Britain’s economy has long been out of sync with much of the rest of Europe, and particularly the Continent’s two largest economies, France and Germany.
The model is different and the cycle is different. When Europe is up, the UK tends to be down, and when the UK is booming, Europe is often in the doldrums.
Ever since the Thatcher government of the 1980s, the UK’s economic model has also seemed to have more in common with that of the United States than the behemoths of Europe.
This juxtaposition is part of what made Britain’s membership of the European Union so awkward, and also what made membership of Europe’s monetary union effectively impossible.
Europe’s gravitational pull has nevertheless always been strong, and after the peculiarities of the last election, which left Labour with a commanding majority, it’s proving all but irresistible to our new masters in Downing Street.
Labour’s leadership wants both to rebuild bridges with Europe after the acrimony of the still relatively recent divorce, and seemingly to emulate its social and economic model.
Social charges on business are to be ramped up closer to those of Europe, worker and union rights are being redrawn to make them more like those of the big continental economies, and both taxation and public spending as a proportion of national income are being increased to approach European levels.
The oddity of this swing in the political pendulum, which by the way is almost certain to be accelerated by a second Trump presidency, is that it occurs just as the European social model seems to be failing as rarely before.
There could scarcely be a more powerful manifestation of European decay than news this week that the German car giant Volkswagen is seeking to close at least three of its German plants and slash worker wages by 10pc.
Downsizing of such magnitude is unprecedented in post-war Germany, and is deeply symbolic of an economy which after decades of apparent success, has badly lost its way.
Being more like them has long been an aspiration on the British left; with its history of industrial interventionism and seemingly harmonious partnership between labour and capital, Germany has obvious appeal.
Or rather, it did. Now in its second year of recession, you wouldn’t any longer want to be in Germany’s shoes.
I don’t want to stretch the parallels too far, because the differences are as great as the similarities, but Germany’s predicament is in some respects reminiscent of Britain in the 1970s, when a once thriving mass market auto industry was similarly plunging into the abyss, with catastrophic loss of international competitiveness compounded by increasingly fractious industrial relations.
The two most immediate causes of Germany’s travails are well known: loss of access to the cheap Russian energy supplies which once powered its industrial heartlands, and failure to prepare adequately for the transition to electric vehicles, leaving much of the engineering prowess for which Germany is famous high and dry.