What we need is a new generation of post-consumerist initiatives, such as Freecycle and Gumtree, which allow people, by mutual self-help, to bypass the debt cycle. In the past, people looked to the state to protect them from the ravages of the market, but not any more. Where is the left in the worst capitalist crisis in half a century? The government seems to have given up, too. A defeatism about the credit crunch pervades Whitehall, a sense that there is nothing that can be done, apart from trying to use public funds to fix the holes in the financial system. One intellectual casualty of the crisis has been the myth of deregulation. Josef Ackermann, chief executive of Deutsche Bank, said recently: “I no longer believe in the market’s self-healing power.” Many financiers have echoed his view. This is a paradigm shift, but Labour has failed to keep up. It has been left to bankers such as Sir Ronald Cohen to condemn the greed of what the BBC’s business editor, Robert Peston, calls “the new plutocrats”. It was the governor of the Bank of England who condemned the “bonus culture” of the City, not a Labour minister.

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