There's nothing like a recession to turn established wisdom on its head. Only a few months ago, the idea of big business inviting government interference would have been unthinkable. Now the queue of supplicants is stretching down Whitehall: banks, car makers, television companies, rail operators, broadband providers, steel producers and the construction industry – all are suddenly demanding billions of pounds of public support.

It couldn't come at a worse time, of course. The banks alone are capable of bankrupting the British state if all of their nightmares were to come true. If we have to start nationalising the commanding heights of the rest of the economy too, it won't just be ideology that will be going out of the window.

It's a very hard time to say no. With job losses now running at nearly 80,000 per day, every job that can be saved is priceless.

And of course, no one is rude enough to call for anything as simple as direct government cash. Even the car industry dresses up its pleas for money in more sophisticated language: asking for credit guarantees and other measures to stimulate spending.

At the other end of the scale, many regulated businesses are just using the crisis to negotiate better terms at the expense of consumers and taxpayers. The railway industry wants to turn its system of franchises into a one way bet. In each case, the implicit threat is to disrupt vital services if business doesn't get its way. Give Channel 4 money, or Big Brother gets it. Even BT is at it, questioning whether it can now afford to invest in broadband infrastructure.

The final straw came today when even PFI companies who specialise in taking risk away from the public sector start asking for money.

Taken individually, many of these industries have a case. But don't be fooled – all these pleas for help will cost us money. And not every industry pleading penury is quite a broke as it looks.