It is enormously important not to minimise or understate the scale of the predicament in which we find ourselves. The supply of credit — the lifeblood of our businesses and the only hope for sustained employment — has dried up, and we need to recognise the magnitude of that crunch, as well as the scale of our fiscal deficits and national debt, if we are to take the radical action that is required to solve these problems.
But there is a danger in all this – of talking ourselves into even more of a crisis than we genuinely face.
In the end, the cause of our current malaise is lack of confidence – and, although there is nothing to be gained from a false optimism that ignores the realities of our ghastly fiscal deficit or the lack of credit, there is also a need to recognise that even a very severe recession is not the same thing as the total disappearance of economic activity.
This point came home to me very forcefully at my advice surgery last week in Dorchester.
A remarkable man made an unscheduled appearance. He wanted, he said, simply to bring me some good news.
I expected to hear something about a particular aspect of social or cultural or environmental life in West Dorset which was mercifully unaffected by economics, finance and the miseries of doing business at present.
But I was surprised to discover that his good news was in fact entirely on the economic front. He wanted to tell me that his own business was flourishing. He assured me that he was providing both jobs and work for other firms. And he then reeled off a list of friends and acquaintances in Dorchester who were busily at work, churning out goods and services, with the customers and the pounds rolling in.
It was, he said, all too easy to assume that the newspapers were telling the whole story. If you believed them, you would, he claimed, imagine that economic activity was ceasing in Britain. But he could testify personally to the fact that this was far from the case.
And, of course, he was right – not just about his friends and acquaintances and not just about Dorchester or West Dorset, but about the country as a whole.
We are all rightly concerned (and more than concerned) about the fact that the economy, instead of growing recently has been shrinking. For the businesses that no longer exist or are on the edge of bankruptcy, and for the people who have lost their jobs or fear losing their jobs, that reality of reducing national income is the only reality that matters.
But, across Britain as a whole, the ghastly fact of the economy reducing is nevertheless the counterpart of the fact that we still have an economy.
So my visitor had a point — it’s just that his news wasn’t newsworthy.