Much has been written about the credit crunch, but the bottom line is that the root cause was a "greed frenzy" of city slickers.

Over the past decade, they were busy getting rich and fat, lending money to people who could not possibly afford to repay the debt, passing on "toxic" bundles of debt worth billions, gambling on commodity and stock markets around the world, much of it driven by their receiving huge bonuses.

The politicians were just as much to blame, revelling in the feel-good factor on both sides of the Atlantic and which undoubtedly gave Labour this miserable (and hopefully) last term in office.

They could and should have seen the bubble bursting but didn't want to, and the roller-coaster kept rolling, Labour kept on spending.

In the end it took relatively little to bring the whole pack of cards down, and the sad thing is that it's the people at the bottom of the feeding frenzy that are going to pay the highest price for all this greed.

It's the people on the breadline who are going to be pushed over the edge, unable to pay the price now demanded for basic foods and the basics of life.

I was watching a TV programme last week about the effects of this unadulterated greed on small, pretty seaside villages in Cornwall.

Once they were village communities, with their own little shops – places for the rest of us to fall in love with on holidays.

Then the city slickers moved in with their fat bonuses, buying up these lovely cottages for their second and third homes, visiting once or twice a year and having them shut up for the remainder.

The prices of these properties shot up, so much that the locals could no longer afford them.

With so many locals forced out and so few permanent residents, the village shops failed and these lovely places have become virtual ghost towns.

One of the results of this financial turmoil will be much tighter regulation of financial institutions and an end to the bonus culture which drove these slickers to lend more and more money to dubious borrowers.

That in turn might, hopefully, result in some of these fat cats no longer being able to afford their second homes.

That process could be speeded up if Britain did what some other countries do and impose a "wealth tax" on people who do not live in their homes for more than a few weeks a year.

There can be no justification in building more and more new homes, destroying more and more countryside, all the time many thousands of people have properties that are almost always empty (I am thinking principally of West Durrington).

How much I agree with the archbishops who have roundly condemned the financial slickers, plus President Bush – who was prepared to find £700 billion to bail out failed banks and the rich, and yet never seemed to find money to feed the poor.

I hope this week's vote against might result in more super rich paying the price.
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