Lies, damned lies and pretend conventions

Last weekend the shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer expressed concern that the government's chosen method of tackling recession could cause a collapse in the value of Sterling. The Prime Minister's answer was to tell one of his big fat lies by claiming there was a convention that the opposition should not seek to undermine government economic policy in times of recession for fear that it might make matters worse.

My dim memories of the early 1990s, when the UK was last in recession, are not of a Labour opposition cheering the government to the rafters and pledging loyalty to the then Chancellor and Prime Minister. My recollection is that they said exactly what the Conservatives are saying now, namely that the government had mismanaged the economy for over a decade and needed to change course if the worst effects of recession were to be avoided.

1991 was a long time ago and many a week has passed when FatBigot Towers has witnessed the consumption of more than the recommended number of units of alcohol, so I thought I'd see if I can find what poor Gordon, the serial liar, said at the time. Well well, what a surprise. He opened a debate on the 30th of January 1991 and put forward a motion in the following terms:

"That this House is concerned about the deepening recession which is bringing rising bankruptcies and closures, falling output and investment and fast rising unemployment hitting all regions and all industries ... condemns the Government for the economic mismanagement that has created a recession ... calls for an immediate reduction in interest rates, a Budget for investment in industry, and a modern industrial policy ..."

The debate is recorded in Hansard here. It is interesting to note that, in addition to doing exactly what he says the opposition is not allowed to do in a recession, poor Gordon the serial liar was criticised for not engaging in debate but steamrolling a series of disparate points in what one MP described as a "Gatling gun approach". Another objection was to his refusal to allow others to interrupt him to seek clarification of what he meant. These flaws in his character, so often commented on today, were well established almost two decades ago.

Not content with attacking government policy on the 30th of January 1991, poor Gordon the serial liar did so again at some length in a debate on the Budget on the 25th of March 1991 (here), then again on the 13th of June (here), the 16th of October (here) and with specific interventions in debates on a number of other occasions that year. He cannot claim to have forgotten dedicating a whole year of his parliamentary life to doing exactly that which he now says is contrary to established convention.

There is only one explanation. He is simply dishonest to the core and prepared to tell deliberate contrived lie after deliberate contrived lie to further his tenuous grasp on power. It really is a most extraordinary way for a Prime Minister to behave but then we have never before in my lifetime had a Prime Minister devoid of any of the qualities required for the job.

I won't name Baby P

I haven't named Baby P. Others have and I doubt that they are wise to have done so. Although it is highly unlikely that any of us have read or been served with a court order preventing him and two of his abusers being named, we are on notice that such an order has been made because it is mentioned in newspaper, television, radio and online reporting from the main news media.

There are usually only two reasons why such an order is made. The first is to prevent any siblings of the dead child becoming the object of prurient interest and the other is to ensure that any further court proceedings are not prejudiced by what happened to Baby P. I believe other proceedings are pending against Baby P's mother and her boyfriend, perhaps the order will be lifted once they have been concluded.

It is often difficult to tell whether an order that someone should not be named will have a real effect on a subsequent case. The judge or jury hearing that case will have to decide it on the evidence called during that trial and it is common for arrests to be reported in serious cases without the disclosure of the identity of the arrested person prejudicing his trial a few months down the line. Of course there is a risk of the jury being affected by what they read in newspapers or saw on the television, but even in the most serious and widely publicised cases they are able to draw a clear distinction between what they heard before going to court and the evidence called from the witness box. Indeed, it is the very nature of news reporting that only a summary can be given and even that is rarely based on full knowledge of the facts, once the full story is heard it becomes clear that news reports were far from comprehensive so they can readily be put to one side by a jury. In the few cases I was involved in that were the subject of newspaper or television reports there was so much cherry-picking of juicy bits and quoting of attention grabbing soundbites out of context that it was hard to see how they could have affected the court in any way.

One relevant factor is the time lapse between conviction for one gruesome offence and trial for something else. Where one trial follows hot on the heels of another there is a greater risk of prejudice so the court would be a little more inclined to make a gagging order, but even then such orders are rare. Of greater importance is the need to protect any other children from becoming objects in a media circus. It is not uncommon to find other children of homicidal parents being taken into care and placed with foster families or for adoption. For those children the arrangement is a new start and, in some instances, a first opportunity to live in civilised surroundings with people who will care for them properly. It is not their fault that they were born to unmitigated scum and if they are to have a true fresh start the last thing they need is unwarranted intrusion reminding them, and informing those around them, of a past that should be left behind forever.

The reason it has been possible for some to name Baby P, his mother and her boyfriend is that their identities were disclosed in news reports shortly after his death. Some of those reports have remained accessible through the BBC website (and others) although they are not on open display. It takes someone with far greater knowledge than me of matters computery to find the reports, but for those in the know it is a simple task. The information is available for all to see in back issues of newspapers and anyone who wishes to do so can identify the people concerned by spending an afternoon in the local library. At first sight this might appear to make a gagging order utterly futile, but in real life very few would bother to scour the papers in order to find information they are not at liberty to dissipate without being in contempt of court.

Of course the question does arise whether it really is a contempt of court to disclose information which is already in the public domain. As I understand the law, the mere fact that information is available does not provide an absolute defence, it all depends on the particular circumstances. Where the purpose of an embargo is to prevent information being disclosed for the first time, the fact that it is already generally available will render the embargo pointless and any breach would not normally be found to be a contempt of court. It is different where the purpose of the embargo is to prevent information that is available to a limited extent being spread further. In order to justify an order of this type being made there would normally have to be a strong reason for seeking to prevent further publication. In the case of Baby P the reasons would appear to be protection of siblings and prevention of unfair prejudice at subsequent court proceedings. Without knowing a lot more about the circumstances I cannot begin to assess whether the judge's order could be challenged.

And that, in a nutshell, is why I am not prepared to name Baby P, his mother or her boyfriend. To seek to put my judgment, based as it is on limited knowledge, ahead of that of the judge in order to satisfy a desire to ensure that the great British public knows the full story would be to make a decision I am not qualified to make. I simply do not know enough about it. Even if I felt I did know enough about it and that the gagging order was not made on solid grounds, it is not for me to take the law into my own hands. An argument I have read from one of those who did make the disclosure on his blog is (and I paraphrase) that he did so because it is wrong for Baby P to be referred to anonymously when he was a human being and should be entitled to the dignity in death he was not afforded in life. It is a view with which I have great sympathy and I am sure the time will come when those with greater knowledge of the case than me will feel it appropriate to lift the embargo. But it is not for an anonymous blogger to make that decision when there could be repercussions which cause harm to other innocent people.

There is also a wider issue, one which has also been in the news recently. More than one cabinet minister has made noises about censoring blogs or requiring them to be licensed or supervised in some way. Of course the ministers say this is for the benefit of the public when it is actually to seek to suppress criticism of the government. To have an anonymous blogger apparently taking it into his own hands to ignore a court order in a sensitive case seems to provide just the sort of ammunition the government would need to justify its plan for censorship.

Those who argue against any control or regulation of blogs use the most powerful argument of all, namely that bloggers are subject to the law already and further regulation of content is as inappropriate as it would be for the government to dictate what newspapers are allowed to print. To adopt a vigilante approach to reporting one case on a blog is to assert that the rule of law does not extend to that blog and, by implication, to blogs generally. It is an unsound position to take and should be resisted. Let the rule of law apply to everyone. If you claim it doesn't apply to you, you can hardly complain when the government acts as though it doesn't apply to them.

I'll cough my own way, thank you

Today I have a feeling of impending doom. For over a month I have had a persistent cough, actually not one cough, a number of different coughs. It started as a general tickle causing occasional clearing of the throat, then it turned quite productive and seemed to come from every part of my lungs. An over the counter chesty-cough syrup seemed to sort that out nicely until a few days later when it resurfaced in its dry and tickly form. This was followed by a fever lasting a couple of weeks in which the cough was secondary to an extraordinary phenomenon of sweating profusely through the scalp at night. As soon as that died down, I woke regularly at night for several days with a burning sensation through the lungs and today it is a hacking noise centred around a spot in the middle of my chest which reverberates with a deep hum every time an uncontrollable need to cough overcomes me.

As a smoker of long standing my first thought is of lung cancer. I don't think it is cancer because I'm quite good at spotting people with cancer, they often have a grey pallor and bits of them that look as though they are naturally plump are actually thin; I don't seem to display either of these qualities yet. My last chest x-ray, in 2005, was clear but a lot can happen in almost four years so maybe I should have another. Therein lies the quandary. What if it is lung cancer, what should I do?

I suppose the obvious answer is that I should have a little light zapping if it might be susceptible to that treatment. Yes, that's relatively painless and won't interrupt my life too much. I don't think I'd want any chemical treatment because the side effects are just so very nasty. Although I don't have a lot of hair to lose, the little I have is in fine shape and any feelings of nausea I experience should always be preceded by a good evening on the booze not by a jug full of glowing green gunk squirted into my spindly arms through a hypodermic needle the size of a baby's leg. This is all very well at this stage when the prospect of lung cancer is just a thought, just a theory. How, though, would I react if it were real? What pressures would I feel that are not imposed on me by my morbid daydream?

The answer for all of us is that we simply do not know. Acquaintances and relatives of mine have suffered cancer and chosen different paths. Some have opted for every treatment under the sun and in some cases life was prolonged, albeit at the cost of severe temporary discomfort. Others have weighed the quality of life they would experience in the event of successful treatment and decided that they would rather die sooner than go through both the treatment and the resultant diminution in their faculties. In one instance the person concerned delegated the decision to members of the peculiar religious sect to which she belonged and followed the advice she received. There was also one acquaintance who decided to side-step both treatment and a steady decline by jumping out of a bedroom window and allowing the concrete below to act as his relief from suffering. Different people took different courses for different reasons. None of them was objectively right or wrong because there is no right and wrong about it, or to be more precise there is no wrong about it.

When faced with a number of options about our future we have to decide what to do. Often making one choice will preclude others from being tried later and if the choice we make proves not to deliver the desired result it might be tempting to think it was the wrong decision. In fact it was no such thing, it was the right decision because it was the one we felt was right at the time.

It seems pretty obvious in the UK in 2008 that we should each decide for ourselves whether to seek treatment for a serious medical condition. The same can be said of a decision to take our own lives but it was only in 1961 that committing suicide and attempting to commit suicide ceased to be unlawful. It was just one of many examples of the law changing to reflect changes in the general morality of the country. Where once, and for a long time, suicide was generally considered sinful, the falling influence of organised religion allowed the people to form their own view rather than having one formed for them.

A troubling trend in this country is for views to be formed for us again, just as the churches did for hundreds of years, and for a single approach to certain issues to be the only permissible approach. This new morality is not based on any ascertainable principle but on a moveable feast of temporary political trends. Perhaps the most obvious example is the way the principle of non-discrimination on the grounds of race has spawned unprincipled calls for thinly disguised quotas to increase the number of people from ethnic minorities employed in certain fields. It has taken on the cuddly name "diversity" and has become an end in itself in all areas of the public sector while increasingly being forced on the private sector as well. There is no principle to it, indeed it breaches the central principle of non-discrimination. The principle is that you should not refuse employment to someone because of their race, to do so would be unfair and unacceptable. It necessarily follows from this that the best person should be employed for the job regardless of race. If it happens to be the case that all the best people for a particular job are Kurds, then only Kurds should be employed; if all the best people are members of a particular African tribe then they should get the jobs and if all the best people are pasty-faced Brits the office should be full of pasty-faced Brits. To require "diversity" necessarily requires some people to be employed because of their race rather than their abilities and that means people of another race are refused employment precisely because of their race. In other words, the principle against discrimination on the ground of race is breached in order to achieve an unprincipled political objective.

To argue against the "diversity" agenda is to risk being labelled a racist which, in the eyes of the most politically correct, places you in the same category as predatory paedophiles and mass murderers. Because they have a political cause they cast principle aside while pretending they are acting on principle. Only one opinion is permissible and that is the opinion they happen to hold at the moment. The target of their attention can shift in the blink of an eye. Those bored with "diversity" turn to the environment. They take the principle that humans should not pollute the planet and subvert it by pretending that all sorts of harmless or, indeed, beneficial activities amount to pollution. Having lumped drilling for oil along with dumping chemicals in rivers as acts causing pollution they seek to stop the drilling. Having defined carbon dioxide as a pollutant, activities creating carbon dioxide must be stopped regardless of the benefits they provide. The tentacles of these subverters of principle extend into every area of life these days and gullible governments believe there are votes in it so they hand out vast sums of money to support these otherwise unemployable maniacs.

There are signs of them infecting the world of medicine. It is unacceptable to use tobacco, to add salt to your food, to drink alcohol, to eat fat (by which they mean meat); calls are made for treatment to be restricted for those who commit these modern sins. There is no principle behind it, although they claim the principle is that taxpayers should not have to pay for treatment for those who deliberately do harm to their health. Yet if this were the principle they would not allow treatment to anyone injured while engaging in dangerous sports or while driving a car without proper care. They cannot make such a call because it would expose their position for the nonsense it is, so they choose just a few soft targets and seek to impose their one-size-fits-all attitude to our dietary habits. To argue against them is to risk being labelled a reckless murderer of the weak-willed. Only one opinion is permissible.

How long, I wonder, will it be before they turn their attention to the treatment of serious illness and what will be the single permissible opinion? They have shown their hand already in their approach to dietary matters, the prolonging of life is more important than the quality of life. They can measure longevity and claim its extension as a success for their project whereas quality of life is immeasurable and can give them no statistic to use for political ends. Once dedicated to quantity over quality they have only one course to follow, they must require everyone to undergo life-prolonging treatments. Refusal to do so will be unacceptable because it will show that the patient does not understand what is in his best interests. It is far more important for them to use my tortured lungs for their own ends than for me to decide how I wish to live out my final months. Watch this space, choice of treatments will be restricted for our own good.

I had a nice cup of tea while writing this and have stopped coughing, perhaps I might make it to Christmas after all.

A weekend in Washington

The way the BBC is reporting it one might be forgiven for believing this weekend's meeting of the political leaders of nineteen of the largest economies in the world will cure all financial ills. In fact they can agree anything they want and it will make little difference to anything. After all, if they had a magic wand it would have been wafted around months ago and recession would have been avoided.

It is obvious what will happen, indeed it has already been presaged in early press conferences. They will agree to seek to stimulate their economies through tax cuts to boost consumer spending and tax funded projects to boost spending yet further. In the background developing countries will demand vast additional handouts from the West, in the foreground bland desires for better this and better that will announced and everyone will go home claiming it was a huge success. In some countries it will work, in others it will make things worse, in most it will make no difference whatsoever and overall recession will end when it would have ended anyway. This weekend's gathering is a collosal waste of time and money.

The single reason for the current mess is that previous apparent growth was funded by unsustainable credit which is no longer available. The amount of money available to be spent is reduced because people can no longer borrow as they have for several years. Even if they could borrow, many will not now do so because they have existing debts and it is time to pay the piper. It is all so simple really. If you earn £500 a week and spend £520 the time will come when you have to reduce your spending to below £500 and use the balance to repay what you have borrowed in the past. Just reducing your expenditure to what you earn will involve a 4% fall in spending, yet it is not a fall in wealth it is an adjustment so that your spending equals your wealth rather than exceeding it. For years the UK economy has been boosted by people spending money they do not have and it is now time to take that false wealth out of the equation and start living realistically. The current recession is all about matching the apparent wealth of the country to its actual wealth. In a way it is not a recession at all but a removal of billions of pounds of self-delusion. In exactly the same way, the fall in house prices is not removing genuine wealth from anyone it is removing fictitious wealth which has caused householders to suffer from self-delusion.

The real challenge is to remove self-delusion from the public sector. The seed for doing so is being sown this weekend. Even poor Gordon has had to acknowledge that if you want to maintain consumer spending in order to help manufacturers and retailers weather the storm, government must stop taking so much out of every wage packet so that individuals have more to spend. If, as seems to be the case, he believes that is good for the economy when times are hard there is the tiniest scintilla of hope that he might realise it is good for the economy at all times. For the first time in his political life he has had to concede that individuals can spend their money better than government can spend it. Is there a chance that he actually believes this? Time will tell, but it is encouraging that he has taken the first tentative step towards fiscal continence.

When people are spending their own money they seek value for every penny and they keep an eye on things. The businesses they deal with know they have to provide a good service or the customers will go elsewhere. The more goods and services that are subject to those market pressures, the better the quality of what is provided and the better the value for money. It has long surprised me that some people call for government to nationalise businesses and run them "for the people". After all, who would you trust more to provide groceries of good quality at a good price, the government or Tesco? Tesco makes huge profits whilst delivering excellent value for money, it is the best possible evidence that profit is a good thing not a burden.

Poor Gordon is, of course, holding on to one delusion with such a vice-like grip that there seems little chance of redemption. He is steadfastly refusing to countenance a drop in government spending of any kind. Part of me accepts that axing the hundreds of thousands of non-jobs currently supported by taxpayers would not be a sensible thing to do during a recession because it could exacerbate the downturn. Another part of me says that the sooner the heavy cost to the taxpayer is eased the sooner we can come out of recession. At all times we should be realistic. Current levels of government expenditure are based on the false notion that the country is far wealthier than it really is. The bloated public sector grew on the back of fictitious wealth created by the credit bubble. In so far as it was sustainable at all, it was only sustainable out of the fictitious wealth. Explosion of the fiction necessarily means that it is no longer sustainable and must be cut back.

That side of the equation will not be addressed by the great and good this weekend. If the time comes that Gordon has to run cap in hand to the IMF for emergency funding one condition they will impose is that the government cuts layer after layer of worthless fat. That is exactly what was required when the last Labour administration brought the country to its financial knees in the mid 1970s. If Gordon has any sense he will take the lead and realise that non-jobs are exactly that. He has a fancy term for creating non-jobs, it is "endogenous growth theory", the rest of the world calls it burdensome waste. After he has primped and preened himself over the next week, telling everyone who wants to listen (and many who do not) that he has saved the world economy single-handed, he will have to face reality. Reality requires the end of big government and a return to value for money. He won't be able to do it because he is too stubborn. Creating the biggest of big governments in the Western world is something of which he is immensely proud. To him it is an end in itself. To the rest of us it is an unaffordable dead weight - a pretty good description of Gordon, if you ask me.

Poker or casserole, otherwise no pot thank you

I have never taken any illegal drugs. Not even a Clintonesque uninhaled experience with cannabis. Yet I am a chain smoking alcoholic. My smoking and drinking contributed to a severe heart attack at an early age and another will surely follow because I have hardly changed my ways. Through all the years I have been clogging my arteries and turning my liver to fat, not a single temptation to take an illegal substance has crossed what I laughably call my mind. I wonder why. It seems to me there are probably three reasons.

The first is that they were never part of my life growing up. I was as unsociable a child as I am an adult, parties and noisy clubs have never been my thing so I was never in the places where I might have been expected to be exposed to drugs. Even at university I never saw any one taking anything I knew to be an unlawful narcotic and I was never offered anything of that kind.

Secondly, I have always associated the use of illegal drugs with a desire to rebel whereas I have always wanted to be part of the establishment. One thing that sticks in my mind from the 1970s is how absurd and naive I always thought hippies to be. Stupid clothes and loud hair seemed to me signs of the arrogant and selfish. The more they tried to stand out through their appearance the more I interpreted them as saying "look at me, look at me, see how special I am, I'm not like you little people". It seemed rather pathetic, all the more so when they idolised multi-millionaire musicians for their stands against capitalism. Paying to make some people rich in order to complain about other people being rich has never seemed very sensible to me.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, it is illegal. I'm a rather passive sort of chap when it comes to the law. Like it or loath it, I will abide by it. Maybe that makes me a dull and unadventurous old fart but it's the way I am. Possessing certain substances is against the law so I am heavily inclined against doing so.

Sometimes I ask myself whether my attitude would be any different were these substances available lawfully. Would I forgo a bottle of wine and take something else instead? Maybe I would, in fact I suspect it is more than likely that I would, or at very least that I would give it a try. Because it is illegal I am not even prepared to give it a try. The legal-illegal divide is, I suspect, of importance to a great many more people than just me. Living in a society with laws in which the vast majority seek to abide by the laws is something which helps form the stable country we are. It is probably more cultural than rational, but our default position is to abide by the law. Something that is illegal is on the wrong side of the line so we would need persuading before we were prepared to try it.

Those of us who have difficulty restricting their consumption of the legal drugs alcohol and tobacco might have good reason to be grateful that other drugs are prohibited.

Euro recession? Yes and no.

It's official: the Eurozone is in recession. But is it? The BBC tells us it is and then tells us Germany and Italy have contracting economies, Spain looks likely to follow but France doesn't, at least in the short term. It made me wonder about something at the heart of the Euro experiment.

Looking at the UK alone, the spread of industry around the country gives rise to inevitable conflicts of need. Manufacturing industries which use imported raw materials and sell predominently at home benefit from a high-value pound, whereas those using domestic raw materials and selling overseas would benefit from the opposite. There is no way economic policy can be ideal for both, so a balance has to be struck. Urban populations can operate pretty well without great use of private motor vehicles whereas scattered towns and villages are heavily dependent on them. Petrol and diesel taxes will hit the latter much more than the former. In all areas a single economic policy for the whole country throws up conflicting benefits and detriments. In some fields there are ways of easing the burden for those hit hardest by a policy which is generally beneficial but this cannot always be done, particularly where there is an international element and no scope for different rules for different parts of the country - exchange rates are perhaps the most obvious example of this.

When you gather a number of disparate countries together and operate a single currency with a single exchange rate and a single bank base rate the problems are multiplied. Manchester and Chichester have very different needs from economic policy, it is so much more so for Germany and Greece. When recession bites the UK you will still find some areas where people say it simply does not affect them because the business they are in is cushioned from the buffetting that other industries face. The government must do what it can to counteract the effect of recession in those areas that are hit and this might have adverse consequences for the areas not affected. It is difficult enough in a single stable country but the bond of stability and nationhood allows it to be done without rioting in the areas for which the cure is worse than the disease. Is there anything holding Germany and Greece together such that measures required to help Germany will just be accepted in Greece even if they do damage? Why should the people of Greece put up with such a situation when independent economic management would avoid it?

Maybe the bond of Euroness is stronger than I think. Maybe the smaller countries feel they get a benefit in good times which outweighs both the lack of self-determination and any adverse impact in bad times. Or maybe there will be cries of "why should we?" when they are forced to make sacrifices that their own national position does not require.

In the next few months it will be interesting to see how France reacts. If they stay out of recession and are forced to swallow bitter pills because the Germans and Italians are in trouble I can see our beret wearing chums getting a bit uppity. And it will all be so totally unnecessary. The whole Euro experiment is totally unnecessary. You don't need a single currency in order to trade effectively between countries, you don't build stability into diverse economies by policies which actually suit no one particularly well and you don't have room for swift and effective local action if everything is decided by a committee operated like a supertanker with fifteen competing captains.

We can all learn from how other countries do things and make the right decisions for our own country by combining our local knowledge with our observation of how particular policies have fared elsewhere. The concept that a single policy can be suitable for such diverse economies as Spain, Finland and Slovenia seems utterly absurd. The Euro experiment will now be tested as it has not been tested before, with any luck the lesson learned will be "small is beautiful".

Gordon's money tree keeps on rattling

A few times each year groups of doctors write letters to the serious newspapers claiming that their speciality is underfunded. Psychiatrists state what is, for them, an obvious truth namely that mental health is at the heart of all human wellbeing. A few weeks later it is the turn of gynaecologists to tell their obvious truth, namely that all wellbeing stems from a happy birth. Then come the bone menders, the liver wobblers, the blood curdlers and all the rest of them in turn displaying a narrow and patently blinkered vision of the world. None of them ever suggests which of their colleagues should have to forgo funding to pay for the extra their department needs. No matter how much money is pumped into the Stalinist bureaucratic maze that is the National Health Service there are always calls for more as though money grows on trees.

Now we are seeing the same attitude being shouted every week from the audience of Question Time. The cry is always the same: "If they can find all that money for banks they can find it for ...". Be it schools, hospitals, social workers, army, wildlife refuges, housing, roads, railways, museums of ancient woodcraft or any other subject you can imagine, the cry is always the same. I think these people really do believe government should spend unlimited sums on every pet project or cause and that there will never be any repercussions. In a way their position is entirely logical because the government did just promise billions to banks without telling the people that any not repaid by the banks would have to be repaid by them out of taxes. Even if that message had been sent, the numbers are so vast and the money seemed to be available so quickly that the message would in all likelihood have been lost in a haze of fluttering £50 notes.

I wonder what would have happened if the government had said "we are considering bailing-out the banks and to do so we will raise income tax by 10p in the pound from next Tuesday". The answer is pretty obvious, the outcry would have been so loud and threatening that the plan would have had to have been scrapped, so instead there was no mention of taxes rising. The problem, as we are now witnessing, is that it is looked on as free money sitting on a money tree somewhere in Downing Street and there's plenty more where that came from.

It is a good example of the need to be honest so that everyone can understand what is happening and, in particular, can understand that every penny spent by government must be raised from tax. No doubt all those calling for greater spending would understand that it must come from tax if only someone sat them down and talked it through, but our politicians don't do that any more and for a decade that fundamental truth has been hidden. While the credit bubble was creating false wealth and taxes were being levied on that false wealth no one felt any real pain.

The Stamp Duty paid on an inflated house price was overtaken within a few months by the nominal increase in the value of the property. You didn't want to give the government £10,000 for the privilege of moving home but it seemed a small price to pay as you read in the newspaper that your new house is now worth £35,000 more than you paid for it. It's still a £25,000 profit in a few months and poor Gordon is "investing" the other £10,000 in public services, all is well with the world.

And so it was also with stealth taxes. They don't come in big clumps but as little bits here-and-there. Many go unnoticed, some cause a stink for a short time and are reduced a little or an increase is delayed, but then they just become part of life. You cannot evade them so you just put up with them, but all the time you have enough spending money available on the plastic or by remortgaging your house and releasing the £25,000 profit, so life is more comfortable than ever before and the additional taxes cause no pain that is not more than compensated for by a nice holiday, new electronic wizardry and a fridge with two doors.

All this time the government is spending more and more and locking ever greater on-going expenditure into the public psyche. The message is that it's "investment" and we all know investing for the future is a good thing. The message is that it's "prudent" and we all know that means there's no waste. The message is that it's "vital public services" and we all know that the opposite of vital is dead. It's all beneficial, it's all necessary it's all affordable because there is no more boom and bust. The psychological effect is pervasive, it changes the public mood and the public perception. The perception is of endless growth allowing the vital public services to expand without pain. People believe that stuff. That it is nonsense with a hat on is neither here nor there because the exercise is not about rational analysis but about persuading people that they are getting more and more from government without having to pay much more for it. Yes, you notice the extra taxes but the vast figures bandied about whenever spending on "vital public services" is announced seem so much more than the extra you are paying that you're making another profit to add to the profit on your house.

That is a very dangerous perception. It is built on layer after layer of half-truth and exaggeration from poor Gordon but examination of his veracity takes second place to the perceived profit-on-profit you are making from his time as Chancellor of the Exchequer and Prime Minister. You actually believe that he is making money from nothing because he is spending billions and billions yet you are only paying hundreds. It's the numbers game I adverted to a few days ago - when the numbers get so big we cannot comprehend them, they take on a life of their own. Before you know it you believe he has a money tree, then he tells you he has a money tree because he is finding endless billions for the banks without even hinting that you might have to pay for it, so you want some of the rich fruit for your favourite cause.

That is how people fall for the guff. That is what causes them to say "if he can find money for the banks he can find money for [insert pet subject of your choice]". It will take a long time and some harsh lessons for this absurd inversion of the truth to be removed from peoples minds. In the meantime we will continue to hear calls for the money tree to be shaken again and again. Only honesty can undo the damage and there is no prospect of the current government being honest, to do so would be to change the habits of a political lifetime.