"For a rainy day" was, believe it or not, the phrase used by David Cameron this morning during his interview on The Today Programme to explain the vicious cuts to enable debt reduction and putting money aside. He might have been talking about the housekeeping - a tin on the sideboard perhaps because you never know ...

How deeply insulting, patronising & fallacious. Economists correct me, but countries do not work like households. Borrowing is fundamental to a healthy economy.

From another angle, though, how disturbing the 'you can't have something for nothing' tight lipped prudence becomes when seen in a broader perspective. For what is interest but ... something for doing nothing? And, from another angle, what does this do to human existence? The new 'normal' is to see the ability to pay as your right to a life. As the treatment of immigrants fleeing war zones confirms they are - in the eyes of a society that thinks simply in terms of financial liquidity - subhuman.

& we know where that leads.