‘Cash is just grief’: why shops and bars want to make you pay by card

In Sweden, where 81% of all payments are digital, VAT receipts are up 30% in five years. But, says Ross Clark, author of The War Against Cash, that argument is just another bogus way in which cashless is presented – by banks and governments, but also by Mastercard, Visa and others chasing a fees bonanza – as unrelentingly positive: “It’s nonsense to say you could eliminate tax evasion by eliminating cash. Transactions are theoretically traceable. It doesn’t mean that anyone is tracing them.”