The people in power have no real belief that Plan A will work but refuse to even consider there might be a Plan B. They occupy themselves and the surrounding elite class bubble in which they operate with trivial concerns played out as if they were life and death ones, and the rest of the population are pacified with horse tranquilisers muscle relaxant.

Sound familiar? There is also inevitably a banker involved and someone who cannot stop herself from making dire predictions which her fellow travellers cannot prevent themselves from taking seriously.

Pedro Almodovar has come in for a fair amount of criticism for the perceived shallowness of his latest film Los Amantes Pasajeros (presented as “I’m So Excited” in English due to the prominence of the Pointer Sisters’ song in the film, but more literally translated as the on board or passing lovers). However what came to mind most strongly for me when watching it was Bismarck’s famous comparison between the making of laws and sausages (ie not a pretty sight). And indeed quite a few sausages are “made” during this film, under the influence of a “Valencia cocktail” with added mescaline, as all efforts are concentrated on sleepwalking to the planned emergency landing at an as yet unavailable airport in as pleasantly mindless a way as possible.

An economic policy in which only a tiny minority have any idea what is going on and only a tiny minority of that tiny minority feel able to influence what is going on in the cockpit is a shallow one. Perhaps we all need to get a bit more excited.