“The United States may be a great place to be rich, we like to think, but they treat their deprived appallingly over there. We tend to watch reports from poorer American states with a shudder, thankful that our country is run along different, more compassionate lines.

But if Britain were to somehow leave the European union and become the 51st state of America, we would actually be one of the poor states. If you take our economic output, adjust for living costs and slot it into the US league table then the United Kingdom emerges as the second-poorest state in the union. We’re poorer than much-maligned Kansas and Alabama and well below Missouri, the scene of all the unrest in recent weeks. Only Mississippi has lower economic output per head than the UK; strip out the South East and Britain would rank bottom. We certainly have our problems; we’re just better at concealing them.”