In this financial war, homeowners are the biggest draft dodgers | Phillip Inman | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

In this financial war, homeowners are the biggest draft dodgers | Phillip Inman | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Vince Cable was right at this week's Liberal Democrat party conference to liken the current financial crisis to fighting a war. We may not have spent as much money rescuing the banks as we did battling fascism 70 years ago, but it ranks alongside the second world war as a colossal exercise funded by debt.

Yet the analogy goes little further. In the war everyone suffered. There was rationing, which affected every household. The Luftwaffe was equally likely to bomb a town house owned by a rich family as a small terraced home rented by the poorest. And everyone lost sons and daughters in battle.

Three years into this fight and it is obvious the pain of Cable's war is shared unequally. The tired cliche that we are all in this together is so obviously false it is beyond argument.