We may aw well forget about mortgages - and jobs too

So now the banks (three hearty cheers!) are telling us that they will start to limit the supply of mortgage funding, not only according to the size and regularity of our incomes, but also by the thriftiness of our spending habits. For those on average and below-average incomes, I give the following Irish translation; until now there have been no mortgages available at all, from now there’ll be no mortgages at-all-at-all.

As a freelance, and one of those who used to be on the property ladder until landing on a socking great property snake called a divorce, I know that a house now falls into the same bracket as a Ferrari; something only to be contemplated when filling in one’s lottery numbers. No whingeing; I claim no natural right to a three-bedroom semi. But Lady Thatcher’s property-owning democracy is now surely in its death throes.

In any case the banks’ criteria make no sense. The idea of buying houses on a mortgage was born in the days when the bank could reasonably expect that a chap with a steady job would keep it for life. These days there’s no real reason to discriminate between the chap with a regular job and one on a fluctuating freelance income; the former is no less likely to be on his beam ends next year, and (may I venture) the latter is more likely to be keeping his income up by bobbing and weaving, whereas the other will probably be traumatised into hopelessness.

Ultimately the banks will get onto this too, and will start only lending money to those who are rich enough already, helping them leverage London property from the stratosphere into the ionosphere. The problem with tolerating a swathe of super-rich in our country is that service providers will start to feel that an infinitesimal sliver of the billionaire market is going to be more profitable than any amount of market share among the plebs, who can simply go to hell. Adam Smith (whom I honour greatly) said that it was not the benevolence of the baker, butcher etc. which encouraged him to feed us, but his self-interest. What he didn’t say was that, if the self-interest of the baker, butcher etc. encouraged him to direct all his efforts towards someone else, we’ll bloody well starve.

So where does that leave the rest of us? Well, sort of a bit disenchanted with an economic structure which leaves us out of account altogether. We can’t get mortgages, so maybe we won’t bother with the regular jobs that exist to service them either. We won’t pay stupid prices for accommodation whose only virtue is a location close to a workplace. We’ll live from hand to mouth, but we’ll live free.

The much-bewailed lack of jobs for young graduates (= cushy sinecures) may be a beacon of hope. I have always told my two student sons: don’t get a job, get a skillset. (After several thousand evenings of seeing their father come home from the office in a vile mood, they’re both determined never to set foot in one.) And then, if democracy survives (and that’s a great big Lacedaemonian “if”) we can hold a nice straightforward election: us v. them. You do the math.