This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday column

Would we cope with misery as well as the Greeks? If our great fat cushion of state-backed jobs, welfare payments, tax credits and easy loans were whipped away one morning, how would we get on?

I think we would do very badly. In Greece, the suddenly poor and destitute turned to their strong extended families.

And if those families had not taken them in and supported them, there would have been nothing else. Fortunately, they did.

This country doesn’t have strong extended families any more. In many cases, it doesn’t really have families at all.

In too many places, it has gangs instead. And those that survive are weakest just where they would be needed most in a crisis – among the poor.

This country lives on the edge of serious disorder. The misnamed ‘riots’ of August 2011 were nothing of the kind.

They had no political pretext, no wider aim. I suspect many thought of joining in, but didn’t quite.

They followed the realisation by a large number of people, in a period of good weather, that the forces of order were weak, absent and afraid. Many of them were laughing as they stole, wrecked and burned.

Mostly, they turned on shops rather than private homes or individuals. But this seems to have been a matter of chance.

There were one or two especially frightening moments when the lawless mob came into direct contact with the cosseted middle class, who hid from their hooded attackers under restaurant tables while the kitchen staff, ready to defend their livelihoods with force, beat off the assault with rolling pins.

And almost all of the looters got away with it. It was only the dim stragglers who were caught and whom I watched shuffling through the courts in the weeks afterwards, most of them with criminal records nearly as long as a Hilary Mantel historical novel.

They were baffled to find that, after years of cautions, unpaid fines, suspended sentences, community service and limp rebukes, something might actually now happen to them.

Actually, not much did in the end.

That’s bad enough. But what about the rest of us? Generations of all classes have been taught to expect a comfortable, well-fed existence, a reliable safety net.

How much privation would it take to turn us into beggars, then looters and food rioters? I ask this because we are much closer to a Greek-style crisis than we think.

Our debts, national and personal, are huge. We can never pay them off. Our trade imbalance is just as bad. Our recovery is based entirely on a house-price balloon that could burst in a moment.

The main effort of the Government is to avoid any shocks until the Election is over – but what then?

I feel for the Greeks. I don’t blame them for refusing to endure more collective punishment, though they were foolish – as we are now – to let politicians lead them into a swamp of debt.

But I wonder whether, not far hence, it will be the Greeks who are sympathising with us.

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