XL they didn't...

XL go phut

The first of many to come, XL today went under. One of the UK's largest tour groups, it ran out of money, leaving thousands of people trying to find a way of returning to these fair shores, and thousands of others trying to work out if they had a contract with one of the bits of XL that had some kind of bond or not.

XL had a rather extravagant structure, with more names than a bad referee, and the papers have been full of ready-reckoners outlining who will get all their money back, who should get some of their money back and who should look forward to peering over the heads of the prime creditors at the final meeting. Many didn't even know they'd booked with XL - so much for branding, eh?

The big boss gave a tearful press conference, blaming the oil companies for his companies' demise. He said that "while many people have been making hay with high oll prices, this is the repercussions of that hay". This is the first time I recall an animal feed crop being blamed for a collapse, but he was under the cosh rather and I suppose we know what he means. As with several 'surprise' incidents of this year, the only surprise was that nobody did anything despite the papers having been full of reports of imminent troubles for several months. I expect people who've booked a last-minute holiday to escape a wet and clammy country perched perpetually on the end of the jetstream this year have wondered in quieter moments whether the chief exec could have spotted that an $80 million oncost had to be netted back somewhere or there'd be hell to pay...

So is this bad or good? - well, less jet travel means the polar bears don't have to swim quite so much. It adds a few thousand more redundancies to the growing pile. It reduces our exposure to the oil producers by a barrel or two. And it probably concentrates the minds of the Monetary Committee, who by all accounts are split between those who want to do what Mr Brown told them to do, and those who want to do something sensible.

Get used to this - there are going to be plenty of company bosses making similar speeches over the next couple of years. This recession is going to be a structural watershed. Things after it won't be like they were before it. The UK has finally run out of Empire and colonies to live off, and the countries who laboured for us long after our armies made them do so have decided that they'd like a piece of the cake, too, and that, come to think of it, the cake is probably theirs, anyway. So if you want some, you'd better ask nicely.

Suspension of disbelief is rife. Those commentators who get paid for commentating from the safety of a well-paid bunker position in a southern city believe that the storm will pass overhead, we can open the windows and put away the umbrellas and all will be well. For some, this will be true. For most, it will not.

The key question will be - what do we do for a living? In short, what's the point of dear old Blighty? We organised in quick order the first Civil War and Republic, kicked that out and got the king back, hosted Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions, made a hash of diplomacy and lost it all in a couple of worldwide conflagrations, exported the Beatles and football and now we don't know what to do next. Our kids are good at Facebook and computer games - maybe there's a living to be made out of that...