The King without a sword? The land without a King !  This week Austin dares you to look into the eyes of the dragon and see your doom.

I can’t work out how far to hell our handbasket has actually gone. I accept that the media must always default to reporting what is most extreme, and, in spite of protestations of balance, in the most extreme way. Comparisons are made with the Great Depression of the 20th Century , but it is not clear to me if we are in a period of adjustment that is an inevitable part of the economic tectonic plate movement, or something nearer the edge of the chasm.

I guess financial plight is not new. The corn laws and the riots that followed the enclosure of farms amongst other seismic changes brought untold misery and even starvation to population groups, and going further back various kings have ruined their people’s wealth for aggrandisement or conquest. So perhaps what we have now is a dip less shallow than usual, but something to be endured and recovered from eventually in a short period of years.

At least I hope it’s that, as the alternative is pretty ghastly. And I’m not talking about how many BMW’s you have in your garage, I am concerned somewhere in the back of my mind about the rule of law. How strong is the fabric of our civilisation actually?

Here’s a bunch of ideas to throw into a pot.

I listen every Saturday morning to From Our Own Correspondent on R4 , one of the five best programmes on any medium. I heard about the current situation in Kenya assessing how much recovery of civil and civic partnership between the two main tribes there is from the ethnic bloodshed in 2007 following the disputed election. The answer is not much, if one featured Rift Valley village is anything to go by, where maize fields to feed 10 million Kenyans lie unsown because the Government cannot afford the seedcorn (though it can afford flashy cars for the doubled-up cabinet ministers in Nairobi), and one tribe is afraid to go out in the farms anyway because of likely violence from the other. What had been one of Africa’s more stable democracies has faltered substantially.

Zimbabawe. Enough said

I recently watched the remade series the Survivors, portraying our own society cut down - by disease, not economic dislocation – which if fiction is at least a working model of apocalyptic breakdown.

In this week’s news, the Government has been mooting rescue packages for those affected by imminent repossession due to downturn/unemployment. The various London-based news outlets seem unaware of the Mortgage Rights Act in Scotland, which, though by no means a complete answer to the problems of a mortgage holder, is a better provision than in the rest of the UK. But repossession is at a 12-year high with no sign of natural reduction.

Car production is down 60%.

The emerging Stanford case has left Antigua uncertain and queuing, with thousands elsewhere in panic.

There’s more, as the Irish comedian says.

When I am pessimistic, or reflecting on the latest piece of bad news ( e.g. a late breaking story - McCarthy & Stone the builders are having to go to their lenders for a deal to survive their gigantic capital debts – I always thought that as a company they were boring but sewn in to the very fabric of our society) I wonder at what point will the Government have to turn round and tell us that they themselves are running out of cash (where ARE they getting all the billions from to prop everything up?) , or can’t pay the police, or can’t protect the courts? What householder is going to be the first to get some friends or family together and resist the bailiffs or the sheriff officers?

We are not Parisians, nor less Kenyans, but under what pressure does the until now watertight social contract start leaking? And where? Paris? Falkirk? Wolverhampton?

One film that is not my favourite but is quirky and interesting is Excalibur. It was made in 1981 with Nicol Williamson as Merlin. All the knights of the Round Table speak with local accents – Nigel Terry as Arthur has a Bristol twang. Merlin uses an otherworldly nasal tone with which the brilliant Williamson hogs the movie. But one line stands out. When the last of the enemies is defeated and Arthur and the knights are now masters of all they survey, he points his wand at them in turn, and says in a thunder-laden voice “ Remember this moment well, all of you, for it is the Doom of Man… to forget”.

And so it is. I think most of us can’t imagine anything other than our safe, accountable, middle-class society, whose pressures are shades of grey, not black and white. It wasn’t always the way, and needn’t be forever the way.

One final reflection - the recent TV series on the Victorian farm. Three scientists went back to running a farm that is still in its Victorian state. No mod cons, all work and life had to be as at the late 1800’s. even that setup was more sophisticated and knowledgeable than say an Elizabethan lifestyle. But if you had to lose the technological infrastructure you had taken for granted – crikey , if the supermarkets ran out of food, what would you be able to do? Indeed what would you be prepared to do to prevail and protect? And would it be within the law as we know it? and would everyone else do the same?

Austin