Something the governor of the Bank of England said just before Christmas has stayed with me all through the holiday season. People feel the economy “has got stuck”, Andrew Bailey told the BBC.

It’s a vivid metaphor. I keep thinking of Winnie the Pooh wedged in Rabbit’s front door, unable to get out. Too many helpings of honey have left him jammed, helpless and immobile.

Something similar is happening beyond the Hundred Acre Wood. Everyone’s got stuck. Households have got stuck, unable or unwilling to splash out much, crimped by cost of living pressures or just inclined to save a bit more as a precaution against harder times ahead as the jobs market softens and frozen personal allowances eat into real incomes.

Non-workers — the so-called Neets (not in employment, education or training) — have got stuck, mired in a benefits system that sometimes makes it barely worth applying for jobs and a medicalised health system prone to label them as too ill or too fragile to work.

Firms and their managers have got stuck, caught up in the gloom about rising taxes and other costs and in no mood to risk that new hire or to press the button on a new capital spending project. Safer to do nothing and hoard cash or throw it at non-productive share buybacks.

The government has got doubly stuck, first hemmed in by the excessive state borrowing of the past that prevents it from embarking on a conventional fiscal boost that might act as a catalyst for a wider pick-up in activity. Second, it is stuck in an ideological straitjacket imposed on it by rebellious Labour backbenchers. The party’s MPs seem still to be more focused on redistributing the cake rather than growing it first, and blind to the confidence-crushing effect on business of many of their pet desires — from the minimum wage to stronger employee rights.

Bailey and the Bank of England are themselves a bit stuck. Yes, they have started to reduce borrowing costs and a couple more base rate reductions could follow in 2026, but they are rightly cautious about assuming the battle to curb inflation is done. It is fear of future inflation that is propping up government bond yields and the cost of future government borrowing. Britain’s bond yields are the highest in the G7, and among all advanced economies second only to Iceland. No fun at all when your annual interest bill alone is already more than £100 billion.

Nothing would help to solve the nation’s problems as unambiguously as a prolonged burst of real economic growth, preferably driven by productivity gains. From that all else follows: improved living standards, better funded public services, a halo effect for the UK as a destination for overseas investors and a much needed fillip to domestic morale.

Yet the verdict of the Office for Budget Responsibility in November was damning. It couldn’t identify a single measure in the budget that would materially boost economic growth.

GDP growth slowed to a tortoise-like 0.1 per cent in the three months to September, while the past four monthly GDP figures have all shown growth flat or negative. The Bank is forecasting 0 per cent for the fourth quarter. Everything points to there having been zero growth in the dying months of 2025.

It may be that the paralysis is temporary. The effect of Jaguar Land Rover’s autumn shutdown and the uncertainty generated by the leaks in the two months before the budget should now fade. The hiatus and disruption of Christmas makes the runes doubly difficult to read.

• Simon French: It’s Westminster that has killed the UK’s economic growth

We will soon know the nationwide picture, as retailers start to report their Christmas takings next week and as forward-looking indicators such as job adverts and business and consumer confidence surveys start to be published in the following weeks.

When things are stuck, a jolt is sometimes needed to unstick them. That could take the form of a recessionary shock. A big contraction redirects capital and jobs to new businesses and new ways of doing things and sows the seeds for an upturn — the “creative destruction” described by Schumpeter.

No one wants the misery of a recession, of course, so the better alternative may be a number of small adjustments that will gradually rouse the economy out of its slumber and so simultaneously improve the public finances.

Lower interest rates will help. Some structural reforms in planning and regulation will eventually start to kick in. Plans for new public infrastructure and housebuilding projects will also provide a modest stimulus.

But big, needle-moving policy boosts seem unlikely. Dominic Sandbrook wrote in these pages the other day that the levers available to Margaret Thatcher to pull Britain out of its 1970s slump are not available today. She had North Sea oil and a treasure house of state-owned assets to sell off as well as the potent wins of abandoning exchange controls and dismantling antiquated trade union legislation.

• Dominic Sandbrook: Strikes and strife: is Britain really back in the 1970s?

There are no easy wins this time. We all know what happened when Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng tried their infamous shortcut to faster growth in 2022.

Positive external surprises are perhaps the best bet for spurring a quicker domestic economic rally. Peace in Ukraine and the ensuing lower energy costs would deliver a big dividend. And never underestimate the traditional role of America in pulling the rest of the world out of a downturn. The US has just reported a thumping 4.3 per cent GDP growth rise for the third quarter.

Alas, the potential shocks to growth seem every bit as real — whether a stock market crash or an unpredictable policy shift from the White House. If a cyberattack on a single Midlands carmaker can have a measurable braking effect on GDP, imagine the impact if a big infrastructure provider such as National Grid or Heathrow or the payments system, say, were targeted.

Still, let’s not get too gloomy. Patience and self-denial did the trick for Pooh. He waited a week, and with Christopher Robin and Rabbit’s friends and relations all pulling on his front paws, he unstuck himself — “Pop! Just like a cork from a bottle.” This too shall pass, though possibly not till 2027. Happy New Year.

patrick.hosking@thetimes.co.uk