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A disclaimer is an attempt to transfer responsibility from a supplier to a customer. You get them all the time but I doubt you read them very often. Called the ‘small print’ they are usually presented in a typeface and size that is unreadable without a microscope. They absolve – in advance – the supplier, whether bank or doctor, government department or electronics manufacturer, from all responsibility for any unwanted consequences arising from your obtaining or possessing the product or service.

In marketing they are called inertia selling and they are illegal. Many years ago the Readers Digest used to employ this method of conning money out of potential customers. “Unless you respond within 24 hours you will be deemed to have accepted our offer” was broadly their message.

One day in New York they sent such a letter to the head of a demolition firm. He replied with a somewhat different offer. “Unless you reply within 24 hours you will be deemed to have accepted our offer to demolish your building next Thursday”. The Readers’ Digest had quite a fine building in New York then.

Disclaimers extend not only to goods and services but to places you may find yourself in, to contacts you may, even unwittingly, make, to people you have never heard of. Their message is simple: Nothing undesirable or unwanted that happens in the world can ever be our fault. You hereby accept that everything undesirable or unwanted that happens in the world is wholly, exclusively and solely your fault and you will be responsible for any and all of the consequences.

I said that disclaimers were an ‘attempt’ to transfer responsibility. Courts do not always accept that they have succeeded in doing so. However, in any action you will be pitting your probably limited savings against the weight of a large organisation to which the maintenance of their disclaimer is more important then your patronage or welfare. Caveat litigant.

It is time the consumer had rights more clearly spelled out and enforceable. Try making your bank or other supplier accept a disclaimer from you. Your effort will not be successful because their disclaimer will out disclaim yours.

If George Soros and his rich friends would like to help the world with some of their wealth they might devote it to balancing the suppliers’ and the consumers’ rights.

That would certainly help to level the playing field.