THE last time interest rates were as low as they are now was in the early ’50s, and that’s a long time ago.

Oh the ’50s — the time of big sticky-out skirts, high backcombed hair, teddy boys and winklepicker shoes. Rock Around The Clock was in the charts, there were jobs a plenty and everybody was having a good time.

This was the new Elizabethan age and the world was to be Britain’s oyster.

Today somehow doesn’t have quite the same feel. We are not that hopeful or optimistic anymore.

We feel the people in power have let us down — and they have.

Folk who will feel this the strongest are those who have always paid their way, bought only what they could afford, saved for that rainy day — the sensible hard-working ones.

Now, they have to pay for the reckless, the feckless and the workshy.

Who is going to help them when the money they have worked so hard for, saved so carefully to make their retirement a little more pleasant, is no longer earning anything?

There will be no handouts for them.

There was, though, for a mother of seven children who sneered about how stupid the authorities were for paying for each child to have a new school uniform, when it was obvious she could pass them down to the younger children.

This “mother”, “lady” (neither word fits) never ever worked but drew over £250 a week.

Sadly, we have, through the benefit system, put people in a “why work” situation.

You can’t blame them, but things must — no, have to — change.

We have a class — sorry, a layer — of people with no sense of responsibility, to whom everything is someone else’s problem.

The media always refers to them as working class but that’s the one thing they are not.

The real working class, no matter how poor, had quite high standards, looked after their children, their old folk and one another.

Among those mean terraced streets and satanic mills there was a strong sense of camaraderie, of togetherness — an understanding of each other’s difficulties.

Sadly, as people and families have become more fragmented, more apart, there’s not a lot of it left.