The Spring Statement is usually a rather smaller affair than the Budget, an opportunity for the Chancellor to present the latest economic and fiscal forecasts to the House of Commons and announce consultations on proposed policy changes. After his big-spending Budget in the autumn, Rishi Sunak presumably hoped that his statement next week would cleave closely to that model.

Recent events would make that irresponsible. Since Mr Sunak’s last “fiscal event”, inflation has risen ever higher, with surging energy bills threatening to impoverish millions of households. The country briefly re-entered Covid restrictions after the emergence of the omicron variant, denting the economic rebound. Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is already having immense consequences for the international economy, accelerating existing trends – the cost of living squeeze – and heralding a future in which globalisation is forced into reverse and the relatively benign geopolitical conditions of the post-Cold War period vanish, possibly forever.

Following the exit from the pandemic, the Government’s hope was that it could finally govern as a peace-time administration, focused on massive new spending on the NHS (and, eventually, social care) and levelling up poorer parts of the country. There were already major problems with this vision, given that it relied on abandoning Conservative principles and breaking manifesto promises, while offering no certainty that the stated aims could be delivered.

Now, it looks ridiculous. The Government appears to have no plans to even postpone the planned increase in National Insurance contributions, despite the pressure it will put on stretched household finances. Continuing with proposals to raise corporation tax next year, when the economy sits on the edge of recession, is brave to say the least.

But even reversing these unfortunate measures would hardly be sufficient to meet the scale of the challenges the country is facing. The logic of, first, Brexit, then Covid and now the ructions caused by Putin’s assault on Ukraine is that the UK must be leaner, more competitive, and more resilient to the regular crises that appear determined to engulf us. When an employment dispute at P&O Ferries, a small matter in the grand scheme of things, threatens weeks of disruption at the UK’s most important port, it is clear that the state of the nation is not good.

The list of problems is long. Companies face too many barriers to operating flexibly and taxes are too high. Successive governments have assumed that, just because our employment laws are less onerous than those of a semi-socialist state such as France, there is no need to do anything about the other rules and regulations that hold the private sector back. Across swathes of the public sector, there appears to be a cultural indifference to hard work and an unproductive attachment to working from home, while hard-line trade unions take every opportunity they can to inflict misery on the rest of the population by striking.

Energy policy remains a mess, with a continued fixation on net zero, albeit with a greater appreciation of the need for a less disruptive and costly transition. The Government has not moved anywhere near quickly enough to progress the renewed exploitation of North Sea oil and gas, and it is still unclear whether ministers have changed their minds about fracking. The Government has promised a new energy strategy, but why is it taking so long to materialise?

The current era invites comparisons with the 1970s, when the country was plagued by inflation, labour disputes, energy crises, and an unstable international environment. It would be unwise to exaggerate the similarities. But like then, there is a danger today that politicians form a consensus around certain policies, like net zero or a commitment to a larger state, that have the effect of entrenching these crises, rather than solving them.

Mr Sunak should use his Spring Statement next week to challenge that consensus and lay the groundwork for an economy that is much better equipped to navigate a world in which growth and prosperity are harder to secure. One of the finest qualities of this Government is its optimism about the UK and its continued ability to thrive, rejecting the gloomy prognostications of those who think the country’s best days are behind us. But it has not yet set out a policy agenda consistent with that optimistic vision of the UK’s future. There is little time for delay.