Are We Nearly There Yet?

Yes. Not long now before the headlines of the business pages transform into daily experiences and unaffordably high prices for everyday purchases; we are already exhausting obvious substitutions like cheaper cuts of meat, usually chicken, fresh fish almost never and then farmed salmon, avoiding salad products for frozen basic greens, bulking out meals with rice, pastas, pulses and bread. Already we pass Waitrose on the way to our local no-frills. We've stopped redecorating, and the domestic equipment is going to have to do another year, as will the curtains.

Clothes are separates, no longer the pretty summer dress from Fenwicks, the well cut jacket and skirt that costs a bit but will last for years, a silk or linen blouse; but 'tops' with jeans or machine washables.

There might be a 'do', an evening out with our local club, but otherwise we'll be eating at home and cooking from quite close to scratch, though the frozen vegetables are easier (as well as cheaper). And after supper? Once we're in for the evening, we usually stay - there's not a lot of going out for a stroll and a drink when it's cold, and the streets are hardly friendly, are they? We've cut back on the pub.

We thought we might remortgage to replace the car - the children's school seems to cost more and more, now they're bigger - and have a little holiday, but the bank doesn't want to know and the rates are through the roof; the fixed rate ends this year too.

The unemployment hasn't really started yet but the taxes just go up and up to pay for those already out. And the council's services are rubbish: the library closed half the time, old stock, you wouldn't think they'd heard of books, just videos; the swimming pool is usually given over to special groups and it's none too clean anyway. The new houses were built on the playing fields and sports pitches.

Dreary. Making do. That's how it feels at first. Then comes scary, as your house is worth less than your mortgage, and the rate on your savings is lower than inflation; then comes cold, as energy prices drop your living temperatures, and then comes no car and all the impossibilities of using a collapsed transport system; then getting ill from poorish diet and exposure to forgotten effects of poverty like rising levels of dirt.

Everybody's in the same boat. Precisely, so services are pushed until they break, which happens quite quickly as there's little elasticity inbuilt. And the socially more vulnerable, and more isolated, fail to cope entirely. People go mad, become criminal, burden families that are already under pressure with chronic illness, depression, and crises generated by infrastructure failure.

Life expectancy starts to fall as social cooperation shrinks, social order is first maintained by force and then degenerates anyway. Hope and reasonable aspiration fades for all but the toughest-minded, the best organised, those determined not to suffer the inner colllapse that comes with great loss.

And the loss is enormous; delivered by the ideological malevolence and, worse, the technical incompetence of the last 11 years of New Labour.