Fenton Robb: Why is it always the prudent who end up paying the price?

"We are all in this together" - so goes the mantra that is supposed to turn people struggling to comprehend the disasters facing them as individuals into a jolly team of companions in adversity.

Few seem bold enough to question this new version of the social contract. The whole country is in a mess, no doubt about it; but many may feel rightly aggrieved that, although they were not party to creating the mess, they are going to have to pay for clearing it up.

These are the prudent people, those who work and save from their earnings to buy a home, who limit their family to a size they can afford to care for, who try to put enough aside to buy some comfort and freedom in retirement.

These honest workers do pay for their homes and their possessions; if they borrow money, they make adequate provision for paying it back in full. They do not cheat on their neighbours by claiming benefits to which they are not entitled; they do not "work the system" to avoid working for themselves.

They work as much for self-respect as for money. Yet it is they who are now being compelled to fight to keep their jobs, to work longer if they can keep them, to take cuts in their standard of living and the value of the provisions they are trying to make for retirement and for their own children. What, they are asking, have they done to deserve this?

The facts are brutish in their simplicity. We have led the world into creating pipe dreams of untold wealth to be gained without effort; from the South Sea Bubble and the Darien Scheme, to the creation of National Debt, paper money, unsecured credit and the "property ladder".

Britain has succeeded in diverting investment away from capitalising productive industry into financing reckless gambling on such a scale that many were deluded into thinking that it was an "industry" in its own right!

Such discoveries and inventions as we make are developed and exploited by large international corporations overseas. Today's leisured classes, the aristocrats who demand the wealth of others, are those who would rather beggar their neighbours than do menial work that they think fit only for migrants.

But it is the illusion of security promised by the growth of the state in the last century that is now unravelling and it will reveal that the promises of a democratic utopia were built on the same kind of shifting sand as all the other illusions we held dear. The education system failed to prepare pupils and students for the work place.

Social snobbery, not economic necessity, dictated the abolition of technical colleges and their degradation into pseudo universities. Well established crafts and skills were treated with contempt. The health services were no better. Nursing degraded from being a vocation into a mere profession. Hospitals became dangerous places. We could not make even our own problematic windmills.

So are we really all in this together? Are those, so old-fashioned as to do an honest day's work, going to pay to support the burgeoning generations of the idle? In today's democracy, the prudent are a dwindling number. Are the prudent really going to relish "pulling together" to support the feckless and parasitic?

The well-heeled politicians dictate that the prudent will pay up to support the profligate instead of looking after themselves and their own, but I very much doubt they will relish it. And what happens when the prudent are so squeezed that there are no more pips to squeak?

• Fenton Robb is retired Professor of Managerial Information Systems, University of Edinburgh..