Did the iPhone kill Britain’s productivity?

In the year 2007 Gordon Brown became prime minister, Northern Rock went bust and the iPhone was introduced. But something silently and invisibly calamitous must also have happened in Britain, because it was the year that productivity growth in Britain all but ceased.

Tempting though it may be to blame some or all of the above, no-one seems to be able quite to put their finger on it. It should, however, be the single biggest conversation in Britain because without productivity growth we cannot as a nation grow richer, and we cannot award ourselves above-inflation pay rises – or at least not without inflation catching up with them a few months later. As the economist Paul Krugman puts it, productivity isn’t everything, but in the long run it is nearly everything.

UK economic history since 1945 divides into four periods.