It comes as no great surprise that Britain is almost certainly in recession

It comes as no great surprise that Britain is almost certainly in recession. The Bank of England and economists generally have been forecasting it for some time, and the slowdown is affecting almost every corner of the globe.

The reasons are all too familiar: the war in Ukraine that has sent energy and food prices spiralling; the post-pandemic shortages and broken supply chains; and the gradual unwinding of the globalisation that did so much to lift millions out of poverty across the globe.

The UK burdened itself with Brexit as well, making trade with its biggest market more difficult – and leading directly to an acute shortage of workers at every skill level. The British “pie” is shrinking; with all that entails for wages, strikes and public services. Less to go round for all – and a scrap for what’s left.

It will probably trigger a housing crash – on balance, a further damaging and destabilising development – and the recession may be deep as well as prolonged. It is a grim prospect to have the best part of another decade written off, economically speaking.

Things might be more encouraging if the government gave the impression that it knew what to do. That it had some sense of the engines for future growth, and how to fuel them. Even if it was just left to market forces, how would that be facilitated? If it needs the Treasury and the business department to develop another industrial strategy, then when will the country see it? Which, if any, “winners” is Britain to back? Electric cars and their associated battery packs? That looks to be in the balance given the precarious condition of Britishvolt. AI? Financial services? Life sciences, inspired by the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine? As they used to say on Fleet Street, we should be told.

The government does have a plan for the public finances, or at least will have one by the time of the autumn statement on 17 November. It will entail a severe fiscal squeeze, with the harshest times to come later in the decade (that is to say, after the next election). It will help push inflation lower, rightly at the centre of the authorities’ efforts, but it will do nothing for the UK’s anaemic growth rates, at least in the short term. The gilts market should be reassured – but the voters will be entitled to ask what the pain is exactly for, and how and when it might end.

Not so long ago, Britain did indeed have a “plan for growth”. It was presented by Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng at the time of their disastrous mini-Budget, and it didn’t survive its first contact with reality. It was poorly thought through, poorly presented, and lacked credibility. Put at its simplest, it didn’t add up. It suggested that the UK economy was in the hands of a sort of fiscal Bonnie and Clyde.

Incompetent as it was, though, it was at least a plan of sorts. The aim of raising the long-term trend rate of growth was correct, as was the focus on productivity. It just happened to be full of the wrong policies. What the country has a right to expect of Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt is some idea of how the UK is going to overcome its immediate and long-term problems, looking beyond the inflation surge and the rebalancing of taxation, spending and borrowing.

Voters don’t like recessions, but they resent them even more if there is no obvious light at the end of the tunnel. The British people were presented with a manifesto for growth at the 2019 general election that was scarcely more than a series of silly slogans: “levelling up”, “building back better”, “Global Britain”.

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The pandemic intervened, catastrophically, but there’s no reason to suppose that the UK would be growing bullishly if Covid had never happened. The UK has not, before or after the pandemic, benefited from Brexit, and it’s done more harm than good. Whatever path the UK eventually opts for to rejoin the European economy, by the time of the next election the country will feel deeply miserable and pessimistic, and with good reason.

The government will no doubt claim that Labour would merely make a bad situation worse, and use their fiscal plan to trap Labour into spending promises and tax plans.

It will still probably be “time for a change”, after 14 years of Tory rule, but a Keir Starmer government wouldn’t have much more luck turning the economy around. It’s going to be “eye-watering”, just as Mr Hunt promises. The candour is appreciated, even if nothing else is.