The out of control profligate spending of the Blair and Brown years has got UK plc into a terrible position, we are in debt over our ears to an almost unimaginable level. The abysmal Labour maladministration left power with debts equal to about £15,000 for every person in the UK. But that isn’t the end of it, Government spending is like a supertanker, it can’t just suddenly be stopped or turned because of the sheer impetus that it has. So we are still accumulating debt at a frightening rate and we are still having to borrow immense amounts of money to cover this profligate spending.

Currently the government is spending an average of £6,500 PA per household more than it is earning.

And the more we borrow the more interest we have to pay on the debt mountain, so the less that is available for spending on goods and services. It is a spiral downwards where we are borrowing money to pay the interest on previous borrowings. So the sooner we balance the books the better.

There are two ways we can stop this deficit. One is to increase taxes by £6,500 PA per household. The other is to reduce government spending by £6,500 PA  per household. The problem with the tax route is that we are already being overtaxed (except for the non doms who get all the benefits of our government without paying for them) so there just isn’t the headroom to extract a further £6,500 PA per household. The only route is to cut spending.

The role of government is to provide the population with goods and services that they cannot provide for themselves. This means things like national defence and a road system. But over the years governments have taken it upon themselves to do much more till we ended up with the socialist nightmare of them owning major industries (only to run them into the ground with the help of the unions). Even after Margaret Thatcher’s excellent reforms the government still owns many things that it shouldn’t (the London underground, the Post Office, woodlands, etc) and still provides services that it shouldn’t (the whole parasitic dependency culture, Royal Navy drug patrols in the Caribbean, etc). So there is massive room for the cuts that are necessary.

Some people say (principally the misguided Labour party and their loyal supporters the BBC) that we don’t even need the existing cuts. They live in cloud cuckoo land, where do they think we are going to find that £6,500 PA per household? They say that cuts cause economic harm. Well they certainly cannot cause as much harm as the debts. And cuts can have a direct positive effect, for instance cut benefits and large numbers of people would be forced to work instead of just being dependency parasites, bring the army back from Germany and then we aren’t injecting huge amounts of money into the German economy. Also I have already explained in an earlier article that there is an excellent way to stimulate the economy to counterbalance the cuts.

The Conservatives made the big mistake before the election of ring fencing spending on the NHS and foreign aid. They now need to say  that they have seen the books and our situation is so dire and perilous that they are going to have to revisit this pledge. Which would be good because the NHS is immense and it is hugely inefficient. They are the epitome of waste. With aggressive reform the NHS could deliver the same (not very good) service that it does now for many billions a year less. And as for foreign aid, why are we sending British taxpayers money to India and China when companies from these countries are so rich that they are buying up great swathes of British industry? The Chinese government has more reserves than any other nation ever in history yet we still send them our taxes.

The BBC seem to be running an institutionalised campaign against spending cuts, they are running lots of anti cut stories and leaving them on the front page for a long time when there are lots of infinitely more important things going on in the world. You would wonder what their motives are in this. Certainly BBC executives don’t have to run a proper business, all they do is spend money that is given to them. If they were privatised they would soon get a far better grasp of reality.

The current economic disaster that the Labour party manufactured is actually an opportunity. We can make the move to a minimum government, low tax economy where citizens get to keep most of the money they earn. Where the vast bulk of the workforce is in the private sector providing goods and services that people actually want whilst creating wealth for UK plc. A dynamic, creative, successful country where enterprise and hard work are rewarded. It can be done and now is the time to start doing it.