Halfway through last month, the BBC News website ran reports that global warming would hit the red-line landmark of a 1.5-degree increase in four years' time.

At the same time, it published the story that the King of England’s prodigal second son had been involved in a “near catastrophic” car chase with the paparazzi, an incident supposedly reminiscent of the disaster that led to his mother’s untimely death.

The BBC ran the royal near-miss on the top of the news, above the prediction of the global climate catastrophe. The spoilt prince’s latest complaints were clearly more urgent than news of the impending apocalypse.

By the time of the evening news, the end-of-the-world story had been bumped even further down the national broadcaster’s list of news priorities by reports of controversies surrounding the building of new homes in designated countryside areas, and changes to regulations governing the landlords of residential rental properties.

Our news agenda isn’t always focused on the longer term.

That’s perhaps a sign of our national psychology. When last month, the chief economist at the Bank of England supposed that the current cost-of-living crisis might mean that British people might in fact have to get used to lower living standards for a while, a media backlash against this depressing piece of economic realism – the suggestion that an economic calamity might actually impact on individual people’s actual lives – resulted in the man being forced to apologize for the “inflammatory” nature of his blatantly obvious remarks.

His suggestion that we must accept that the economic crisis has left us all worse off was of course just as true as it was apparently utterly unacceptable to the snowflake nation that we seem to have become.

His statement that pay rises for all would inevitably stoke the engine of inflation, and therefore just make everyone worse off in real terms, fueling a relentless and unending inflationary cycle, was simply a matter of fact, a truth both inconvenient and even brutal, but one whose acknowledgment is sadly necessary if we are ever to get out of this horrific mess.

Nobody wants to be poorer. But it’s inevitable that an economic crisis will erode standards of living. Once we have accepted this, we can make sensible grown-up decisions about how to mitigate the harm caused to the most vulnerable in our society. But we can only do so if those in positions of greater economic advantage are willing to take the hit.

And yes, that includes those highly paid workers who are currently striking because the real-terms value of their wages has been hit by inflation.

Many doctors, train drivers and academics are among the top ten per cent of UK earners.

It’s not what anyone wants to hear, but, if you want to play your part in protecting those who aren’t so fortunate, you’re just going to have to suck it up.

The harsh truth is that if it isn’t hurting it isn’t working.

It’s 34 years since John Major, at the time the Chancellor of the Exchequer, uttered those famous words, articulating the need to take tough action in relation to rampant rates of inflation.

He went on to become Prime Minister a year later. It’s hard to see that any politician daring to express such sentiments these days would have much of a career left to them in the aftermath of the inevitable backlash.

Where’s the British bulldog’s bottle gone? Where’s our spirit of sacrifice, our sangfroid, our fortitude, our stiff upper lip?

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We seem to have all the resilience of an undercooked omelette. We’ve grown hearts of watery porridge and backbones of blancmange.

The souls of our martial forebears, woken from their troubled slumbers by the whining from above, would take one look at us and feel glad to be out it.

There are many people who are really suffering from the impacts of the country’s current economic woes, but they’re not necessarily the ones complaining the loudest.

One hates to think what the nation’s upper middle classes would do in the face of actual food shortages or war. They’d probably write strongly worded comments demanding tax cuts at the foot of stories in the Mail Online.

This is after all a country in which a major media furore was provoked last month by school tests which some teachers and parents considered to be too tough.

The BBC reported that eleven-year-olds were asked to “find a similar word to ‘eat’ in a passage that contained both ‘consume’ and ‘feeding’”.

To be frank, it was hardly rocket science. It wasn’t even domestic science.

Nevertheless, the National Association of Head Teachers declared that even school staff had “really had to think” about how to answer such supposedly challenging questions.

This dismissive judgment from their own bosses hardly served to restore public faith in the value of the teaching profession, at a time of ongoing industrial action.

Meanwhile, a recent survey showed that up to a million British people may have cancelled their broadband internet contracts last year because they could no longer afford them.

This is clearly a problem in terms of its potential to exacerbate extant disparities in economic, educational and employment opportunities.

However, at the same time, more than four million people who could have accessed “social tariff” contracts (cheaper deals available for those on benefits) had chosen not to do so. Less than five per cent of those eligible for those deals had in fact taken them up.

According to the charity Citizens Advice, this is because the broadband companies have failed to promote these discount tariffs.

Once more, our strategies to support the most vulnerable individuals and families through this crisis clearly aren’t working.

Certain populist elements in the right-wing tabloid press have elected to blame the technocrats at the Bank of England for the United Kingdom’s ongoing economic crisis, rather than the policies and politicians their support helped to put in place.

Rather than taking any responsibility for their own roles in this unfolding disaster, these unambiguous cheerleaders for Brexit, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss have continued to trot out their hackneyed mantra. They still repeatedly declare that they’ve “had enough of experts” – those very economists who’d warned them time and again that their plans would lead the country exactly to this point.

Their much-vaunted bonfire of regulations has sometimes seemed reminiscent of a totalitarian state’s burning of the books. If this is freedom, then it is a liberation from the tethers of knowledge and reason. This isn’t the soaring progress of sovereignty they promised, but a rocket veering crazily out of control. This isn’t the raging power of a reinvigorated economic furnace, but an unstoppably destructive volcano exploding in our faces with all the force of a billion experts screaming at us those awful, damning words: “I told you so”.