It’s folk economic faux-wisdom (“if a household overspends, we know that we have to give up things we’d rather keep”) that is providing the smokescreen for this ideological assault.

“well, that’s what happens when you get into power – you give up your principles.”

But where, previously, neoliberals had used the crises in other political systems (state socialism, social democracy) as an opportunity to helicopter in their ‘reforms’, on this occasion they are using a crisis brought about by neoliberal policy itself to try to electro-shock the neoliberal programme back into life.

But the narrative of an overfunded public sector produce cognitive dissonance for those of us who have actually been delivering frontline public services in the last ten years, where we’ve been expected to do more work for less money and with fewer resources.

What we’re seeing now is the Terminator of Capital with its neoliberal-managerialist mask wrecked, and the Big Society (Victoriana 2.0) ruse not convincing anyone.

For that reason, this is definitely not the time to recline into the leftist version of capitalist realism, the defeatist counterpart to the Bullingdon club’s bullishness