MAIL ONLINE: Abroad, our reputation lies in shreds. At home, an exhausted government is drifting, rudderless, from one crisis to the next.
Unemployment is rising sharply. The public finances are in chaos. The unions are threatening havoc and inflation is set to soar...
No, this isn't the tail-end of 2009 - though the parallels are painfully obvious.
This is the Britain of early 1979, in the dying months of the last Labour administration, as brought vividly back to life by papers released today under the 30-year rule.
Then, as now, our country's problems were stacking up so fast that national ruin seemed inevitable.
But as the papers so graphically remind us, waiting in the wings in the spring of 1979 was a politician with a radical blueprint for revival and the indomitable courage to turn it into action.
Even 30 years on, Margaret Thatcher remains a hugely controversial figure.
For many on the bien-pensant Left, she is still the butt of sneers, reviled as the petit-bourgeois grocer's daughter who ruthlessly destroyed jobs in the old nationalised industries.
For growing numbers of others, however - and the Mail has been among them from the start - she is recognised as the woman who rescued Britain from the edge of the precipice and did more for ordinary workers than anyone since the war.
Whichever side you may be on, it's impossible not to admire the sheer vigour and straight-talking honesty, brought to light in the 30-year-rule papers, with which she stood up for Britain and set about her task of reconstruction.
Foreign presidents, Tory grandees and obstructive civil servants can hardly have known what hit them when this whirlwind blew into Downing Street on May 3, 1979. >>> Daily Mail Comment | Tuesday, December 29, 2009
