Jayne Dowle: Get a taste of reality, Mr Osborne, as families flounder in financial storm

Perhaps it will be when the kids get married, seeing as the average wedding now costs something like twenty grand. We have scrutinised the bank accounts with a magnifying glass (literally, in my case, I’m not spending any money on eye tests) and made sure no financial service is ripping us off.

The car, which celebrated its seventh birthday this year, has had a large scratch down the driver’s side for months, but while ever the wheels go round, we count our blessings.

Five-year-old Lizzie has forfeited her automatic right to new school shoes just because it’s a new term. And her big brother Jack’s arithmetic has improved since every time he says he wants to buy something with his modest pocket money, I make him work out exactly how much he will have left.

Like all those other “typical” families surveyed by both the Institute of Fiscal Studies and the TUC this week, we are facing the toughest financial times since the Second World War.

We are paying the price for the Government’s cuts in public spending and the rise in the cost of living, with inflation up to 4.5 per cent and climbing. A perfect austerity storm if ever there was one. And things might not get any better for a decade.

The TUC warns that we have to contemplate losing up to £4,600 per family per year by 2013, as wages stagnate, and public spending cuts freeze child benefit and tax credits.

It doesn’t take me – or TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber – to point out that “the wrong people are paying the price” for the Government’s obsession with deficit reduction.

Whatever Brendan Barber thinks, I can’t see us all taking to the streets en masse to protest, especially considering what happened over the summer.

For “typical families”, however, disposable income is, frankly, running out.

Even Philip Hammond, the Transport Secretary, thinks that trains are now a rich man’s toy.

In a supposedly civilised and democratic society, that can’t be right. But do you think any of this ever actually registers with George Osborne? Does he know that it now costs £5 for a large jar of coffee, and £5 for a large tub of butter? I would hardly call either of these two items recklessly extravagant indulgences, but there’s a tenner gone every week before we even get on to meat and two veg.

I honestly can’t think what else we might do to save money, battered as we are from all sides. And yet, this is happening in a beleaguered country where the Chancellor of the Exchequer is giving serious consideration to dropping the 50 per cent tax band for those who earn more than £150,000 a year. While the rest of us scrimp and scrape, the rich get a free gift. This goes beyond political belief or allegiance. It is madness. And it is riddled with holes.

I am sceptical about these “entrepreneurs” who are supposedly going to leave the country in droves, taking their so-called wonderful wealth-creation schemes with them.

What about the good number of those who make their six-figure sums in public services, or running taxpayer-funded organisations and government offshoots?

That lot won’t be off, whatever tax they have to pay, or they would lose their right to their gilt-edged pensions. Most entrepreneurs I know are struggling to draw anything like £150,000 from their business, desperately drumming up custom from customers with no cash to spend and extending credit lines to such an extent that the only way to pay the mortgage is via the Visa.

This assumption that mine is part of the spendthrift generation, racking up a fortune of debt on credit and store cards, not caring about tomorrow as long as we have jam today, galls me now more than ever.

I don’t know a family who isn’t counting the cost, abandoning holidays, cancelling extra-curricular activities and generally doing without, not to save up for something special, but because they can’t survive any other way.

We dare not look forward. Instead, we are all constantly looking back, to the days when Christmas was just Christmas, and not some awful stomach-churning event on the horizon gearing up to make us “typical families” despair.

My grandma grew up poor and experienced not only the Second (and the First) World War but a Depression. Even when she was on a relatively comfortable pension, she would still drag me from shop to stall, buying bread here, apples there, all to save a few pence. I used to roll my eyes and think, “when I’m grown up I’ll never be like that”.

Now every time I go shopping, I find myself thinking, “what would grandma do?”

I’m not expecting any government to perform fiscal miracles. And I’m not expecting to become a millionaire. I just don’t want to live in a world where I find myself marching my two kids out of Marks & Spencer just because a tube of Pringles is £1 cheaper in the 99p Shop.