AFTER Brexit, it’s been bad news piled on more bad news for the UK economy. The Tories’ reputation as the "wise custodians" of capitalist economics lies in tatters. If I were a City of London banker, I’d be chasing Cameron and Osborne out the door with a cutlass; financiers poured their ill-gotten millions into Tory election funds, only to find themselves locked out of their biggest market thanks to an internal Tory split. This isn’t just Brexit; it’s Brexit without a plan, Brexit without a clue, Brexit without a hope.

Nonetheless, I’m anxious to avoid the emerging “Brexit myth”. That’s the myth that presents Britain’s economy as a high-performance powerhouse until big bad Boris and his worm-tongued, back-stabbing sidekick Gove took us out of Europe. This is nonsense, and it lets the Tories off the hook.

Last week, the TUC released a fascinatingly grim report on Britain’s economic performance before Brexit. It showed that, since 2007, our living standards have suffered the worst fate of any OECD country except Greece, a country whose economic failure has left it perpetually on the verge of civil war. British journalists love to sneer at the French economy. But French living standards have increased, albeit modestly, by about 10 percent, while ours have actually fallen 10 percent since 2007. We were in the relegation zone long before Gove and Johnson’s love affair.

Brexit is simply the lump of corn on top of our cake of shit. With Brexit forcing us back into recession, our living standards will have slumped for more than a decade. Indeed, we may not recover our 2007 wages until 2022. That’s pretty much unheard of, outside of Greece or Zimbabwe.

My question is, what’s so bad about Britain’s economy? Or rather, what makes us worse than other countries? Yes, Westminster politicians are often corrupt, overpaid, divorced from ordinary life, and dependent on mobilising public bigotry through tabloid newspapers owned by billionaires. But try living in Italy, France, Germany or America; these aren’t havens of enlightenment. Anyway, politicians don’t have much control over the economy.

Yes, Britain’s economy depends too much on financial services, on short-term speculation over long-term investment. Again, though, that doesn’t explain what’s so especially bad about Britain.

For me, the biggest clue lies back in the early 1980s, when Thatcher imposed a set of anti-trade union laws that became the envy of tyrants and dictators the world over. That’s when the rot set in. That’s when we started to tumble from being one of the world’s more balanced economies to the paragon of inequality we’ve become today.

This means private business owners in Britain have unusual power to impose whatever terms and conditions they wish on their workers. True, businesspeople in France and Germany are morally no better, and they’d love that power. But Britain’s laws are unusually cruel and authoritarian in their bias against the working class.

In France, 98 per cent of workers are covered by a collective bargaining agreement. This means their negotiations over wages and working conditions are conducted collectively by an organised group of workers, ie a trade union. Thanks to decades of authoritarian government policy, only 29 per cent of British workers are covered by these agreements. In 1984, the figure was 70 per cent.

The most equal, socially liberal, and prosperous economies in Europe are those with the highest trade union power. When strong syndicalism declines, so does our standard of living. Britain stands out because our government crushed the unions so deliberately, with such politicised brutality, and because the centre-left surrendered so feebly.

After a while, Thatcher’s (literally) violent political victories became second nature. The collective interest has lost ground. We’re forced into a perpetual scrap to achieve more than the people around us, right from school, into the workplace, and even into retirement. It’s better-thy-neighbour from cradle to grave. The concept of solidarity has become not only shameful, but criminal too. This has quickly become the British economy’s “character”.

But contrary to Tory logic, lots of competing individuals doesn’t actually benefit the common good through some “invisible hand”. Britain proves the opposite. We’ve got the worst of both worlds, a failing economy and an uncaring state.

If any British government wants to sort out our terrible wages, there’s a simple answer, and I’ll give it to any politician who asks: your legal boot is on the neck of workers – take it off. Give us a chance to fight for ourselves, collectively. Otherwise, no amount of well-meaning reforms are going to improve our lives.

Fortunately, there’s hope on the horizon. In Scotland, a number of trade unions are looking at ways to rebuild our collective sense of struggle in the workplace. And there’s also the Better than Zero campaign, led by teenagers and twenty-somethings, which shows you can cause a ruckus even in the most precarious workplaces. They focus on call centres, shops and hotels, the private businesses that boomed in the post-Thatcher low-wage economy.

That campaign is already winning victories. But at this stage, victories aren’t really the point. First and foremost, we have to recover the idea that you aren’t alone in the eight hours you spend working every day. We have to recover the idea that workplaces are political spaces like everywhere else. Otherwise, Britain’s gloomy economy will continue indefinitely for decades ahead.