Was yours a quieter Christmas, spent at home around a tree smaller than the previous year's Norway spruce and a pile of toys less vulgar? Or was it the last hurrah? A great binge of booze and half-price clobber followed by a new year skiing holiday that the bank can jolly well pay for.

We are a nation divided by our attitudes to money. If your holiday was a low-key affair, you are likely to be a new puritan. You and your ilk have been out of fashion since the 1980s when a succession of Tory governments ripped apart Britain's postwar social consensus. The new totem - the pursuit of personal gain - never really appealed to you, even though your life did get better. You worked hard in the same job over the past decade and were promoted, twice. You had sensible holidays. Your life is comfortable. Your job is not yet threatened. You should be happy. But you are angry, even furious.

You are angry because of them, the privateers, that family at the end of the road in the big house with the Christmas tree that gets bigger every year. After a decade of job-hopping, the husband has been out of work since early December. The wife manages a shop that sells cushions and candles. On New Year's Eve, the entire brood (they have four children) flew off to America for a week's frolic in the snow.

You fantasise that your neighbour is a crook. Charming, witty and good-looking in a louche sort of way, he sails through life living on the edge, taking risks that would cause your teeth to chatter. You wonder, guiltily, whether the credit crunch will finally sink him - until you remember that it might sink your own. That makes you more angry because you know that he enjoyed the boom, while you slogged and saved.

The original privateers were Britain's first entrepreneurs, legitimised scoundrels with letters of marque - permits granted by the sovereign to grab and loot on the high seas. Men such as Sir Francis Drake were favourites of a female monarch and brought the booty home to Blighty.

In a succession of privatisations, Margaret Thatcher granted her own letters of marque by selling the commanding heights of the economy to her own collection of privateers - men such as Colin Marshall, of British Airways, and John Egan, of Jaguar.

Mrs Thatcher's personal leadership was more puritan than privateer. She had a profound sense that wealth creation was about work, a moral thing, but her political instincts told her the value of cultivating risk-takers. In temperament Tony Blair was a privateering Prime Minister, an opportunist in hot pursuit of personal glory and the main chance. Today the privateers of the Blair boom are on the run, their ships are taking in water, their methods are considered suspect and the State is again reasserting control in the form of puritan Gordon Brown.

Life is getting tougher for the privateers of private equity, men such as David Ross, the co-founder of Carphone Warehouse, who resigned in a share scandal, or Guy Hands, knee-deep in the mess that is EMI. The banks won't lend and the stock markets are plunging to new depths. Then there are the ghastly oligarchs, the Abramovichs and their trash flash, as the puritans would have it. Another tug on the non-dom tax noose might be their incentive to quit.

Britain is shot through by the resentment felt by puritans against these pirate popinjays. Like the parakeets that are now found wild all over London's great parks, the privateers have spent the past decade nesting in the capital's most leafy branches, screeching and bidding up the cost of everything from plumbing to school fees.

Could this be the moment that puritans take revenge? They are happiest when part of something larger than themselves. That is why they make good civil servants and teachers. But every large corporation is packed to the gills with people dutifully implementing the three-year corporate plan. As the Government takes stakes in British banks and industries, this could be the moment for the grey men and women to take the helm at some of our greatest institutions.

Britons have a strange hankering for the almost-forgotten era of postwar social collaboration. People were kinder then, say the elderly. Everyone waited their turn, for rations, mortgages, jobs. The trouble was that it went on too long and the job of the puritans became that of sharing out the poverty.

Everything that matters in Britain is dependent on the diligence of puritans and the flair of privateers. A strong economy requires both. While a bonfire of tycoon vanities is fun to watch, we should be careful in case the flames spread to our own homes. Britain in the 1970s was a dreary land of bad food, blighted careers and emigration. It is the hairshirt world of this new puritan Jerusalem that most scares the privateers. Let us hope they are not about to weigh anchor and set sail for richer pickings.

Carl Mortished is world business editor

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