He'll ask how much I smoke

Tomorrow is the date of my annual visit to the GP for a dodgy-ticker assessment. There can only be three outcomes, the same pills, different pills or an appointment with the undertaker. It's always rather a fun thing. My GP is one of the sensible ones who knows which patients will react to nagging with either a raised eyebrow or a clenched fist.

I have been off the sauce for a few days to ensure my blood pressure will be lower than normal. There is no intention to mislead. Visiting someone who will measure your blood pressure causes a rise in blood pressure, so mine should be at about its normal level when he measures it. An unnecessary increase in the daily dosage of Amlodipine or Ramipril can then be avoided. The beta-blocker will always remain at the same dose as will aspirin and the statin, it is the blood pressure pills they twiddle. Having checked with chums in the medical world it is not normal practice to second-guess the blood pressure meter, so my breakfast and bedtime pill intake should remain the same as a result of a few days of painful abstinence.

One question he will ask is how much I smoke. He might or might not ask how much exercise I take or the general construct of my weekly diet but he will ask how much I smoke. For years I have told him that I buy one packet of cigarettes a day, I used to say a packet of ten now I say one packet because my consumption has crept up. It is a lie, then again it is not a lie because my medical chums tell me the usual practice is to either double or increase by half the level of smoking admitted to by the patient and my daily usage is usually between 30 and 40 little vitamin sticks (as I like to think of them).

What I never say or, indeed, lie about is how much I smoke. I only lie to him about how many I buy because I have absolutely no idea how many I smoke. The question "how many cigarettes do you smoke?" is really quite meaningless because there is no unit by which it can be measured. Some people are assiduous smokers, the ciggy is in the hand from the moment it is lit until the moment the last possible shred of tobacco has burned and puff furiously between those times. Others take an occasional drag and leave a long stub. Or you could puff furiously but leave a long stub. Or take regular but not incessant drags and leave any length of stub. Or the bus could come, requiring you to discard whatever is left of your heavily taxed sinful pleasure. Or or or. In each case a cigarette has been smoked to some degree or another.

The person who smokes every possible morsel of his little treat cannot smoke more than one cigarette for each cigarette he ignites. The person who takes one drag and then leaves it in the ashtray until it is burnt to the filter has also consumed one cigarette, although he has taken into his black lungs only a small fraction of the supposedly noxious fumes emitted by his conflagratory companion. If each of these chaps buys forty ciggies a day and treats each one in the way I have described how should they answer their doctor when asked "how many cigarettes do you smoke?" It would be accurate for them each to say "forty", yet that would tell the doctor absolutely nothing other than that his patient takes some tobacco smoke into his system forty times a day. How much he takes cannot be ascertained without further questioning, which rarely if ever happens.

Were such additional questioning to happen I wonder what the answers could tell the medical people? "I smoke forty a day and suck every last dribble of first hand smoke", "I smoke forty a day but only have one puff every ten minutes and don't inhale deeply", "I smoke forty a day, sometimes take a lot of the ciggy and sometimes take a puff or two and the rest drops as ash into my keyboard", "I smoke forty a day and have no idea how much of each ciggy I consume and how much burns gently in the wind" ... they are all forty-a-day smokers yet three out of the four probably inhale less tobacco smoke than a ten-a-day dedicated deep inhaler. There is no way in the world of any medical person being able to fine-tune treatment on hearing that someone "smokes" forty-a-day rather than ten or twenty.

Since my GP is not in a position to draw any clear conclusion, or to determine the appropriate treatment for my dodgy-ticker, from me saying I smoke ten, twenty, thirty, forty or more ciggies, I prefer to tell him the truth dressed in a lie. I will tell him I buy one pack of twenty every day (actually it's nineteen, not twenty but that just confuses things). He will note down that I buy/smoke thirty or forty and we will both be happy. His note will be correct, I know his interpretation of what I say will result in his note being correct, he won't waste time with advice on ways to give up smoking because he knows me better than to waste his breath like that, I will leave with a prescription for my pills for the next three months and life will go on. And neither he nor I will know how much I really smoke, nor will we really care.

I didn't watch it

You might not be surprised to know that politics is something that interests me. It interests me very much. When the prospect of televised debates between the main party leaders first arose my reaction was that it would probably be enormously good fun. The first debate has now been held. I didn't see it, I went out for a curry.

I went out for a curry specifically to avoid watching something I feel to be deeply damaging to the structure of politics in this country. I don't mean the debate itself, I mean what the debate represents, I mean the presumption behind it. That presumption is that elections are now about who will be Prime Minister rather than which party, if any, will form a government. More attention is paid to the person at the top of the big party tree than the policy platform. Of course that person has to argue policy and does so from within the confines of a published manifesto but the person is on display more than the policy.

To some extent the party leader has always been a highly significant part of his or her party's fortunes at the ballot box because the leader of the party gaining a majority in the House of Commons becomes Prime Minister, and the British public aren't keen on a patent incompetent holding that position. We last saw that in 1992 when Labour should really have won against a tired Conservative administration that had pretty much run its course. Their choice as leader and prospective Prime Minister was Neil Kinnock. The longer the campaign ran the more his inadequacies were exposed. As usual with those who prove themselves wholly unsuited to high office, he then cashed-in big time with lucrative positions in the EU. Kinnock failed because he was patently unsuited to the job.

Now we have moved to a new era, in which the position of Prime Minister is likened to that of the US President. It is an entirely false comparison. A President runs for election for that office and the people have a chance to vote directly for Presidential candidates. The US President is not a member of either House of Congress. He might find a Congress generally opposed to his position on many issues and there is nothing he can do about it (other than resort to blackmail, bribery and corruption). When he introduces a Bill to Congress he has to take his chance on whether it will be passed, even members of his own party cannot be guaranteed to give support. Over the pond they call it "checks and balances". The substance of it is the understanding that difficult issues require serious consideration and exposure to debate. Even an American President with a nominal party majority in both Houses would struggle to get some measures through Congess because the Representatives and Senators look first to their own prospects of re-election and only secondarily to party loyalty.

There are no checks-and-balances for a Prime Minister with a working majority in the House of Commons other than the occasional rebellion in the House of Lords. Commons business is so heavily whipped by the party machines that all sorts of absurdly bad laws can be forced through, as has been seen numerous times over the last thirteen years. That, more than anything else, is why it is wrong to hold Presidential-style debates between the party leaders. Of course we want our potential Prime Minister to be exposed to scrutiny, for fear that a Kinnock might creep through unnoticed. But giving them the trappings of Presidency without the checks-and-balances necessary to ensure they are leader but not dictator and exposes the country to a dreadful peril.

We are currently in the grips of exactly that peril as a result of less Presidential elections. An economic illiterate was allowed to dictate governmental economic policy for a decade as the price for Mr Blair enjoying the trappings of the highest office. For Mr Blair it was a price worth paying, as his present bank balance shows. Both Blair and Brown were unassailable in Parliament because there were no checks-and-balances to prevent strict party discipline delivering them a majority in every vote that mattered. That deficiency pertains today. It can only be made worse by the general election being promoted as a Presidential race because it will strengthen the power of the Prime Minister without weakening the power of his slavering party machine.

What makes it worse at this election is that everyone knows they are not telling the truth about how they will deal with the government's annual deficit. They are all scared to tell the truth for fear that it will cost votes. So we are being asked to vote for a President and can only guess at their central economic policy for the duration of the next Parliament. To make it worse still, if they did tell the truth the one whose position is most sensible in the long term would probably lose most votes.

Brillo brings the Knife from the Kitchen

I have a lot of time for Mr Kitchen, as I will always know him, the new leader of the Libertarian Party. I also have a lot of time for his blog although some of the language is not to everyone's taste. He occasionally wishes nasty diseases or a painful death on authoritarian bigots as a conclusion to his demolition of their arguments. What cannot be ignored, however, is that he does demolish their arguments far more times than not, exposes them for what they are and then adds some choice abuse. On many subjects he writes with care and authority, for example much of his writing on the great global warming hoax is now becoming mainstream. The "bad" language is little more than window dressing. There is no more chance of him visiting physical violence on the victims of his linguistic attacks than there is of me winning the lottery.

On the first 5th of November stroll I chewed the fat with Mr Kitchen over a few pints and found him every bit as sincere, serious and knowledgeable as I expected. At that time Ian Parker-Joseph was the LPUK's leader. On his resignation from the position a few months ago Mr Kitchen was elected leader. At the time it was obvious that his sweary blog would be used against him. A so-called interview on the Daily Politics show on the BBC consisted of Andrew "Brillo" Neil summarising some of the things said in one post on his blog and asking whether it was appropriate for the leader of a political party to write such stuff.

Some have commented that this was an irrelevant and unjustified approach, (for example, here) but I don't agree. Nor, it seems, does Mr Kitchen who has closed his old blog and started afresh as Mr Knife. Dabbling in politics as an observer and commentator is one thing, asking people for their vote is another entirely.

I know that my vote is practically powerless in a constituency occupied predominately by those dependent on the State, those naive enough to believe big government does good and those rich enough to put their money out of the way before spending other people's. That doesn't diminish my vote in any way in my eyes. It still puts me on a par with everyone else on election day, it is still something my parents' generation fought to retain and it is still something most of the world would love to have if only they could. It also counts in the overall voting statistics which have relevance above and beyond the result in any one constituency.

A new political party has a choice between being serious and being frivolous. I have no doubt LPUK is intended to be serious. It might only have 450-odd members now and it might only be fielding one candidate at the general election, but every party has to start somewhere and I agree with much, but by no means all, of the general policies it puts forward. It represents a serious line of political thought. And that is the problem. It is putting itself forward as a serious, albeit small, political party and is standing behind a leader whose intemperance of expression is so unorthadox that it distracts attention from what the party is trying to say.

Not only does it distract attention but it provides a different focus for attention. With politicians of the main parties we spend a lot of time asking what they really think. We hear them speak against a background of distrust caused by too many years of flim-flam, flip-flop and fudge, so we dig around and see what we can find about them when they are not "on-message". Much of the material dug up by such enquiries formed the basis for Mr Kitchen's vitriolic character assassinations. No doubt he wrote from the heart. He was not "on-message" because there was no message only a calculated analysis of the failings of others. Now he has stepped into the limelight and complaints are made (vicariously, I have not heard any complaint from him) that he should not be subject to the same treatment. Sorry chaps, it doesn't work like that. Sauce - goose - gander.

The heavy price of stardom

Now that I have been recognised as a spokesman for Britain (I think that's what this article means) it is incumbent upon me to cast aside frivolous topics and launch even deeper than before into the national and international psyche. Topics of the greatest moment must now be addressed when previously I felt they were beyond my compass. Fame has a price and here is where I start paying. I must turn to matters of the trouser.

An American gentleman by the name of Eldrick Woods is rather good at hitting a small ball with a stick, indeed he is the best ball-sticker in the world and has been for some years. He is also rather proficient with a more intimate stick, on which his wife recently found the wrong colour of lipstick. Mr Woods felt it necessary to drive his car into a tree, take a break from work and hold a sickly press-conference at which he vowed never to do again that which he has never been able to resist in the past. Perhaps he really meant that he will never again succumb to the temptation of extra-marital fleshy pleasures, perhaps he really meant he will strain every sinew not to get caught again, only time will tell.

It should be so obvious that it need not be said, but I'll say it anyway. Some people require a lot of rumpy-pumpy to feel comfortable in life and others are perfectly happy with a little bit every now and then. Some prefer to rump and pump with a number of different people and others prefer to have just one intimate companion. Some prefer those younger than them, others like them older. Some prefer the same pigmentation, others prefer a more cosmopolitan life. Some prefer the same gender as them, others take a more conventional approach to the ins-and-out of human anatomy. Some grunt, some squeak, some moan, some sigh, some use objects other than bodily parts, some use bodily parts primarily designed for other purposes and some are happy just to put the kettle on and make a nice cup of tea.

I really couldn't care less what someone wants to do with their reproductive equipment provided they don't do it to me without my consent or to anyone else without their consent. And it utterly defeats me to see why it should be the business of anyone other than those involved.

Mr Woods played away from home. So what? His wife probably claims to be upset, shocked, dismayed, appalled, betrayed or disgusted and maybe she is one or more of those things. So what? What's that got to do with you, me or anyone else? He's not the first golfer to have got involved with a bit of rough or to have treated his wife in a less than fair way and their marriage is not the first to encounter this particular hazard. There is no reason for him to bunker-down out of sight or to give up his lucrative career. Two schools of sanctimonious humbuggery have condemned him publicly and each is a complete nonsense. The first is the "role-model" argument and the second is religious.

The "role-model" argument is that Mr Woods is the most prominent golfer in the world and should set a good example to the young in everything he does. What utter bilge. It supposes that impressionable youngsters will develop bad habits because their hero is a naughty boy. Find me an alcoholic who says "I do it because George Best was my role-model". Go on, find me one. Find me a youthful golfer who turned from placid to violent when John Daly won the Masters or the Open Championship or a rugby player who turned from beer to cocaine because his favourite player was Lawrence Dallaglio. Find me a man or woman who was turned into a serial adulterer after reading a biography of Frank Sinatra or into a kiddy-fiddler as a result of their love of the "music" of Gary Glitter. Go on, find me one. If you believe in the role-model argument please spend the rest of your life hunting for these invisible creatures, it will keep you from doing any greater harm by expressing your deranged opinions.

Then there are the religious zealots who damned Mr Woods for defying their god's law. They are right, of course. He did defy their god's law. So what? What has it got to do with them? If he is a member of their club they can cancel his membership for breaking the rules. If he is not a member of their club their views are a complete irrelevance.

The final round of the 2010 US Masters tournament will start with Mr Woods in third place. He has a very good chance of winning it. Whether he wins or not will have nothing to do with his willy and everything to do with the way he hits a ball with a stick. Whether he wins or loses he will still have rumpy-pumpy sensors that will guide some of his time when not on the golf course. Somehow I doubt that they will be exercised exclusively in the matrimonial bed. Either way, it will still be none of my business and none of yours.

Tax still matters to ordinary people

The single most significant policy announcement in British politics over the last three years was a call to reduce tax. Overnight the opinion polls delivered a substantial Conservative lead from a position of virtual stalemate. The announcement was, of course, the proposal to increase the threshold for Inheritance Tax to £1million.

As the formal election campaign started the first dividing line between the parties concerned a tax, National Insurance. The Conservative lead in the polls, which had been falling, appears to be increasing again after they said they would increase this tax less than Labour.

Everyone I talk to tells me they think they pay too much tax. I really do mean everyone, including businessmen engaged in cash intensive fields such as small shops and restaurants who have (and, I suspect, take) the opportunity to trouser a fair few quid out of sight of their accountants. The point made to me is always the same: "I work bloody hard and don't see why the government should take so much of my money".

There are some who add that others should pay more tax so that they should pay less but I have spoken to no one who thinks they should pay more. Were I to come across such a person I would inform them that voluntarily additional tax can be paid and ask them how much they plan to give. It is one of those wonderful damned-if-you-do-and-damned-if-you-don't questions. If they plan to give more they are damned for not having done so already, if they don't plan to give more they are damned for saying one thing and doing another. The question is not just a cute trick, it goes to the root of all arguments for more tax to be levied.

Whether that argument is put forward by an ordinary individual or a politician it is entirely legitimate to ask whether they practice what they preach. After all, what reason can they have for not volunteering additional tax if they believe the current level is too low? It seems to me there can only be two reasons.

They might argue that it is not fair that only they pay more. Were they to take that approach they would have to acknowledge that tax is a burden unmatched by a concomitant benefit. Were it beneficial there would be nothing unfair about an individual volunteering to give the Treasury an extra £1,000. It would be no different from that person volunteering to pay £1,000 to charity when his co-worker on an identical salary gives nothing. Give to charity and the least you can say is that you have done something that might benefit others, indeed there can be no other justification for doing so. They would never consider tax to be akin to charitable donations.

On the other hand they might argue that one person paying additional tax will make no difference whereas everyone paying more will provide sufficient funds for good things to result. This is a sound argument, to a point. Incidentally it is exactly the reason why any step taken to reduce the UK's carbon dioxide emissions is a complete waste of time and money. Even if human CO2 emissions are potentially harmful there is absolutely no point us doing anything about ours unless all the big players do something substantial about theirs, which they won't. That is beside the point but is worth saying anyway. Back to the point, the second reason for not volunteering additional tax rests on the presumption that more people paying more tax will have beneficial consequences.

The prospect of additional Inheritance Tax being put to good use did not prevent a policy of limiting that tax causing a surge in support for the Conservatives. I believe there are three reasons for this.

First, it is entirely natural for parents to want their children to have a more comfortable life than they lived. Leaving the material profits of your life to your children is part of that instinct and has become part of the culture of this country. Inheritance Tax does not lead to the question "why should the government take so much of my money" but a slightly different question, a question of greater emotional impact: "why should the government prevent my children getting my money?"

Secondly, whether you approve of current house prices or not the fact remains that an awful lot of people have a net worth substantially above the current IT threshold of £325,000. You can't get a one-bedroomed flat in many parts of London for £325,000. The proposed increase of the threshold to £1million is not about those with assets worth £1million or more, it is about those with assets worth between £325,000 and £1million. In many parts of the country that encompasses Mr Average. What is seen and promoted as a rich man's tax is hitting the non-rich and they don't like it.

Thirdly, it provided a first dab on the brake pedal after more than a decade of the tax accelerator being pushed ever closer to the floor. The view expressed to me in private discussions was suddenly out in the open as part of mainstream politics. People think they pay too much tax and a politician said, in relation to one tax, that he agreed they should pay less. It was an important moment because it broke the consensus in a way that accorded with the view of many voters.

Of course there are now enormous additional costs for taxpayers to bear as a result of the government spending billions of pounds it doesn't have. But that does not change the fact that people resent paying additional tax when they see no additional benefit resulting. We are not yet at the position of the people saying "we will pay this much and no more, you must cut your cloth accordingly". I can't help thinking that the effect on the opinion polls of the Conservatives' IT proposal and their position taken on National Insurance in the last week might result in that view coming to the fore.

Where is the leadership?

Now that Her Majesty has fired the starting pistol and the official election campaign is underway I am looking forward to a month of bluffs and blunders from both main parties. All politicians issue the occasional slip of the tongue or put forward the occasional idea that falls apart under close questioning, what seems different this time is just how many errors are being made by so many of the leading figures.

I try to tell myself that it might always have been the same and that I only notice it now because I am older and better able to detect these things. Yet I keep finding the same thought going through what is left of my mind - the people at the top of the main parties today are lightweights. We mustn't be too rosily-spectacled about it because there were plenty of pretty ordinary figures in the cabinet in the 1960s-1990s who have faded from memory and would appear just as hopeless as today's bunch, however they were not only few in number but balanced (and overshadowed) by a lot of truly substantial figures.

The current cabinet must be the weakest we have ever had to endure. State their names and the instant reaction of most of the country must be: "who?". Denham, Burnham, Woodwood, Alexander, Murphy, Cooper, Ainsworth, Bradshaw, Adonis, Royall ... who? These are totally insubstantial figures with no history of achieving anything, no notable speeches or policy idea on their CV and no public profile. The remaining members of the cabinet elicit recognition, usually accompanied by a laugh at the thought they could hold such high positions in government or a reaction of hostility resulting from years of incompetence and lies. The shadow cabinet isn't much better. Grayling, Spelman, Herbert, Lansley, Villiers, Hunt, Gillan, Clark and several more ... "who?"

Before the watershed elections in 1979 and 1997 far more names were known. In 1979 most of the shadow cabinet had either been in government under Ted Heath or had been well-known spokesmen for their party for several years. Most of the shadow cabinet in 1997 had been in one senior position or another since before the previous election in 1992. And in both cases they had been exposed to the public as their party's main spokesman in their designated area of policy.

Today the concentration of presentation into the hands of just a few people - Brown, Mandelson, Darling and Harman for Labour, Cameron, Osborne, Hague and Clarke for the Conservatives - ensures the continued anonymity of the others. Anonymity is not the only consequence, though. The concentration of publicity into a few hands tends also to concentrate the making of policy into those same hands and accentuates the recent trend for more and more governmental decisions being taken by fewer and fewer people.

And who are those people? What have they ever achieved? What is their vision for the future of the country? For all I know they might have a vision. People did so in the past and exposed it for debate and public scrutiny. Even the most subversive scum of Old Labour had a vision, we read about it in their 1983 election manifesto; they were not scared to put it forward and face the risk of being exposed as the hypocritical totalitarian filth that they were.

Today none of the political leaders dares say boo to a metaphorical goose for fear of a minuscule drop in the opinion polls or a "tut tut" from a focus group. Principle does not guide them so they cannot provide any real political leadership by letting us know where they want the country to go and what they want they want to achieve. If ever they start down this path they soon abandon it for want of an immediate bounce in the opinion polls.

Perhaps it is the lack of principled policy that causes me to look on them as lightweights, perhaps it is that far too few of them have had a proper job or excelled when they did have one, perhaps it is that I am now older than most of them, perhaps it is that I give unmerited weight to some of their predecessors, perhaps it is that I am frustrated by their desire to hide the truth about the long-term cost of the current state of the government's accounts. One thing is certain, however. You cannot lead a country effectively unless you have a clear plan because you will lurch from crisis to crisis by nothing other than the jerk of a knee. We've had more than a decade of that. Enough is enough.

Taking money out of the economy

Sometimes I read something so obviously upside-down that I think I must be missing the point. So it is with the result of the long weekend's thinking by the current government spin team. In a nutshell, the government plans to increase employers' National Insurance contributions whereas the opposition say they would increase them by less. The Prime Minister and Chancellor mounted a twin attack, both of them saying the Conservatives' approach would "take money out of the economy". It's so very bizarre that I have had to wrap a cold towel around my chins in order to try to make sense of it.

As a general rule it's sensible to start at the beginning, so I will. Employers' NICs are a tax payable by an employer as a penalty for having the effrontery to give someone a job in the private sector. Income tax and employees' NICs are deducted from the gross wage or salary so that the employee receives less than the headline amount they earn. Increases in these taxes do not require the employer to pay more for the same job. But employers' NICs are a tax payable by the employer in addition to the contractual wage or salary. Any increase adds to the costs of the business.

Call me a simple fellow if you will, but it seems to me that when Mr Patel has to pay extra to employ old Doris on the till that money must come from somewhere and go somewhere. We know it comes from Mr Patel because he's the mug who pays her wages. So, paying this additional tax takes money from the economy in that it reduces Mr Patel's spending power and might mean he has to satisfy himself with fewer extras when next he visits Madame Fifi's Sauna and Hanky-Panky Parlour. In the language so beloved of our Keynesian friends, it reduces aggregate demand. The other side of the coin is that the money goes to the Treasury to be spent on something, we know not what. On the face of it the reduction in spending power caused to Mr Patel is matched by an increase in spending power for the lucky recipient of his largesse. One set all, new balls please.

It follows from this that if Labour wishes to bleed Mr Patel for an extra £15 a week and the Conservatives want to take only an additional £7.50 nothing at all is lost from the economy. The same amount of cash is sloshing about except that on one proposal £15 of it sloshes at the Treasury and on the other that £15 is split equally between the Treasury and Mr Patel. You see my problem? Where is the loss?

No doubt you could invent ways in which leaving money in the private sector amounts to a loss to the UK economy, for example if it is paid as dividends to overseas investors and therefore leaves these shores (subject to such tax, if any, that they pay on it over here). There could also be a drop in aggregate demand if some of the money is saved rather than spent and, on a particularly warped view of reality, that could be said to be a loss to the economy. Again, however, that is to look at only one side. Marginal businesses can be tipped over the edge by modest increases in their staffing costs and a reduction in profits reduces the money available for investment (I mean real investment not government-speak investment). And what happens to Mr Patel's money once the government has it? We know it will be spent but also know that a lot of it will not be spent on anything that adds value. We also know that interest payments on government debt will not all stay within the UK economy.

The argument that taking less tax removes money from the economy is moronic humbug. If they were concerned about taking money from the economy they would not have racked-up hundreds of billions of pounds of debt on which interest must be paid. And if they were honest they would say "we need to take more tax because we are spending too much and we think there might be more votes in taking it from filthy capitalist pig employers than by raising taxes that the little people will feel directly."

It seems to me there is something more sinister behind this piece of spin. Taking it at face value they are saying that government spending is of net value whereas private sector spending is a net cost to the country. It is obvious nonsense and we know it is nonsense because they claim recovery from recession will be fuelled by private-sector economic growth. Nonetheless, it sets the scene and tells the lie they want the little people to believe, namely that everything government currently does is essential and beneficial and once we are over the current difficulties the government can be even more beneficial by doing even more things. There is not a hint of them looking to cut-back the number of things government does in order to balance the books and make a start on repaying the enormous debt their incompetent profligacy has created.

What is even more worrying is that the Conservatives do not seem to want to grasp this most essential nettle either. We can argue about the benefits of street football consultants, grants to the arts, five-a-day advisors and carbon footprint investigators until the cows stop farting. Perhaps there is some benefit perhaps there is not. What is certain is that these sorts of activities are fripperies, they are luxuries, they are most certainly not essential. The only way we can make any serious inroad into the annual deficit and then into the massive accumulated debt is by cutting out spending on non-essential things.

I wonder whether the heart of the problem is the seductive concept of aggregate demand. An awful lot of UK GDP depends on consumer spending. In the private sector wages and hours are being cut so that businesses can survive and one consequence of that is that the employees have less to spend and, therefore, their local shops and eateries are suffering. There is a superficial attraction in maintaining levels of public-sector pay and employment so that the detrimental effect of private-sector belt-tightening is not exacerbated by public sector employees also spending less. The attraction is only superficial because the private sector is dealing with reality whereas the public sector is seeking to avoid reality.

There is no escaping the fact, for fact it is, that we simply cannot afford all the things we enjoyed three years ago. One could say we couldn't really afford them then but that is beside the point. We did pay for them and now we can't so we have to cut them out of our budget. There is no escaping that in the private sector because there is no magic money tree - you cut costs or you go bust. If you go bust everyone loses their job so people have agreed pay deferrals or pay cuts or reduced hours or to cover a vacancy using existing staff without any additional pay because they know the short-term saving in costs might allow them to have a job next month and next year. It is a great example of the benefits of breaking union power, a task which cost lots of jobs in the 1980s. The result is that businesses which would have had to fold a generation ago can now survive. They will still have to keep their fingers crossed about what the future holds but at least they now have a future.

You can bleat as much as you like about aggregate demand but that won't keep alive a struggling business. Only cutting its costs will keep it alive. You can say "you must keep paying your people the same amount otherwise they can't spend and other businesses might fold" to which the answer is "so you want me to fold instead and guarantee that those other businesses fold too". That is the reality.

Maintaining public sector spending will mean more cash in the tills of the businesses the public sector employees frequent but it comes at a cost. That cost is the need to raise additional taxes to pay the shortfall between current tax receipts and government spending and that has an effect on future spending power which necessarily dampens future aggregate demand which, in turn, makes it all the more difficult to generate the income from which those additional taxes are paid.

I've been more than usually circuitous today, but we are now back where we started. Taking one amount rather than another in tax does not take money out of the economy. But taking money out of the private sector inevitably prevents as much wealth and money being generated as would occur if you left that money where it was. The reason for that is that only the private sector can make the stuff to replace what we consume every day. A factory making bread doesn't just pump-up aggregate demand by paying wages that are then circulated around the system, it also makes something that is needed. Take tax from the business and from its employees and you reduce their ability to spend thereby reducing aggregate demand. Pay that tax money to a five-a-day advisor and there is no change to aggregate demand because it is taken from one person who would spend and given to another who has exactly the same amount to spend. But you don't get any bread from a five-a-day advisor's work. We are worse off not better off by keeping these non-value-added jobs.

That is what the politicians should be debating because we simply cannot afford roughly a quarter of what the government currently spends and that proportion will increase as they continue to overspend and incur further interest charges.