A National Government

Only four more days to go before the nation has to decide on a new government. Many - including me - are still undecided and an important reason is that the right answer is "None of the Above". But if we take this route by nor voting or deliberately spoiling the ballot paper, we will get a government selected by others. The problem is that I cannot vote for what I really want. The No.1 problem that swamps all others is the economy. Even the problem is not simple and the answer is almost impossible to control. Only this morning the parties are again waffling on about £6 billion of cuts here or there. It is irrelevant bollocks. I remember incidents in the past where the powers that be argued about paper clips when the major problems were ignored. I think we are in that territory here. The politicians argued about things they could get their collective minds around while ignoring the monumental and complex problems that they could understand.

Let's put the problem simply - again. With present levels of government income, we need to cut government spending by 25% to just stop the deficit getting any bigger. If we do that immediately, we will potentially put 1½ million government employees out of work, reduce government income still further as the unemployment increase had a knock-on depressing effect on every part of the economy and put even more people out of work. In areas like the NE it would cause almost total economic collapse. We would be heading for another Great Depression. Whatever government is in office, it has to re-structure the economy, transfer labour from paper shifting bureaucracy into manufacturing and services which we can sell abroad and has to get young people properly educated to an appropriate level to enable them to meet the national needs and it has to encourage in every way possible the re-building of our industries. It will take 50 years to complete but we need to make a start going in the right direction. We cannot have a government that is not prepared to look beyond the next General Election.

It has been proposed that we build a new high speed railway network. This project should go ahead but only if we are determined to do it by using British companies and workers in all aspects of the project. Sure, we would have to buy some things from elsewhere but it should nor amount to more than about 15%. Building these railways is a vast capital project that will need a great deal of sophisticated engineering that we can subsequently sell to others. It will encourage more overseas investment in our country. Britain is after all, the country that built railways for the world. We should be ashamed if we cannot do it again. George and Robert Stephenson, Isambard Kingdom Brunel and the great railway engineers from the past you should all be living at this hour.

We should be increasing our investment into green energy via wind turbines and water power as well as improving the overall performances of existing power generation systems, road and rail vehicles, etc. there is much that can be done.

But can we get a government that can do it? The new government will have to get public finances under control and get the economy growing at something like 3% per annum [or better] and cut down on paper shifting. It is wrong to restrict the areas in which we can save money wasted on pointless administration. The NHS suffers on many occasions because it has its organisation disrupted by unorganised patients demanding treatment. But surely, it does not need one bureaucrat for every bed!

Such a re-organisation of the economy would be complicated still further by the turmoil in other countries. The European Union is in deep trouble and if the problems of Greece, Portugal, Spain, Ireland and Italy cannot be resolved - no mean task - then the Euro will either collapse completely - very possible - or the currency will devalue by perhaps 30% and that will knock back onto our ability to export. It may also devalue our currency as well. At this moment. the only currency that I feel confident will be capable of recovering is the dollar. But there are economies around the world that are basically sound and/or are expanding - like Canada, Australia, Brazil, China and South East Asia generally. I think India and Russia will grow but much more unpredictably. We need to improve our ties with these.

I would like a coalition or national government - which is more likely to take the right serious decisions than a one-party government that has every daft idea it comes up with dictated by dogma. Mrs Thatcher sold off our national assets to foreigners while banging on about the principle that private monopolies were somehow more efficient than public monopolies. There was a never a shred of evidence to support this but it is still quoted as a holy grail of right wing economic management. Look what we did to those old fashioned and very effective organisations called Building Societies. All of those that became free market banks have collapsed and some even gone into foreign ownership. How has this benefited our economy? Lacking Stanley Baldwin and Clement Attlee, my national government would be made up under Gordon Brown - surly and bad-tempered - as PM with Alistair Darling, Vince Cable and Ken Clark combined into a financial team that would be give all the authority they needed to sort out the economy. The other major posts in government would be spread between the parties. But I cannot vote for a national government. My best hope will be an alliance of Labour and the Lib-Dems. And we don't want to hear about the parties squabbling about who does what. Most of us believe that together politicians and the financial institutes got us into this mess, so now you can sort it out.

Will it happen? Don't hold your breath!

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