David Fuller's view Whatever else happens today, one change is inevitable. We are moving into the era of no-money politics. No money to placate interest groups. No money for new initiatives, regulators, agencies. No money to prove how much ministers "care". It was our money, not theirs. And now it's gone.

It is hard to imagine how profound a change this will be for a country that has become addicted to treating so many problems as ones that can be fixed with cash. "More teachers, police, hospitals" has been our opium. People who were furious about soldiers being denied proper equipment in Afghanistan found it harder to work up steam about the internal inflation that ate up NHS cash. Labour's three-term experiment has surely proved that there is no automatic link between more spending and better public services. Yet we in the media still tend to treat any kind of "cut" with outrage. That will be a hard habit to break.

Looking back it is astonishing how difficult government seemed in a time of plenty. The true job of politics - deciding whom to disappoint - was rarely required. The Governor of the Bank of England did not even need to raise his eyebrow in that unique period when we were importing deflation from China, enabling him to keep interest rates low while the economy grew. Low interest rates are still masking the scale of the crisis, because many people who were worried about their mortgages two years ago are now in variable-rate heaven.

Yet it is essential that people understand what Britain is facing. Yesterday the European Commission demanded urgent action to tackle Britain's deficit, and forecast that it would be the highest in the EU, surpassing Greece. Recent focus has been on the deficit. But even if we pay it off in full, as the Commission points out, an iceberg of debt will remain.