Why has the British government pressed ahead with a programme to tackle its national debt, while America continues to procrastinate? It is a question that often crops up in conversations with British visitors to Washington, given the current US policy gridlock.

And there are plenty of possible answers. Britain’s parliamentary system, for example, makes it easier for a government to impose unpopular policies (particularly since they only face voters every five years). The close proximity of crises in Greece and Ireland has concentrated politicians’ minds. Britain is also more debt-laden and lacks a reserve currency. Unlike Uncle Sam, it cannot simply print money and pray: there is more pressure to act.

But I suspect that there is another factor at work too, of which I was reminded last week when I saw The Iron Lady, the biopic about Margaret Thatcher, at a cinema in New York: the sad truth is that Britain, unlike America, has already experienced austerity within living memory. More specifically, as The Iron Lady shows, it was only four decades ago that Britain was grappling with an economic crisis, cutbacks, protests and endemic gloom. And while nobody under the age of 40 remembers those days, they are baked into folk memory. Thus, for better or worse, British voters and politicians recognise the smell of austerity – or, more accurately, nod with grim familiarity when it is presented on a cinema screen.