IN the frantic activity created by events in the Middle East, one mind-numbing statistic scurried past public awareness without getting the attention it deserved. It was mentioned and debated, all too briefly I considered.

But, given normal exposure, as against running a distant second to the Iraq crisis, I'm pretty certain it would have caused a far bigger stir than it did.

I refer to the staggering revelation that borrowing in the UK is running at EIGHT BILLION POUNDS. In figures that's £8,000,000,000 on credit cards and other loans.

I don't believe further evidence is needed to convince financial regulators that something must be done before the majority of people in Britain are sucked into a very black hole.

Most of us are guilty of living to a social rule formulated in the 20th and 21st centuries which by now governs everyone in the developed world: paying by plastic. The trouble is, many people so doing are running up paralysing debt and need only suffer redundancy, or other life-changing circumstances, to face disaster.

There will be people reading this who, sadly, are already there. And many others who would join them were they to suffer a setback at work or in their domestic arrangements.

Credit cards make it easy, don't they? It's not as if you're actually spending cash, is it? Well, not there and then. But there comes the day of reckoning when statements drop through the letter box and interest charges and penalty payments are revealed. One company, whose glossy TV adverts lead the unsuspecting to believe that possession of their credit card is a route to Valhallah, charge £20 for an account being overdrawn or a late payment. And they don't tell users they are overdrawn until it's too late to do anything. This compounds the problem of repayment.

It's difficult to advise others about the perils of this kind of lifestyle, especially when one has been sucked into it, albeit on a minor scale compared to some people's levels of borrowing.

I should know better. So should everyone who marches under the banner of Senior Citizen. We were raised in an era when if you couldn't pay for something, you didn't get it. I remember delivering papers so I could save up for a new bike because my mum and dad were struggling to bring up four sons in the early post-war years when only black marketeers had cash to spare. Boy, are those days long gone.

I feel sorry for young people. How will they get on the housing ladder with prices currently at a level when £90,000 is being asked for a two-bedroom terraced cottage? And if they do get on, will they be lumbered with crippling debt if the house market topples?

Perhaps when the sandstorm (hopefully) blows over and Mr Blair and his squabbling battalions at Westminster get down to their proper job, that of looking after business at home, they'll investigate the plastic Never Never Land and regulate the credit card companies more closely. Otherwise we'll all go skint. And they can't blame Saddam Hussein for that!