And how does the political class react? There’s the growing hostility towards business, with Labour bleating about the miseries of employment under “unscrupulous” bosses and the need for more worker “rights”.

There may well be circumstances in which greater flexibility benefits both parties, which is why millions of voluntary agreements are already in place. But ushering in a raft of new entitlements will come with costs: somewhere, someone will pay.

Then there was the Tory answer of importing foreign workers to fill shortages and grow the economy. But this served to exacerbate our chronic housing shortage and further overload our creaking infrastructure, while concealing the true scale of our worklessness crisis.

Well, the figures are in: more than a million foreign workers have come to Britain since the eve of Covid. In the same period, some 830,000 UK-born people have dropped out of work.

These problems should have been cleared up years ago. Instead they’ve been allowed to fester, becoming ever more costly and complex.

There’s the £300bn we are now spending a year on welfare, including pensions, as its core function strays far beyond providing a safety net for the most vulnerable. The benefits system is at risk of metastasising into another, no less dysfunctional, NHS – a public service which anyone can use if they feel like it, funded by the taxpayer.

It was reported earlier this year that 3.9m people are receiving out-of-work benefits without having to even look for a job – twice as many as the number of claimants who must try to find work. In addition to the up-front bill, there is the lost tax revenue, and the lost productive capacity in the economy.