The news that fake bank notes with a face value of £350,000 were found stashed at converted farm buildings near Connah’s Quay makes you wonder if we should be jailing the forgers or putting them up for a Queen's award for industry.
Crime takes many forms, of course, and the temptation for the right to mutter about sentences not being long enough and throwing away keys doesn't really stand up to scrutiny, when you realise that the UK already imprisons a greater percentage of its population than any other EU country (139 per 100,000 of the national population), a statistic which places it above the mid- point in the World List - itself more than a little interesting. The United States has the highest prison population rate in the world, some 686 per 100,000 of the national population, followed by the Cayman Islands (664), Russia (638), Belarus (554), Kazakhstan (522), Turkmenistan (489), Belize (459), Bahamas (447), Suriname (437) and Dominica (420).
But we digress. Forgery - like the audacious theft from the Paris Museum of Modern Art - isn't the easiest way to make money, although the irony isn't lost in the case of forgery.
But perhaps what really ought to concern us is that these forgers almost certainly worked long and hard, had significant overheads, high risk factors and their only 'crime' (banknotes themselves have no intrinsic worth - they're simply promissory notes) was to dilute the overall money supply slightly. To have a really significant effect, cause untold misery for millions, wreck entire economies and achieve lasting fame they would have had to been making perfect forgeries on a massive scale.
Or perhaps they should simply have got themselves into banking.
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