It had to happen. In spite of our generosity we punters could not keep underwriting the follies of capitalism and free market economics for ever simply by infinitely increasing our personal debts. Everything is finite, except perhaps the Universe, the mendacity of politicians and the greed of free market capitalists.

Over the past six months everybody has become painfully aware that the good times are gone. The three Bees, Blatcherism, Bureaucracy and Bean – counting have been stirred up and are stinging with a vengeance.

First to be hit were the poor, but now the old are starting to suffer. A social care crisis has been brewing for as long as the climate change crisis and has been as assiduously swept under the carpet. Politicians could not see many votes to be had from the old and capitalists could see easier ways of making money from old age than by providing high – cost, low return care homes (simpler by far to create fraudulent investment vehicles and steal people’s life savings)

Solutions to the growing problem of old age all seem to involve raising taxes or the abandonment of balls out foreign policy initiatives like The War or expensive vanity projects the The Games.

Making up a threesome along with the failure of capitalism and neo-con politics is the failure of modern medicine. While advances in drugs, surgery and other therapies have succeeded in prolonging life by finding ways to downgrade killer diseases to merely nasty, debilitating diseases we do not hear much about successes in prolonging the healthy, active portion of life. The medics have extended our lifespan but failed to combat the infirmities of age.

Another factor is the way successive governments of the Tory right and the Labour right have pandered to the demands of the business community, allowing them the freedom to export proper jobs to low labour cost economies. This has resulted in a disproportionate number of our workers being employed in candy-floss industries or in public administration. While the work of those who actually deliver a service in health and social care, transport, education, environmental services and public order is always costed to the penny and very tight budget restrictions imposed, the budgets for administering these services seems to be open ended.

We would expect nothing else as the administration of public services is now outsourced to the private sector and the only growth industry is in the creation of middle men, all wanting a piece of the action without actually doing anything practical to earn it.

This is why in a Blatcherite world there is never enough money to hire more doctors, nurses and teachers, but funds are always available for more bureaucrats and bean counters. It puts all that guff about enterprise in perspective.