Imagine a family stuck in a house that constantly floods. The carpets are soaked, the walls damp. It’s always cold, no matter how much they turn up the heating.

The family try everything. They promise to replace the sodden carpets and find new, innovative ways to warm the house. Someone with a laptop wonders if AI might be the answer. But no one ever looks upwards and says: maybe we should just repair the giant hole in the roof.

Britons are that family – and the giant hole in the roof is Brexit.

On Wednesday, Rachel Reeves will deliver her second budget, on which, it is widely assumed, the fate of an ailing Labour government depends. Recent weeks have brought conflicting signals – a rise in income tax rates floated, only to be reversed – but there is one big thing we already know: the country does not have enough money to pay for all that it needs and wants.

Every public service you can name is desperate for more cash. Take, almost at random, Britain’s prisons: overcrowded, understaffed and saddled with boxes of paper records, a system so “archaic”, according to the prisons minister, that as many as three inmates are mistakenly released each week. It’s the same story everywhere, from the NHS to the armed forces: we need more money than we’ve got.

Reeves will scrabble around to find a few billion, but none of those efforts will address the fundamental problem, which is that we are poorer than we should be, poorer than we were and poorer than our peers.

Real wages have barely risen in 17 years. Of course, the crash of 2008 was a global phenomenon, but we are struggling more than our counterparts to recover: indeed, for nearly two decades, Britain has experienced the biggest slowdown in productivity growth in the G7. Reeves and Keir Starmer could see the problem when they arrived in office last year, which is why they made growth their........

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