It is true that, in global terms, we are still wealthy. It is true, too, that the EU, which has made similar mistakes to ours, is also on the slide, so that we do well enough when we measure ourselves against France, Germany or Spain. But look at the other Anglosphere countries, and a very different picture emerges.

The average American is 39 per cent wealthier and 38 per cent more productive than the average Brit. Housing is also much cheaper in the US, as was energy even before the Ukraine war.

If Britain were a US state, it would languish at the bottom of the league. When my friend Douglas Carswell, the former Conservative and Ukip MP, emigrated in despair at our lockdown, he chose Mississippi, where he now runs a think tank. He picked that state because it ranked 50th out of 50, and he believed that, if school choice and tax cuts could be made to work in Mississippi, they would work anywhere. What he found, to his surprise, was a higher standard of living than he had left behind. 

"A teacher or a registered nurse here starts on maybe £41,000", he tells me. In Britain, outside London, a teacher gets around £30,000, a nurse £25,000.

"The superintendent of a typical school district in Mississippi takes home £130,000 a year, similar to a Cabinet minister," says Carswell. "I know landscape gardeners who make more than the hedge-fund managers I knew in west London".

All this, remember, in the poorest state in the Union, a state whose median income is less than two thirds of the American average. As the economist Sam Bowman puts it, "Americans could stop working each year on September 22 and still be richer than Britons working for the whole year."