[...] 'I think the City is a convenient whipping boy, because everybody loves having a scapegoat,' he says. 'Everybody was more than happy to get a zero per cent interest rate on their credit card, everybody's happy to spend, consume, and spend money that ultimately they don't have.' In truth, workers who had been experiencing real-term falls in their living standards long before the crash had been forced to top up their increasingly meagre income with cheap credit.