Last time I came up with an analogy for the death and destruction in today’s financial markets, it involved wildebeest and hyenas. I thought it was pretty good, although if I wanted to update it now I’d add an extra paragraph about the way that the wildebeest (banks) are now protected from the hyenas (short-term investors) by a defensive screen of elephants (governments).

Today, a different analogy for the global economic crisis as a whole comes to mind:  Japan Airlines Flight 123, and specifically Japan Airlines Flight 123 on 12th August 1985.  You remember:  this was the packed Jumbo, with over 500 people on board, that lost its vertical stabiliser (tailfin to you and me) shortly after take-off from Tokyo.  With no means at all of controlling the plane except by accelerating and decelerating its engines, the crew kept the plane staggering chaotically around the sky over Japan for the best part of an hour, without ever having anything like enough control to get anywhere close to a safe landing.  Eventually, unable to turn away from a particularly mountainous part of the landscape, it smashed into the ground with the loss of all but four lives.

Well, I told you it was gloomy.  I’m not quite sure what exactly counts as the loss-of-the-tail-fin moment (probably the collapse of Lehman Brothers), but it seems clear that the Jumbo Jet which is the global economy hasn’t been responding anything like normally to the controls ever since.  There are brief moments when it seems that we may be past the worst, followed by sickening lurches when we suddenly find ourselves heading rapidly towards the scenery again.

Quite apart from increasingly assertive forecasts of the deepest recession for a hundred years or more, I’m still reading deeply scary pieces in the papers saying that no major bank, or indeed financial institution, anywhere in the world is yet safe from the risk of complete collapse.   Of course I’d much rather be reading about all this from the comfort and safety of my home or office than sitting terrified and waiting for the end on board JAL123.  But the similarities are striking, all the same.

They say that one reason why London’s public transport and the National Health Service aren’t better is that senior politicians travel around town in Jags and go private. 

I’ve never really believed this.  Even without first-hand experience, how hard can it be for politicians to imagine the way things are for people who do depend on these services?  They don’t even need to imagine:  they just need to meet someone like my auntie Anna, who is old, has cancer, doesn’t drive and lives 15 miles and four bus journeys away from the hospital where she has to go for her twice-weekly treatment.

Last night, though, I decided that maybe I’m wrong about this.  It’s one of my sitting-next-to-someone-at-an-industry-dinner stories, and this time we were talking about the standard of living that ordinary people can expect in retirement. “It’s very simple,” the other chap said, “these people just need to be told that they’re going to have to work for a lot longer than they thought.  Certainly 70, maybe 75, maybe even later:  otherwise they’re going to be very poor indeed.”

I fear he may be right.  But that’s not what I’m cross about.  I’m cross about the utter failure to imagine what that means for people.  You’ve spent the best part of 50 years as a truck driver or a factory worker or a hospital cleaner;  although you’re in good health you’re tired, it’s getting harder and harder to get up in the morning, and you’re not as strong as you were.  Now you find that you have to keep going for ten years or more longer than you thought.  And, very likely, ten years or more not doing the job that you’ve mastered and that gives you your sense of self-worth:  it’s unlikely that you’ll be strong or fit enough to be taking 44-tonners up and down the motorways to the age of 75 and beyond, so what you’ll need to do is see if you can get a job sweeping out the yard. 

It’s all right for the Bloke Sitting Next To Me.  Delaying his retirement probably means moving it back from 50 to 60, and for the duration of those extra working years he can very likely hang around on the senior executives’ floor;  if not, he can set up on his own and take on some agreeable consultancy projects from the Neville Johnson office newly built in the room above the garage with the Merc in it.   

It’s not easy for workers on the line in Japanese-owned car plants, or hard-hat construction workers with a lifetime’s experience of scaffolding and aggregate, to secure agreeable consultancy projects.  And it’s not easy to keep yourself going in a job like that till you’re 70, 75 or even more.  It may be the best prospect we can currently offer to people.  But if that’s the reality of the world we’ve spent our careers building, we might at least have the decency to show a bit of regret about it.