FOR more than a decade most people have become worse off due to the financial crisis-inspired economic downturn and its austerity aftermath.

Our political and economic future has been made reliant on having to pay for bailing out the banking sector from its self-inflicted collapse in 2008 and continuing to fund the mind-boggling amounts of money that finance it to this day.

Extreme public spending cuts, job losses and wage stagnation have been the result, while debt fuels spending as though the economy was booming. Yet the vast majority of households are suffering and debt has become an unwelcome yet necessary part of everyday life.

Inequality is increasing and the country has become dependent on debt to create economic growth.

As Johnna Montgomerie demonstrates in this book, household debt has become the feedstock of the financial sector, providing it with a steady stream of revenue.

While harming individuals and the economy as a whole, unprecedented levels of personal indebtedness also sustains a very big money-making business.

A debt-driven society has produced wealth for the few, misery for the many and not created anything of real worth. Indebtedness is today’s central economic and societal problem and it should now be the people’s turn for some payback.

Abolishing vast swathes of household debt would be fiercely rejected by political powers bankrolled by those who profit from it, the global financial system and corporate media, but it would be a direct, efficient and just way to introduce a degree of fairness into the economy.

Thus this concise, informative book argues for a seismic shift in political economy, examines how the global financial system can be hacked in favour of the many and coherently plots the real end of austerity.

Published by Polity, £9.99.