Rallying cry

Britain’s Trillion Pound Horror Story (Channel 4, Thursday) was unquestionably the most important programme that will appear on British television this year.

Britain’s Trillion Pound Horror Story (Channel 4, Thursday) was unquestionably the most important programme that will appear on British television this year. Yes, even more important than Downton Abbey.

The thing that really drove home just how important was the point, quite early on, where the Fawn turned to me and said, ‘Ohmygod! Where do we emigrate to?’ And it’s not as though the Fawn has ever been one of those irksome left-liberal wives who keeps undermining her husband’s thought-through right-wing wisdom with prissy right-on inanities based on nothing more solid than hormones. No, sirree.

Yet up until this programme, she had never quite appreciated to the extent I do just how irredeemably f***ed our country is. She had imagined, as so many poor innocents still do, that all it would require is a bit of genteel tinkering from the Coalition and within a few years, hey presto: economy revived, greatness restored, all the vine weevils in our garden permanently eradicated, and everyone living happily ever after.

Unfortunately, as Martin Durkin’s brilliant piece of polemic made horribly evident, that just ain’t going to happen. Unless we take steps far, far more radical than anything David Cameron has so far shown himself prepared to contemplate, this country is doomed to become a stagnant economic backwater, little different from those Eastern Bloc economies we so despised in the Eighties. The comparison is not far-fetched: in many parts of Britain, the state’s share of the economy (Wales: 77 per cent; Northern Ireland: 81 per cent) is as high as it was in Honecker’s East Germany, Ceausescu’s Romania.

And what are we doing to deal with this? Absolutely nada.