what are all you moaning minnies on about, you’ve never had it so good?

Thus spake the good Lord Young. I’m surprised that there wasn’t a hush in the room, followed by some Young Tory yelling out

“Jeeves, bring me a crowbar old chap. This old buffer seems to have his foot wedged so far into his gob we need mechanical aids to get it out”

But no such spectacle ensued. If you want to hear it from the horse’s old buffer’s mouth itself, then those nice chaps at the Torygraph have the audio in it’s crackly glory.

It’s such an absolute peach, it makes Marie Antoinette look street-savvy when she exhorted the revolting Frenchmen to eat cake if they weren’t able to lay their grime-stained mitts on bread at the moment.

And yet… What if the old buffer is partly right? If you have a shockingly high mortgage and a job that is holding up, then you’re probably having a pretty good recession. True, you get pasted with tax rises and a cut in Tarquin and Jemima’s child tax credit, but against that your mortgage payments have gone down. Even when I nuked my mortgage in 2008 the payments were already rock-bottom.

The somewhat Austrian School-esque Institute for Economic Affairs says pretty much the same. With bedfellows like that you can see why Cameron instructed Lord “You’ve Never Had It So Good” Young to fall on his sword. It’s always disturbing when the lizard’s eye blinks and the true heart of darkness is revealed for a microsecond before normal service is resumed…

The corollary is of course that there is a general atmosphere of fear and loathing in the air. Everybody is running scared, the falling ordure from the banks still hasn’t hit the ground, nobody knows how much money we have burned, or whether the pitful amounts we have left are going to be worth anything any more when the forces of inflation have finished.

First they come for the Irish, then they come for us – the stalking rapacious bond-holders seem to be circling the EU demanding pounds of flesh, first picking off the easy meat in the PIGS area.You can’t blame them too much, we did all borrow far too much money when the good times rolled. Now the enforcers would like it back, please. Otherwise the guys in the background with thick necks and baseball bats will come to break your legs, y’know.

So yes, Lord Young, in a narrow theoretical and intellectual sense, those of us who still have jobs, and particularly those of us who have over-inflated mortgages are having a good recession. But we hear distant hoofbeats thundering towards us from all points, so if you don’t mind, we are shit scared and don’t need any of your jive right now. Send not to know for whom the bell tolls, m’Lord – it tolls for thee.