‘The Age of Entitlement is over.’ The words were Joe Hockey’s, delivered to an audience of ‘friends’ at the Institute of Economic Affairs London on 17 April 2012. Twenty-two months later, the new Treasurer explained that not only was the age of entitlement ‘over’ but ‘the age of personal responsibility’ had now ‘begun’..

So William Wordsworth famously invoked the romance of the French Revolution. ‘Reason’ seemed a ‘prime Enchantress’, going forward not in ‘favoured spots alone’ but across ‘the whole earth’. The ‘inert’ were ‘roused’, and ‘lively natures rapt away!’ No-one would seriously equate the storming of the Bastille in 1789 with the first encampment in lower Manhattan, 2011.