Economists refer to the period after the fiscal crash in 2008 as the Great Recession. That makes it sound historic and technically it is; after all the UK has experienced a long run of GDP growth and the number of jobs has been expanding so fast that the country has been a magnet for EU workers even since the crash. The latest public finance figures published this week show tax revenues at their strongest last month since records began.

But it is equally clear that the Great Recession is not yet over or that if it is, something has gone wrong with the public finances, as we know from this week's Autumn Statement. By rights the expanding economy should have reduced public sector debt and cut the deficit down to almost zero, or indeed even into surplus just as occurred after the past two recessions in the early 1980s and the early 1990s. Despite the brutality of the former under Thatcher, the deficit became a surplus by 1988 (admittedly partly down to North Sea oil revenues).