But the industry uses endless ruses to avoid building affordable homes, and it carefully manages supply, sitting on its land banks to keep prices high. The policy is justified by trickle-down economics: let the housebuilders do their worst, and some of the homes they build might be affordable to the poor. She wants to rip down our planning controls, creating “investment zones” in which corporations and oligarchs can build what they want. It is within this frame that we should understand what Truss proposes. If money – which is all they know – can be magicked into existence, why can’t everything else? This mindset denies not only environmental crises, but material reality. They should get on with putting in the capacity so we can use what we want.”

Why? Water is the ultimate renewable resource, available in abundance on our planet. This summer, as the drought that now threatens our rivers and water supplies began, John Redwood MP stated: “The water regulators and companies want us to use less water in the years ahead. If you point out that the ecological collapse this causes will destroy every aspect of our lives, including our economy, neoliberals reply that resources are, in effect, infinite: minerals will continue to be found, ecosystems will renew themselves.

Our destiny, according to this belief system, is to turn nature into money. For “there is nothing in the preservation of natural resources as such which makes it a more desirable object of investment than man-made equipment”. The role of soil is to create a “temporary contribution to our income”, which we can then invest in other moneymaking schemes. Rather than seeking to protect the soil – the delicate ecosystem from which 99% of our calories are produced – Hayek says it makes sense to extract as much value as it can produce, exhaust it “once and for all”, then abandon the land. It inveighs against the protection of the living world. Margaret Thatcher was perhaps the book’s most famous advocate, and Truss now carries the flame. His frankly deranged tract The Constitution of Liberty enjoys almost biblical status among his disciples. The founding father of neoliberalism is Friedrich Hayek. For fundamental to this doctrine – neoliberalism – is the belief that everything on Earth can and should be turned into something else. It’s a mark of true faith, a sign that she is following her ideology to the letter. It is not a byproduct of her economic programme. T he ecological destruction Liz Truss plans to unleash on this country is not collateral damage.

Pipe dredge