WHY is everything unnecessarily complicated? That is the question I feel compelled to ask even though I know the answer. The answer is that it suits those who want our money, our compliance and our obedience to have us all wandering around in a haze of baffled incomprehension. I am talking about taxation, insurance, telephone and internet service, travel tickets, hotel prices, utility prices, even a cup of coffee. Everything has been made so complicated that we need a battery of explanatory buffers between us, the consumers, and ‘them’. Although they are the ones who should be called the ‘consumers’ because they gobble up everything like corporate Pacmen as they make billions and pay teams of tax lawyers to ensure that they baffle HMCR as well. It has to stop.

I don’t want to spend half a day each time we renew the insurance on one of our cars, disentangling ourselves from the multicar policy that promised savings and produced the opposite as each new car joined. I don’t want to spend hours of multiple choice options followed by conversations with people who can’t speak English properly or comprehensibly, when I am having trouble with my mobile phone.

I don’t want to read that neither Starbucks (with sales of 1.2 billion) nor Vodafone, (that earns several hundred million pounds a year from more than 19m customers in the UK last year) paid any tax to the UK treasury. They all latch on to the buzz word ‘choice’ to explain the myriad of variable elements to what they sell us, even down to the supermarkets flim-flamming us by pricing similar goods respectively in different weights/measures and pricing structures. Which is cheaper? Four baking potatoes for 75p or a kilo of loose ones for one pound fifty? We shouldn’t have to bring calculators with us to do our shopping. And if they trot out that smug mantra about promoting customer choice, I say bring out the tumbrils.

I don’t want to have to change my car insurer every time I renew in order to get best value. Lovely though the meerkats are, we shouldn’t need to compare anything via a third party website because the industry refuses to simplify its operations and save us all money.

We are the only ones who can change things and I just wish I knew how. Ideas please to the Letters Page?