The War Against Cash

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We are constantly being told that we are on the cusp of a cashless society. The financial services industry would certainly like to see it that way. We are being enticed with contactless cards, mobile phone payment apps, and methods of bank transfer: all, apparently, for our convenience.
But as Ross Clark argues in this compelling new book, it is not in our interests to surrender the right to use cash. Commercial interests want us to pay electronically in order to collect valuable data on our spending habits, while governments would love us to move to cashless payments in order to control the economy in ways which suit them, not us.
If we choose to pay electronically, that is one thing, but we will regret it if we do not defend the right to pay with cash.

Journalist Ross Clark sets out the argument for why we need to defend our right to use cash and challenge the increasing move towards becoming a cashless society.

Ross Clark is a journalist who writes extensively for the Spectator, the Daily Mail, the Daily Express and for many other publications. For many years he wrote the Thunderer column on the Times.
Ross is also the bestselling author of How to Label a Goat: The silly rules and regulations that are strangling Britain, The Road to Southend Pier: One man’s struggle against the surveillance society, A Broom Cupboard of One’s Own: The housing crisis and how to solve it, and The Great Before, a satire on the anti-globalisation movement.

“Mr Clark’s interpretation, if enough people pick up on it, might just stop the world being changed for very much the worse.” —Neil Liversidge writing for the FT Adviser
“The message and the takeaway [in The War Against Cash] for programmers, arguably, is… think just a little more about the extreme long term effects of creating a networked IT framework that completely digitises our world, because some of the consequences may end up on our own doorstep.” —Adrian Bridgwater, Computer Weekly.

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