The Government needs to be careful that it doesn’t go overboard with this guilt trip.

We’ve got the glums in the UK. A poll by Ipsos Mori has shown that consumers in the UK are among the most pessimistic in the world when it comes to their country’s economic situation. The UK economy was thought to be in “a very bad state” by 34% of domestic consumers. Only the Spanish (63%) and the Japanese (41%)  were more down in the mouth than this.

In the developing world, by contrast, life appears to be a bowl of cherries as everyone heads for the sunny uplands. In India, an extraordinary 85% of consumers see their country’s economic situation as good. In China that figure is 77%, and in Brazil 65%.

Indians are amazing. In a country where 40% of the population live below the international poverty line – that’s 456 million individuals making do on less than $1.25 per day – nearly nine in ten of them still think everything’s great. That is a classic developing world phenomenon: when you’re down, and have been down for time immemorial, the only way is up.

Traditionally in the UK, we’ve been quite a sceptical nation. Steady and phlegmatic. We’re not quite as dour as the Finns but we don’t do wide-eyed, optimistic whooping, thigh-slapping and ‘way to GO!!’ stuff. (Neither do the Americans, any more. They are, according to the survey, only marginally less miserable about things than us at the moment: 13% of Brits see our economic situation as “good”, but only 18% of Americans feel that way.)   

Part of our problem at the moment is that the Government is going out of its way to make us feel bad, not good. We have all been very naughty indeed, Brits have been told, ad nauseam. So we have to stand in the austerity corner, without sweets or the full range of social security benefits, until we see the error of our ways.

I think Cameron and Osborne need to be careful as their Government advances into its next phase. Because if they continue to lay the ‘feel-bad’ edict on with a trowel, then consumer confidence – already pretty badly dented – will fall even further. That won’t benefit anyone. Vince Cable may have many virtues, but helping a nation feel good about itself isn’t among them.

Our economic plight is not as bad as the Spanish or the Greeks. If I was a Greek, I’d feel there was quite a lot to be miserable about at the moment – with next to no light at the end of the tunnel. I just hope that our low score on this survey is just a reflection of our slightly more cautious outlook generally, rather than the possibility that we’re all collapsing into an apathetic depression.