Low Inflation 1992-2007

Bank managers and Building Society heads were today united in sadness at the death of Low Inflation, a sadness which they chose to express by immediately cancelling all their low-rate, fixed-interest mortgage offers and preparing to issue foreclosure notices against any debtor who even considered looking at them in an even slightly needy way.

Low Inflation was born in the UK in 1992, the product of the Chancellor of the Exchequer Norman Lamont's decision to jilt the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in favour of a brief liaison with a sexy floating pound in the bathtub. So disturbing was this event - not to mention the image of Norman Lamont in a bath inextricably associated with it - that it will forever be known as Black Wednesday. It was in this dark period that Low Inflation first saw the light of day in the British economy, perhaps due to the fact that at the time there was precious little British economy left to inflate.

Over the following years, Low Inflation was to come to dominate the British economic scene, ushering in a time of prosperity, rapidly rising house prices and spending like there was no tomorrow on essential 1990s items like Magic Eye posters, PlayStation consoles and Robson and Jerome tapes. So popular was low inflation that in 1997, new Chancellor Gordon Brown placed it at the centre of his policies, right alongside blaming the Conservative Party for anything that went wrong and wishing Tony Blair was dead. This ushered in a period of yet more prosperity, even more rapidly rising house prices and spending like there wasn't even much of today left on essential 21st century items like Harry Potter books, Gorillaz interactive CDs and DVD players.

Such a Golden Age could not last. By the early noughties the British economy was beginning to show a fatal addiction to ever more expensive energy sources and an unfortunate tendency to drop bombs on the places that provided them. This, combined with rapidly rising house prices and spending like the world was about to end on essentials like ultraslim jeans, Arctic Monkeys mp3s and giant flatscreen tellies, was ultimately to lead to low inflation's death.

Low Inflation will be buried under a mountain of overextended credit cards and secured debt. It is survived by a weeping Gordon Brown, some very rich energy company officials and a lot of people wondering if an LCD TV the size of a football pitch was really an essential purchase.