If the government of the UK wishes to find a suitable motto, it should adopt the advice of a great Scot. “Great Britain should,” wrote Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, “... endeavour to accommodate her future views and designs to the real mediocrity of her circumstances.” Smith offers wise counsel. The country’s circumstances are more mediocre than imagined two years ago. The question is how to respond.

Three things have combined to postpone widespread recognition of the task: first, the government that was in charge when exaggerated optimism became rife is still in power; second, nobody can be sure how mediocre the country’s longer-term circumstances are going to be; and, finally, as Giles Wilkes points out in an excellent new paper for the Liberal Democrat think tank, CentreForum, with modest initial levels of public debt and low nominal and real interest rates, the UK government was right to let its borrowing take the strain.*