Remember the old song that begins: “Happy days are here again, The skies above are clear again, So let’s sing a song of cheer again, Happy days are here again.”?

You don’t need to be a grumpy old puritan to be thankful that a decade of overindulgence, bubble following bubble, and preening egos fed by Cheshire cat politicians whose every error is concealed by good economic tidings, is finally and emphatically over. But can we really squeeze some happy juice from the remaining husks of our collapsing economies and even Western civilization itself?

You bet we can. We’ll start small — just to get you in the mood.

Andy Wood, chief executive of Adnams, a brewing and hotels business, is quoted thus in today’s UK Telegraph : “… throughout East Anglia we are seeing fewer cars on the roads … That’s just one example. There are fewer people going to pubs and they are also spending on different things.”

Isn’t that what almost everyone has been working towards for years — fewer cars on the roads? And is he hinting at a curtailment of binge drinking, which has become a serious social problem in Britain? Coming from a brewer, that must carry weight.

In England, we were recently informed that unregulated immigration from Eastern Europe, thanks to the EU, and the same from the rest of the world, thanks to the Newish Labour government, would double our population in 30-40 years. Considering our population density is already ten times that of the United States, four times France’s and three times Germany’s, that would be a disaster and leave the country unrecognizable even to its own.

Now the word on the street is that half the East Europeans have left as employment dries up and the exchange rate becomes less favourable for them to send money home. The same is beginning to happen with all immigration as the government tightens up on benefits and entry restrictions, mainly, one surmises, to save money.

Better still, the twin projects of a government lacking coherence and competence, while simultaneously pursuing programmes of social engineering unparalleled outside the old communist world, are now exposed as lethal and highly unrewarding. Gordon Brown, a shambling, frightened figure these days, embodies the imminent death of this unhealthy movement. And it took the collapse of the economy to do it. We may regard that as a small price to pay.

I’m guessing that similar scenarios can be found in most other Western countries. In America, for example, where a liberal-left Presidential candidate has a real chance of victory, will a hard-pressed people vote for an untried, although worthy, man whose sketchy manifesto to date closely resembles Blair’s and Brown’s of a decade ago? Won’t they prefer the experience of an older man offering more of a hair shirt approach to the nation’s finances?

The greatest benefit of recessions is that they shake out the incompetent and the wasteful. Companies that should never have received the support of banks or private equity firms fall apart under the weight of highly-leveraged debt. It causes much hardship, of course, but it brings us collectively back to earth and to honest and careful accounting.

Foolhardy projects, like the euro-currency zone and the EU constitution, are revealed for what they are: the expensive fantasies of puffed-up politicians. They may just survive, unfortunately, but they will not be taken seriously in future, and the likelihood is that they won’t exist in ten years.

And what of all those little luxuries we’ve got used to during the past decade of higher disposable incomes? I always did prefer a measure of ebony tea in a cracked mug to a latte in a supercool coffee shop.

We may have had access to all manner of entertainments across a dizzying array of platforms, but in our exuberance we just didn’t notice that most of it was not very good.

Let’s face it, the good times are only really great in retrospect. As one who lived through the 1980s boomtimes in London, I recall them with some relish. On closer inspection, though, I can dimly remember the frustrations and problems too. What on earth did I do with all that money?

As a certain French general used to say, every weakness in your position can be turned to your advantage. That’s the spirit in which I approach the coming era of austerity.

How about you?