyer was only interested in buying the kidney to sell on. And we all know what happens when people start buying commodities and selling them on. In no time the kidney will be repackaged into derivatives, each with a distinct risk and profit profile, which will be resold so many times that nobody knows for sure how risky the original kidney is, and I for one will be damned if I’m bailing out the organ banks too.