Did you ever wonder why the banks and the City (who caused the great recession) were also the largest beneficiaries of re-inflating the economy with quantitative easing? And did you not perhaps feel a little aggrieved that, once they’d got what they wanted, they carried on as if nothing had happened, displayed no gratitude whatsoever and changed their ways not a bit? Anyway, history has shown that there is alternative in the form of a massive public works programme. You know, like the New Deal. A response to an economic calamity that benefits everyone, not just the people who caused it. Imagine if, instead of a few new towers in the City we had new jobs, new ports, new roads and new railways. Imagine, if instead of austerity, we had government spending. You wouldn’t even need to print money to do it. Rather, governments could borrow it - and at the lowest rates for decades. The Economist recently described the failure of governments to borrow to build as a “missed opportunity”, while Standard & Poor’s reckons that, for every 1% of GDP spent on infrastructure the UK’s economy would grow by 2.5 per cent.