Those of us of a certain age are able to remember when Britain really did seem broken. Indeed, we find it impossible to forget. Those not of the necessary vintage might usefully read Dominic Sandbrook’s book on what he termed “the Battle for Britain 1974-1979”. During the “winter of discontent”, when the dead went unburied, Sandbrook records: “The port of Hull came to symbolise everything that was happening. Easy to picket because of its geographical position, it was … a battleground where the shop stewards’ word was law. The TGWU set up a ‘dispensation committee’ where every morning local farmers and businessmen came cap in hand to beg the shop steward for supplies. A coffin-maker sat nervously before this ‘tribunal’ to ask for wood.”

Or, from inside the heart of government, there are the invaluable Downing Street diaries of Bernard Donoughue, principal policy adviser at No 10 to the prime minister, James Callaghan.

In an entry from 1978, he records how two cars were commissioned for the PM, to be supplied by the state-owned car manufacturer British Leyland (which had endured no fewer than 523 strikes in a 30-month period). “When they finally came they were found to have 34 mechanical faults and had to be sent back … when they returned the PM went for a trip in one. He decided to open the window for some fresh air and pressed the button which does this electronically. The result was that the window immediately fell in on his lap. The PM has now said that he does not wish to see the new cars again.”

As an anecdotal summary of the “broken Britain” of the late 1970s, and the reasons for it, that could scarcely be bettered. Donoughue also revealed the toll the nation’s woes had taken on the man who had been the top civil servant working for Edward Heath when that Conservative prime minister had presided over the “three-day week” and power blackouts (we all had to make do with candlelight): Sir William Armstrong broke down completely, and was found lying on the carpet in No 10 chain-smoking furiously while raving about the world coming to an end. It must have seemed so to him.

This was when the UK was labelled “the sick man of Europe”, and foreign reporters here filed stories about “the end of Britain”. We had been bailed out by the IMF, which in return demanded substantial public expenditure cuts, a humiliation that no developed economy had previously undergone.

Now, our national balance sheet presents another looming horror — and one about which the international debt markets will be no more forgiving than the IMF of half a century ago. I wrote in May that “we are on the edge of a pecuniary precipice, about which our elected politicians don’t see any advantage in telling the hard truth”. The latest figures for public sector borrowing have come in at almost £21 billion for June — well above the forecast made by the Office for Budget Responsibility — and no less than £16.4 billion of this monthly figure represented debt interest payments. The mercury in the national fiscal thermometer is rising alarmingly.

But on this occasion the IMF has not wagged its finger at the UK. Or at least, its estimates for economic growth released last week put the UK ahead of the eurozone, with forecasts of 1.2 per cent GDP growth this year, followed by 1.4 per cent next year. For the eurozone, the IMF’s forecast is for growth of 1 per cent this year and 1.2 per cent next year.

None of these figures are remotely impressive, but they do encapsulate a profound difference between now and the late 1970s. Then, we were heading towards recession while leading European economies were pointing in the opposite direction. And none of them experienced anything approaching the near 25 per cent inflation rate that ravaged British consumers and savers.

We tend to measure ourselves against France and Germany. France’s debt and deficit, as a proportion of GDP, are worse than the UK’s, and its prime minister last week delivered a lecture — as Agnès Poirier wrote in The Times, “from a lectern on which was written Le moment de la verité” — warning that “France is now the country with the highest public spending in the world. We must take responsibility; this is the last stop before the cliff.” To judge from their reaction to François Bayrou’s speech, the French people have no intention of giving up any of their unaffordable privileges (such as a state retirement age of 60).

• German debt deal frees up billions to fund defence and infrastructure

The German balance sheet is far superior to ours or France’s, but its entire economic model, based on manufacturing exports, is being shredded (by both China and America, in different ways). This is set out with devastating clarity by Wolfgang Münchau in his recent book, Kaput. Münchau declares: “Britain is not the sick man of Europe — that accolade goes to Germany”; also, that “Germany’s economic decline [is] a structural slump, rather than a normal economic crisis”. And they can’t even make the trains run on time — the German state railway company is at the bottom of the European league for reliability.

This doesn’t make Britain’s problems any better, but in terms of national psychology it means this feels very different from the 1970s. Though we didn’t then have the asylum crisis — another European-wide problem that has a much bigger grip on the public mind than our fiscal predicament.

It is in this context that Nigel Farage is the political winner, who plays the “broken Britain” tune to great effect — now at Sir Keir Starmer’s expense. Zero sympathy for the prime minister: he is more guilty even than Farage of self-serving doomster hyperbole — last month he told the BBC that he took over a country where “the economy was broken, the health service was broken, you name it, everything was broken”.

Farage now claims, following Starmer’s precipitous collapse in popularity (unprecedented for a new government) that he’s “the last chance for broken Britain”. But his astoundingly profligate policy proposals, which make Liz Truss seem like a fiscal puritan (at the time, Farage praised her measures as “the best Conservative budget since 1986”), are estimated by The Economist to add up to a £200 billion increase in the public sector borrowing requirement. And that didn’t include his pledge that a Reform UK government would buy up 50 per cent of all the shares in “key utilities”. When last weekend Laura Kuenssberg asked him to give even the vaguest idea of how much this might cost, he didn’t have a clue. Although, to be fair, he didn’t pretend that he had either.

It’s rather as if a would-be saviour of “broken Britain” in the 1970s had said that the answer to the country’s most fundamental problem was to increase the power of the trade unions.