Like millions of others I have worked all my life, usually at the lower end of the earnings bracket, my taxes are taken before I get my wage, the Government making sure they got their pound of flesh before I spent it.

Unlike the wealthy we didn’t have the chance to salt it away into offshore accounts to avoid paying tax or to hire an accountant to find loopholes in the tax system.

I owe money to nobody, the banking crisis was not my fault, yet I am the sort of person that is going to bear the brunt of the cost of making it right.

We are being told by the Government that we are all going to have to tighten our belts.

The difference being, that people like me, being – as it were a monetary anorexic – my belt is down to its last notch, unlike the politicians and the bankers who all seem to be quite rotund around the waist as well as in the wallet, their belts will have quite a few notches to go before the real squeeze is felt.

In addition to paying out more and receiving less, we are now being asked to work longer.

This might be fine for Vince Cable, who stated on the BBC’s Question Time that he was still working, past his retirement date.

Well all I can say is, bully for him. If he had been employed all his life in a job that he had to bend his back, I doubt he would still be in that frame of mind.

The only time he probably strains himself is to reach over his dinner plate to pick up his glass of wine in the subsidised Commons dining room.

I only hope that he and the rest of the Lib Dems can live with their 20 pieces of silver, after casting aside their principles for a very small handful of power and proving to everybody that they are not any different than the rest of the motley crew in Parliament.

Stanley Melling, Kingsway, Lower Darwen