We will all pay a price for this mad debt binge

They were like a wire stretched so tight a turn of the screw and they would snap. It wasn't always like that. When she began work at the height of the recession of the early Nineties, debt problems made sense. Her clients lost everything when they lost their job and could not find another, as she would expect them to. Now trivial losses of money - cuts in overtime, utility bills rising unexpectedly - were pushing the indebted over the edge.

Adherents of chaos theory hold that a butterfly flapping its wings in China could cause a hurricane in Florida. It's like that with debt now: small changes in cash flow are having calamitous consequences.

Yesterday the National Association of Citizens Advice Bureaux spelt them out. It is taking on 5,000 more staff to cope with a doubling of the number of credit card, unsecured loan and overdraft cases to 6,600 a day.

If you ever watch the commercial cartoon channels, you will know who they are talking about. About the most shocking sight on British television is the commercials from loan companies urging single mothers to borrow so they can buy the toys that the station is advertising and their pestering children are demanding.

But not all of the stories are from people living at the bottom of the heap. Citizens Advice tells me that its clients include police officers and bank staff, who you would think would know better - particularly the bank clerks.

Meanwhile, the upper middle class depends on debt, although we don't normally describe it that way. Just as many of my better-connected friends see themselves as "travellers", not "tourists", so they call themselves "home owners" instead of "debtors" when, of course, they can stay in their homes only for as long as they can pay their mortgage.

Their parents told them you could never lose by investing in housing. But some are. The Consumer Credit Counselling Service says the number of middle-class families seeking help because they had borrowed to keep up with mortgage payments, school fees and the Joneses has tripled in three years.

The Government could and should clamp down on loan sharks who prey on the poor, but it is hard to see what it can do about the rest of us as mortgage rationing and credit control died with the 20th century. But that doesn't mean it shouldn't be worried. One reason it gets so little credit for Britain's long boom since the last recession is that too many voters, rich and poor, can hear the beating of distant wings and have the uneasy feeling that their prosperity will be gone with the wind.