These are the self-inflicted wounds that must be healed if an overarching growth strategy is to be developed and implemented. That strategy must, first, cope with the legacy left by a profligate government, in the process redrawing the boundary line between the public and private sectors, permanently reducing the public sector to an affordable level and one that does not squeeze out the private sector. 

Then, government must do no harm — or more precisely, stop doing harm. It is stifling what the great John Maynard Keynes called the "animal spirits" of British entrepreneurs and businessmen, the drive and risk-taking of which Britain's businessmen and workers are capable. 

Finally, it must recognise that the history of interventionist government is the history of the gap between intentions and successful implementation. Put differently, it must recognise that there are times when less is more, when the temptation to respond to a clamour for immediate results must be stifled lest the long-term performance of the economy suffer, when the itch to "do something" must be ignored rather than scratched.  

The government inherited an unsustainable budget deficit. If there was any doubt about that before Greece focused policymakers on the speed with which a nation could become unable to borrow at affordable interest rates, that doubt is now gone. The question is not whether to get the fiscal house in order, but how to do it, and at what speed. And not only to satisfy international investors, who at the moment see Britain and its huge deficit as no more threatening than Germany with its reputation for fiscal probity, but also to set a predictable macroeconomic framework that reduces the uncertainty that is such a deterrent to the willingness of entrepreneurs small and large to invest in businesses and jobs.

The government has decided that the way forward is deficit reduction, quickly. Theoretically, it is to cut £3 of spending for every £1 to be raised by taxes, and get the deficit down to comfortably sustainable levels by the end of this parliament. It is the timing rather than the goal that is the source of controversy. Too fast, says the shadow Chancellor, Ed Balls. The pace of deficit reduction, already (he argues) a major source of slowing growth and rising unemployment, will produce a recession, exacerbating rather than reducing the deficit. He might be right; he certainly is not certainly wrong, and the latest economic data, showing the economy is slowing, seem to be coming in on his side of the argument. But then again neither is the Chancellor wrong to defend the course he has chosen by pointing out the dire consequences for the deficit of the rise in borrowing costs that would certainly follow in the absence of a credible deficit-reduction plan — his. Both approaches stand on equally firm ground, at least theoretically and at least in the short run.