IT was grim news indeed from Chancellor Philip Hammond in his Autumn Statement. There was, in terms of tax, the usual mixture of bitter pills and sweeteners, all pretty minor this time round. But the really bad tidings came in his projections for the overall performance of the UK economy during the next five years.

In 2016, as he pointed out, it has survived the immediate effects of the Brexit vote in somewhat better shape than might have been expected, so we will still see two per cent growth this year. But in 2017 there will be a sharp drop to 1.4 per cent, with a slight recovery to 1.7 per cent in 2018. In the following two years we are supposed to get back up to two per cent growth again, but the further forward we go, the more unreliable these official estimates always become – and the Office for Budget Responsibility, which produces them, has one of the worst records in the world for accuracy.

In any case, neither this Government nor any other government can be certain of things much beyond a time horizon of 24 months or so, simply because there are so many factors that might change the environment in which policy needs to operate. In this case, the totally obscure outcome of the Brexit negotiations is the great unknown. Meanwhile, a drop in the growth rate of 0.6 per cent year-on-year may not sound a great deal. But translate it into real money terms and it comes to look much more serious. The UK’s gross domestic product (GDP) at the moment is something over £470 billion a year: 0.6 per cent of that represents a loss from the recent trend of about £3 billion – money the Chancellor could do with as the economy faces severe headwinds.

We can compare it also with the fact that in the far-off days when a Keynesian consensus ruled economic thinking in Westminster and Whitehall, the experts usually reckoned the economy required growth of about three per cent a year just to keep on an even keel, with unemployment and the other important indicators remaining stable. Although that three per cent was the official target after 1945, the UK was usually hard pushed to meet it. Even so, there were booms from time to time, and these on the whole sufficed to maintain HMS Britannia in a reasonably seaworthy condition.

Underlying relationships in the economy constantly change, however, and those of the post-war period were clearly going awry even before the great financial crash hit us in 2007-08. Since then, two per cent growth has been the maximum, rather than somewhere near the minimum, that the UK economy has been able to manage. A vast government deficit with enormous increases in the money supply, which might once have been thought a sort of key to recovery, have had next to no effect.

Yet unemployment has risen nowhere near as far or as fast as would once have been predicted by the same Keynesian model. The exception to this is youth unemployment, because young people cannot get into a labour market where their elders are clinging desperately to the jobs they already have. That is a sign how, more generally, stubborn recession has exerted its downward pressure on wages rather than employment. Compared with the experience of the past, more of us have stayed in work, but at the price of carrying home a slimmer pay-packet.

This is the rut in which the UK is stuck, and it has to be said Hammond is doing little to get us out of it. Maybe achieving that would be beyond the powers of any Chancellor at the moment, but Hammond is certainly not erring on the side of bold if risky action. Brexit makes everything so much the worse. Its immediate effects are deflationary, with any benefits – if they exist – to come only in a longer term that the difficulties of the shorter term may postpone indefinitely. Of these, the main one is the plummeting pound which, together with all that debt waiting to be monetised, is bound to produce a surge in inflation. We are almost back to what in the 1970s used to be called stagflation – the worst features of a sluggish economy combined with the the worst features of a booming economy. These strains brought the social strife that led to Thatcherism.

So much for the UK: I do not envy Philip Hammond or Theresa May their jobs. But what of Scotland? Is there any greater hope for Nicola Sturgeon and her cohorts?

I fear the answer is no. We remain part of the UK economy, where our growth rate was already well below par. One of the goals the SNP set on taking over at Holyrood in 2007 was for Scotland’s growth at least to match the UK’s. There have been some small signs of improvement from time to time, but just at this moment the comparative Scottish performance is getting worse rather than better. In this respect, after nearly a decade in office, the Government of Scotland has been a failure. It gives me no pleasure to say so, but it is true.

Let us look for a little light in this dismal tunnel. One argument being aired in Scottish politics at the moment is that the UK economy remains by far the biggest influence on the Scottish economy, so if the one runs into trouble then so does the other. The same holds true of the Irish economy, so I am not convinced this adds up to a decisive argument either way on the point of independence.

Even before Ireland joined the euro while the UK did not in 1999, governments in Dublin had been making strenuous efforts to get away from their reliance on British markets. To some extent they succeeded, though that did not save them in 2007-08 from an even greater financial crash than ours. And at this moment, Dublin is still visibly torn between its past of trading primarily with the UK and the future it hopes for of trading if not primarily, then at least a great deal more, with Europe.

The Government of Scotland needs to follow that example, even if it starts a daunting distance further back on the same line of development. Probably, it can do little in the short term to protect us from the battering we are going to get from the economic setback induced by Brexit, added on to our inability to recover decisively from a long period of low growth, no growth or actual recession. Nothing Hammond said yesterday will help.

Yet we have to start somewhere, and just moaning about the UK Government’s hostility to Scotland, accurate though the point may be, is not the right place to start. We need to take a long, hard look at what we can do ourselves, even with fiscal powers that leave a lot to be desired, to get our economy on the move.

Above all, the Government of Scotland needs to make economic growth its principal policy, rather than just an incidental to the numerous other worthy aims it sets itself. The whole range of touchy-feely stuff about inclusion and sustainability is all very well, but none of it is going to make Scotland richer. If we concentrate on this sort of thing to the detriment of growth, then the UK Government will have the decisive argument in a second referendum: vote independence, vote poverty. And Scotland will not become an independent country.