The UK’s course towards the cliff is now unavoidable.

As the morning unfolds, the usual ritual of an MPC announcement from the Bank of England at noon is awaited. Like the Budget these days, the decision often leaks anyway: it was impossible to find anyone in the Square Mile yesterday expecting anything other than ‘no change’. The tragedy is that nothing short of a sensational announcement was going to make any difference either way. Sterling, the Treasury and the UK are heading for a monumental crisis of confidence. The reason (as the Slog has contended previously) is that time has been piddled away by indecisive cowardice, and a quite astonishing level of governmental denial.

Everyone will be going through the motions from here on. Mervyn King talks gaily about a QE bout we can’t afford, Lord Mandelson adopts his slightly camp version of steely determination, Darling promises ‘a decisive budget to calm the markets’, and Osborne promises an emergency budget after fifty days of Tory power. But the moment has passed, and they all (with the exception of poor dear Gordon) know it perfectly well.

In a bizarre twist of fate, being outside the Eurozone we will be able to approach the IMF in the end without Angela Merkel getting her Lederhosen in a twist. But back on the dark side of reality, I find myself increasingly puzzled by the way in which people talk about ‘going cap in hand to the IMF’ as if what they could put in the cap is likely to do anything except make matters worse. What is the IMF supposed to do, invent a repayment system with special low rates for plucky old Blighty? Our hopeless level of debt is about management now, not amount.

In my brighter moments, I can console myself with the old line about “Well, they can’t arrest everyone, can they?” And it is certainly true that, by the time this inevitable process has rolled out, most of Europe, the US, Russia, Japan and a fair sprinkling of South American nations will be in the same boat.
What’s more, if those Pacific inhabitants on the upside of this revolution want any markets left to sell to, they can’t just leave us all to rot.

Of course not. Everyone, sooner or later, will default: because they can’t raise affordable loans, they can’t compete with the emergent economies, and above all they can’t even stabilise the level of debt – let alone pay it back.

But what we all need to grasp is that there is no such thing as a Get Out of Jail Free card. We will pay through the nose for this release with ruinous inflation, rapidly reduced social services, varying degrees of hitherto unimaginable social unrest, and the loss of almost all the ‘wealth assets’ so painstakingly gathered from around 1650 until 1945.

The world that replaces the one with which we’re familiar now will (as always) be one offering huge opportunities to those with drive, foresight, and a willingness to think of Asia as home. What it won’t contain in the UK any more is a free health service, efficient government, retail therapy, rising house values, University education for the majority, and a police force dedicated to the maintenance of public order.

British police in the future will see their role instead as the surveillance and control of private dissent. While citizens here will worry even less about liberty, and constantly about livelihood.