Budget

The most amazing thing about the budget is how even this Labour government showed no interest in reducing expenditure. In the next two years they will borrow more than every Government in the last three hundred years, and yet they are not even interested in basic reductions in expenditure. 

It shows that they have given up hope for the Labour Government and have therefore decided to sacrifice the future financial prosperity of this country. Their actions can onyl make things so much worse for an incoming Conservative government: the cuts that will have to be made will be painful indeed.

There are the cuts that are so obvious and simply must be made: ID cards, cutting down and time-limiting benefits, cutting quangoes and agencies, moving the public sector to the same pensions system as the private sector. But there are going to need to hard cuts for a Tory Government to make; for example, we cannot spend billions on a replacement for Trident in the current situation.

Labour Debt

Listening to Dan Hannan yesterday evening at the South West Surrey Conservatives annual dinner, I was particularly struck by his comment that UK debt will be bigger in 2009 than at the end of World War II.

That is quite extraordinary. After 6 years of fighting Hitler to a standstill, we were less indebted than after 12 years of suffering Brown. And not only has Brown built up this debt, but he has done so without a single parliamentary vote: he has shepherded the mother of Parliaments upstairs and locked her away in a cupboard. At least Nero only fiddled while Rome burned. Brown has filled up the fire-engines with petrol and is hosing fuel over the dying embers of our economy.

When will Brown and Labour (and the media that still support them) realise that you cannot fight a crisis born out of debt with more debt; that today's debt will destroy jobs tomorrow as the productive economy is squeezed still further. Families are facing ruin because of Brown, and more will do so. The thing that makes me despair is that Brown still has 32% in the polls from his carefully bribed and purchased client state, and he only needs a further 4% to secure his majority and continue his destruction of the UK.

And all this from a man whose only electoral mandate is some 20,000 Scots. Even Robert Mugabe felt the need to have the people of Zimbabwe put Xs beside his name to legitimise his rule. But not Gordon.