There's a piece of fashionable political nonsense you should be vaccinated against before the virus hits us: a whole vocabulary of ministerial happy thoughts to which you'd best learn to block your ears.

The coming nonsense is that when this recession is over, countries such as Britain should seek and find our salvation in (in what will become a buzz phrase of 2009-10) a “new economic model”.

Wrong. Actually we're just stuffed. We hit a tree. There is no replacement economic model for us to drive off in. We must bash out the dents, clear the broken glass, remove the bumper from the front wheel, and limp on as best we can. We should accommodate ourselves to that prospect.

Instead, as our prosperity sinks, the politicians' rhetoric will go skyward. “New challenges”, “a new vision”, “post-millennial economy”, “thinking outside the box”... how wearisome this inspirational PowerPoint pap becomes. Already I can hear that most unlikely exemplar of the next generation of economic thrust, Lord Mandelson, of Foy and Hartlepool, now in his sixth decade, fumbling through ermine for the right intergalactic techno-patter.

He will not be alone. “One thing is certain,” the greying heralds of a new economic age will intone, hair tint running down their collars, “nothing will ever be the same again.” Hear, hear! How this stuff resounds around the gilded screens and neo-Gothic tat of the Upper Chamber.

Melancholy will be the spectacle of a range of middle-aged-to-elderly political throwbacks burbling about life changes and sea changes and gear changes and step changes for the British economy. “Post-recession Britain... new age... new economic dispensation... recalibrate... re-balance... blah, blah, blah.” Oh boy, is this nonsense going to sound wise. The riff will be that Western economies like Britain's must reinvent themselves.

Behind the curve, and banging the table as ever, Gordon Brown has not yet latched on to the rhetoric of the “new economic model”. He's still trying to kick life back into the old one. His reflexive response to calamity remains to try to get the wounded to their feet, and to pretend it hasn't happened. Yesterday on the Today programme he was still choking on words like “boom” and “bust”. Like those pensioners one witnesses taking an unfortunate tumble while boarding a bus, his instincts, and those of much of the political class, have been to stand up again as fast as possible and carry on.

So the talk until recently has been about “kick-starting” the old economy, and Mr Brown's immediate promise was to get mortgage lending back to the levels of 2007. Hah! This mindless attempt to return to routine is an indication either of the absence of imagination, or of panic. I've seen a mule that had just broken one front leg scramble back on to three of its hooves, then begin trying to graze again, desperately reaching for the familiar, though the poor beast was doomed.

But as it becomes apparent even to Mr Brown that there is to be no return to that golden decade of no hard choices and uninterrupted growth, he and his Cabinet will begin the search for something new in the Uplift Department to say.

Listen to Peter Mandelson already: this is how it will run. Although (the argument will concede) the old rust-belt industries of the 20th century had to go, Britain turned its back on industry rather too readily. We were bedazzled by financial services: fool's gold from the City.

Now (the argument continues) we must square up to the fact that Man cannot live by leverage alone. We need (wait for it) a new economic model. First, we must (argh) “rebalance” our economy. Government must seek out (key words) “a new generation” of manufacturing strengths, a second-wave industrial renaissance.

What, then, are these strengths? Our talent (runs the argument) for (key word) “innovation”; an “IT” (key word) generation; the potential of our existing (key word) “high-tech” industries and (key words) “high added-value” economic activity; and our (key words) “genius for invention”. Vital to all this will be (key words) “skills”, “training” and “education”. We should remind ourselves, too, of that inestimable resource available to our economy: English as a (key words) “world language”.

Nobody will quite say “white heat of the technological revolution”, because Harold Wilson said that in the 1960s and it became a joke.

Nobody will quite say “picking winners” because 1960s and 1970s Labour governments tried to do just that, and ended up picking some deadbeat car factories. Nobody will quite say “fast-forwarding into the future at an ever-increasing pace” because Tony Blair has used those words and they sounded silly first time. So maybe somebody brainy could coin phrases such as “virtual manufacturing” or “the circuit-board economy”...

And it will all be just so much hot air. What do people think India's growth is based on? Rice? What is it, precisely, that we do so much better than China? The truth is that some parts of Britain's high-technology economy, and some of our services industry, are strong already and can remain strong. Where there is potential strength the market has invested already without any help from ministers. However recently the ministers may have discovered promising parts of the British economy located outside the Square Mile, investors and customers can sniff out quality for themselves, and do, and did, even as far afield as Birmingham.

The non-City part of our economic landscape has not been held back by political inattention, and will not be significantly advanced by political patronage or speeches. Politicians don't “rebalance” economies. Market forces do.

This recession is not a failure of market economics. It is a reassertion of market economics after a decade in which we paid ourselves more than we were producing, and funded it precariously and temporarily by complicated credit instruments that it took a while for the market to rumble. Now a prosperity that always baffled ordinary citizens has collapsed. The collapse of confidence is not irrational; it's the correction to a long run of irrational confidence. All that stuff about the emerging Asian giants wasn't just phrasemaking for party conference speeches. It was true. We're falling behind. We face a mountain of debt: the difference between the life we are able to sustain and the life we were enjoying.

Politicians cannot do much to jack up the first. So it falls to them to arrange and explain a reduction in the second. The great task facing the next British government is to help the country to recognise and embrace its fate: that we should get poorer, and slip with as good a grace as possible into the world's second league. Yes, there is a rebalancing required: a rebalancing of popular expectation.

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