It is arguably easier to imagine the South African economy recovering from years of load shedding and State Capture and returning to 3% GDP growth than a tired, sclerotic and divided UK.

Did those South Africans who left for the UK make the wrong choice? Amid the farcical comedy of errors that has been the UK general election campaign of the past four weeks, one inconvenient truth has been studiously avoided by all parties: the dire state of not just the UK's public finances, but its economy in general.

According to the IMF, real GDP per head in the UK fell by 0.2% between 2019 and 2023. Of significant economies, only Germany (a fall of 1%) and Canada (one of 1.4%) did worse.

In the longer term, the country suffers from a toxic combination of relatively high inequality with relatively weak economic growth, as the Resolution Foundation's Ending Stagnation report, published in 2023, demonstrated. British workers turn out less for every hour they work than their counterparts in other advanced economies such as the US, Germany and France. According to the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics, output per hour worked was just 0.6% above its pre-pandemic 2019 average in the first quarter of 2024.

That leaves the UK's productivity on the same shallow upward trajectory that it has followed since the financial crisis, well below the trend...