Thus the Guardian leader this morning describes the political race now on in the UK following the financial debacle:

Everything is possible now. An extraordinary, history-changing contest has been got underway.

A sentence of pitiful illiteracy.

Over in the Telegraph a snappy writer, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, asks a tragic question: is Britain going bankrupt?

The point is that as the current government piles on debt after debt, cutting some taxes and raising others, the markets may at some point take a view on whether all this debt in fact can be repaid:

But this is not to excuse the Brown Government for the total hash it has made of the British economy. It presided over a rise in household debt to 165pc of personal income. How could the regulators possibly think this was in the interests of British society? What economic doctrine justifies such stupidity? Why were 120pc mortgages ever allowed? Indeed, why were 100pc mortgages ever allowed? Debt is as dangerous as heroine.

Labour ran a budget deficit of 3pc of GDP the top of cycle. (We had a 2pc surplus at the end of the Lawson bubble, so we go into this slump 5pc of GDP worsee off). The size of the state has ballooned from 37pc to 46pc of GDP in a decade, and will inevitably now rise further.

It is because Gordon Brown exhausted the national credit limit to pay for his silly boom that today’s fiscal stimulus  — just 1pc of GDP (China is doing 14pc) — is enough to rattle the bond markets.   Our national debt will jump in what is more or less the bat of an eyelid from under 40pc of GDP to nearer 60pc — according to Fitlch Ratings. It is enough to make you weep.   But is this bankruptcy territory? Not yet. Britain will remain at the mid to lower end of the AAA club.

Meanwhile HSBC’s Stephen Green urges banks to get back to moral values.

Where is the moral value in the government, the one player in the whole drama which can use force to get its way, plundering the population to pay for its own mistakes?