This General Election campaign 2010 is only 5 days old but so far it has been absolutely awful. Three days have been spent swapping insults on the matter of up-coming National Insurance increases - is it the right thing to do; how it is a tax on jobs; how it is opposed by business leaders - many of whom contribute to the Tory Party; and so on. It is all waffle. In the last financial year the government borrowed £168 billion; it is currently borrowing 25% of everything it spends; more than 20% of those in work are employed by the state. The accumulated National Debt is £848 billion - about 60% of GDP. Even in the boom times between 2002 and 2007 this government increased the debt from 29% of GDP to 37% of GDP and since 2008 the debt has spiraled out of control. Almost.! The cost of interest payments on this huge debt is about £30 billion per year. Even these appalling figures don't tell us everything. The government has huge commitments which do not show on the balance sheets for public sector pensions and the hidden cost of the PFI schemes - wondrous projects that allowed us to build hospitals and schools in a way that kept the costs off the books but which cost us very much more than they would have done had we built them in the old-fashioned way using properly accounted money from the exchequer. The burden of these astronomical debts is absolutely crippling. Irrespective of all other incompetence, whoever takes over the running of this country has to come up with some very severe schemes and programmes to get things under control - otherwise, we really will be bust. We are not far off bust already and that is why this is so important. A few pennies on or off NI contributions next year is neither here nor there. But none of the political parties tells us anything. The three economic spokesmen have agreed that there will have to be cuts deeper than anything Mrs Thatcher did - but still no details. We can't carry on like this. And for all those politicians - and there are plenty of them in all parties - who think that Mrs Thatcher was some political wonder-woman, I think it is important to remember the catalogue of decisions made by her government which were wrong from day one and which have crippled the nation ever since. Her most catastrophically wrong decisions concern energy. We generated a large percentage of our electricity from coal - and we still do - but because this blasted woman did not like Arthur Scargill and the power of the unions, she embarked on the ludicrous policy of shutting all the pits - bringing in a right-wing American industrialist to help do it. Now, although we have coal reserves that would last for about 400 years buried under this country, we import coal for our power stations from Poland and the USA. At the same time the ridiculous woman encouraged power generators to burn gas to generate electricity - so we squandered away our gas reserves as well. Now just to keep the country going we have to import gas from Norway, Russia [God help us] and others. It is absurd but the damage is done and it is permanent. In spite of the uncertainty of our gas supplies, we also have the lowest storage capacity for gas of any country in the major countries of the EU. I hope all the stupid people who supported Mrs Thatcher will remember this. I will talk later about the Poll Tax, privatisation and the transfer of so much of our essential services to foreign companies - something that Harold Macmillan likened at the time to selling off the family silver. As a PM Mrs Thatcher was almost as bad as Blair and that is saying something.
Can I spot among the three men vying for the job of PM in this General Election someone who will lead and inspire this country again? Errr...............No!
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