Where next for Britain’s uncertain economy?

Yet more indications today of Britain’s radically altered political landscape. Some irony that the Labour left’s long-desired aim to cancel a raft of multibillion pound defence contracts will, in all probability, be realised by a Conservative chancellor responding to the costs of a crisis in capitalism.

I can’t get across enough how much this crisis has made all sorts of certainties about how Britain’s economy is run, well, completely uncertain.

It’s not just the fact that the Sir Fred Goodwin memorial 50p tax rate is basically not actively opposed by George Osborne. A policy of this kind has been politically unthinkable for a decade-and-a-half.

Now, following months of remuneration rage, pension pot-pique, and banker-baiting, nearly 60 per cent of the nation backs tax rises on the richest 350,000 earners.

So what is the game plan for UK plc now that the bonus-addled bankers, and even Sir Michael Caine, are to be taxed off the island? I thought our whole business model was in servicing the world’s super-rich and promoting banking as “the goose that lays the golden egg”.

Well, last week’s budget was more than a calamitous set of numbers, it was surely the failure of an entire economic mindset.

As I’ve said before, the carnage inflicted the public finances are of an order associated with a world war, and I cannot imagine a better subject for parliamentarians to investigate than how we have got into this mess.

As many of the commenters on this blog have also suggested, there are profound questions about the shape of our future economy. The government had a stab last week.

Roger Bootle, the celebrity economist who predicted the death of inflation, has just put out a paper examining where the economy goes from here.

“It would be misleading to talk about when things ‘get back to normal’. After all, what is normal?

“The economy surely cannot return to how it was before. The economy over the next ten years will look significantly different to the economy of the last ten years,” he says.

He expects a decade where consumer spending growth underperforms growth in the economy. So hello Nescafe society, and goodbye £3 lattes.

And talking of froth, have a look at this article by Stephen Green, the chairman of HSBC. Britain’s senior banker has a devastating line in there about Britain’s economy, I’ll blog about it later.

In the meantime, do you have any idea how to reshape Britain’s economy? I’m thing of holding a Dragon’s Den-style pitch for Britain’s New Business Plan…