Elite groupthink is driving Britain into a nightmare of inflation, idleness and rage

To the experts, economists and other idiot savants who inexplicably failed to see this storm coming, thanks for nothing. All of their acronyms, PhDs, fancy modelling and algorithms have proved useless: Britain and the world are plunging into the most terrifying economic, political and cultural crisis of the past 40 years. A bunch of intelligent amateurs couldn’t have done much worse.

Inflation is out of control, a terrible recession is looming and higher interest rates are about to send house prices tumbling and unemployment soaring: the politicians are still in denial, unlike the voters, but the reckoning, when it comes, will be traumatic.

This is like the financial crisis all over again, only worse: for the second time in less than 15 years, the public has been betrayed by a failed technocratic orthodoxy, an over-educated yet staggeringly ignorant ruling class convinced that it can defy human nature as well as the laws of economics.

Why do these people never learn? Why do they have no shame? Where is the abject apology from the Governor of the Bank of England for the fact that, even after stripping out the cost of food and energy, inflation is hugely higher than his target? And why are our politicians refusing to treat this crisis with the sense of emergency that it requires? …

The experts drew exactly the wrong lessons in 2008 when Northern Rock and Lehman Brothers went bust: they thought that bailouts and ultra-low interest rates were the answer to every problem, even though they were actually the very cause of the irrational exuberance of the 2000s.