The Knives Are Out

The economic news gets worse steadily, just as was forecast. Giving credit to those without means was always going to end in tears, but it was thought to be such a clever, egalitarian, Labour thing to do - pretend that the poor could meet the requirements for prudent lending by using demutualised , heartland credit agencies that wouldn't look at the poverty of their client base, not least because the employees are part of it. Indeed entire regions of the UK are clientilised poor facing, now, the results of regime financial cynicism, for there was, after all, a lot of quick profit to be made bundling them all up and rating the bundles inappropriately, then passing the parcels of bad debtors and their debts on before the music stopped.

Nevertheless, it is not poverty having its financial mask removed and still being there with us, as it always will be, that frightens. It isn't the economy; that can go wrong any time and, cyclically, it does. What is new is the collapse of lawful and civil behaviour.

People are physically unsafe because policing has withdrawn from many areas, either completely, or at fixed periods of the day. People are not just financially poor, they are financially unsafe in that their resources are open easily to fraud from lost personal data, depredation by regime demands, or the more old-fashioned burglary. The worst threat is the denial of expectations. This is not yet a contributer to the social and cultural fear being endured at present, even though it has struck many in the private sector already.

Pensions that are expected by public sector employees are not able to be paid. The regime will repudiate the pension expectations of its engorged client state. First up will be those newly enroled into Brown's Britain's service. Then the entrants into pensionable age will find their entitlements not starting at once. Then the established pensioners will be required to accept cuts in the name of 'fairness' to all potential as well as current pension claimants. The last to be knifed will be current employees as they can cause real trouble - they might even make a concerted effort and withdraw their labour so must be left alone until the appropriate legislation and control systems are in place. Couldn't happen? It did, all over eastern Europe and the Russian Confederation as their command economies collapsed. And who has tried to run a command economy for most of us (though not the rich, national and international, operating in the London trading post) these last 11 years - out of kilter with history itself?, though the intellectual arrogance would block off that, and all, awareness.

The last threatening piece in the jigsaw picture of lawlessness is the New Labour Regime itself. As we whooped it up on credit we could never repay, the Regime mined the bedrock of our state and its defences, lopping limbs from a body politic and constitutional, blinding and crippling until a basket case is our last defence aginst criminal and gang governance, against mishap and undeserved misfortune, is the under writer of our commitment to each other in the most general and therefore most binding ways. And it is gone, leaving nothing to restrain the use of force and protect the weak, which is most of us, from naked power and its wielding. Wielding right down at local levels too.

The devastation of the economy is but the beginning.