Paul Danon

The INLA have obliged Mr Brown by allegedly decommissioning their arms soon after the late-night policing-agreement between the big parties. Parliamentarians’ expenses are to some extent kicked into touch with the charging of three MPs and one peer. Brown can now try to shift the public gaze on to Ashcroft and Tory funding.

After £200bn spent on money-printing he has achieved the (admittedly only 0.1%) growth he wanted, while the Tories are in a mess on policy and loath to commit on the detail or extent of cuts. Only mavericks like Mr Redwood are allowed to point out that just 1m of the 6m state-jobs are front-line; only he can suggest that, rather than fostering recovery, government-spending is preventing it and making an Icelandic crash more likely by the day.

Mr Brown must know in his heart that he will have a job getting an absolute majority, even though the electoral arithmetic is biased in his direction. He will be considering damage-limitation, perhaps the possibility of another Lib-Lab pact to hold-on to Downing-street. Brown will have kicked himself for not going to the country early in his premiership. He could then have claimed that, unlike Callaghan and Major, he would immediately seek a mandate - no coat-tails prime minister he. He must now wonder if it’s worth risking the opprobrium of wasting millions (more) of public money by having a large part of the country go to the polls twice in two months.

Although Ulster may be neutralised, at any moment Iraq, Iran or Afghanistan could turn nasty. Transport-workers and civil servants threaten and carry-out strikes. Worse, Greece, Spain and Portugal could drag not just the eurozone but the whole EU into a bigger debt-crisis. Iceland was quarantined because it wasn’t in the union let alone the single currency; it could crash and burn without setting light to the rest of Europe. The club-Med countries aren’t insulated in that way. Britain, though benefitting from its free-floating pound, and maybe not as bad as the so-called pigs, has the worst housekeeping of the G7. Our AAA remains at risk, particularly now the money-presses have stopped rolling.

In other words, Gordon’s tiny bubble could quickly burst, maybe when one international financier tips the wink to the market and decides the UK’s time for asset-stripping has come. A market-crash on the eve of an election could undo any psephological advantage that Labour has, giving Cameron the landslide he doesn’t deserve.

In Downing-street this evening, the prime minister must peer at his tea-leaves, wondering if the soggy configuration augurs better for April or May.

With the accelerator stuck down, control can be lost and this can result in a terrible crash. But enough about the economy. Dreadful business about Toyota.

Politicians say that all that’s needed to save the economy (and with it our nation and our security) is a little tweak here and there. You know, the odd billion in cuts. Wiser heads know better. Suggestions for discussion:

• sell all national assets - palaces, parks, museums, galleries - the new proprietors may still let us visit them for a fee
• reduce the school-leaving-age to 14 and enable head-teachers to expel at will thereafter, including for economic reasons (I predict that serious students will work harder)
• privatise tertiary education (the money will go where the research is needed)
• replace all benefits and state-pensions with a single system of outdoor relief administered through the tax-system
• make the health-service pay-as-you-go with relief for the poor
• levy a single rate of tax on every penny of all income (if you must)
• transfer much of the tax-burden to consumption, especially of luxuries
• close all quangos and the BBC
• abolish local government (let companies bid to collect the bins and mend the roads)
• devolve full power to Belfast, Edinburgh and Cardiff (saving the English taxpayers’ subsidies)
• scrap nuclear subs (they’re immoral to possess, let alone use)
• withdraw from all overseas bases and territories
• repay the national debt and pass a law so that no future government may borrow ever again
• have tax-free enclaves in depressed areas where UK and foreign manufacturers can set up factories in which the otherwise unemployed can make goods to export to compete with China
• aim for food-self-sufficiency.

Not that radical, really.

Congressman Paul says: “The aggressive intervention by Hoover and Roosevelt … turned a short recession into the great depression.” He blames the depression on “the Federal Reserve’s orchestrated excesses of the 1920s.” He suggests we’re making the same mistake again - giving yet more disease to an already-diseased patient. Full text.

Here’s his prescription:

• Balance the budget by reducing spending
• Change [US] foreign policy to that of non-intervention
• A full audit and more supervision of the Federal Reserve leading to abolishing the Federal Reserve
• Legalize competition to the Federal Reserve with competing currencies
• Regain respect for civil liberties and privacy while reigning [sic] in the CIA
• Wean ourselves off the dependence of wealth transfers by government
• Abolish crony capitalism: no subsidies, no bailouts, no regulatory or tax privileges to protect the powerful elite, especially the military-industrial complex
• Eliminate the income tax, inheritance tax and taxes on savings and dividends.

And, gosh, he is controversial. He opposes a message of condolence to Haiti because of the aid- and foreign policy-commitment it contains.

Politicians are between a rock and a hard place. To revive the economy, they must cut both taxes and spending. The state is a burden on growth and the audit-commission says it’s madness to ringfence education and health. The rock is the need to cut-back the parasitical state. The hard place is that few will vote for that. People have ludicrously high expectations of what government should provide for them by right. Even conservatively-minded, mid-50s folk like me who have paid tax for almost 35 years are hacked-off at being told that they must now work till 66 or older when, before, we were told how automation and robotics would lead to a life of leisure. All this time we’ve been told that public spending was investment. When do we (apart from those who have worked for the state) get our dividend?

Raging in the mind, heart and soul of modern woman is the battle between feminism and femininity. These two value-systems present contradictory role-models - one assertive, the other yielding, gentle and nurturing. Women thus conflicted think they need to switch attitudes, sometimes during the course of the day, sometimes during the course of a single phone-call. All this confuses the hell out of men, many of whom were told by their dads not to play rough with the girls the way they did with their mates. The call to be a gentleman is undermined by machismo, especially if the macho person confronting you is a woman.

Underlying all this conflict and disorder is the rights-culture which encourages me to think that, not only are certain things desirable, but I can use force to get them. One looks in vain for such an attitude in the foundational documents of Christianity. The commandments, beatitudes, Lord’s prayer and creeds give rights a wide berth and, instead, focus on wrongs, and on duties. We don’t demand our daily bread from God but ask him for it. In fact, Christianity does much to undermine the rights which, judging from their behaviour, many folk think they inalienably enjoy - rights to rage, defame, deceive, manipulate, judge and withhold forgiveness.

Human rights look particularly absurd when you realise that, not only are we creatures, but that God holds us each in being from moment to moment. If you’ve still got a thing about human dignity, try printing this blog out and reading it on the loo.

• Good only as far as she goes, Ann Coulter writes on Christianity.

Mr Peter Hitchens has written a fascinating blog on how old Labour found its new liberal mission and got Britain into the social (not just economic) mess it’s now in. Here is his coda: “I think we could now agree that mass immigration was an error and should be halted; that integration is better than multiculturalism; that crime should be punished hard from the start, and disorder prevented; that the poor should have access, through merit rather than money, to the best schools and universities in the country; that national independence is essential for proper national debate and for any real change; that council housing was better (and cheaper) than housing benefit; that men need to work; that families need to be married and permanent, that industry needs to be protected from unfair foreign competition.”

I personally quail at integration, state-funded meritocracy, council-housing and protectionism, but it’s more of a conservative manifesto than we’re currently being drip-fed. I expect that, properly presented, it could appeal to many folk who vote Labour because of their social class (or the fact that they work for the state) rather than because of any leftist ideology (i.e. most of them).

Sure, it’s a bit frightening. I’ve never dropped litter but I bet most of you reading this have (and fag-ends do count). The argument against proper enforcement of speed-limits is that it would criminalise most drivers. However, if it were as sure as eggs that such transgressions were punished not just with points on the licence and a fine, but by confiscation of the vehicle and a five-year ban, I suspect the roads would suddenly stop being ego-flaunting racetracks and turn into quieter, safer places. Imagine my thoughts as I contemplated a robbery, for which I might go equipped with a weapon, if I knew I could hang for it.

• Mr Field points out that there’s now as much violence in his Birkenhead constituency as there was in the whole country 50 years ago.

Dare one speak of a political sea-change? The Hewitt-Hoon attempted coup was doomed to fail but it wounded Mr Brown further. While he lay stunned, Mr Darling came out of the closet on expenditure cuts (while Mr Cameron fumbled over tax-breaks for the married). Next up it’s Dr Cable, throwing the Liberal economic wagon into reverse. It looks like we are heading for an issue-free election. This is depressing, not just because of the lack of issues, but also because the only other thing to fight elections on is competence. On one side we have the government which got us into this mess. On the other we have a team which (apart from Mr Clarke) is quite untested in office. Sure, Mr Cameron appeared in photographs with Mr Lamont, but, unfortunately, those pictures commemorate black Wednesday. I suppose it is too much to ask that politicians might be further chastened by:

• Kelly on expenses
• Chilcot on Iraq.

Maybe it doesn’t matter. After all, Spain, the EU’s current president, wants a union-wide economic policy.

• More on the lack of policy.

Here we see private enterprise clearing ice from footways because it has an interest in customers’ safety.

And here we see the state ignoring ice-bound pavements and concentrating on the roads.

Lord Mandelson is cutting university-spending. The UK is plainly over-provided for in this area and, to compete with China, needs a large industrial workforce who are prepared to labour hard for modest reward. The emphasis in education needs to shift from the pursuit of highfalutin degrees in impracticable subjects to making young people capable of entering the job-market in their mid- to late teens.

School-leavers need to be able to read and to check the calculations that computers make for credibility (in case someone’s typed-in the figures wrong or put the decimal point in the wrong place). They need to be trained in having a positive attitude so that they are a pleasure to work with. Young people need training in attention to detail and working tidily, as well as a good knowledge of health and safety laws. (It needs to be explained to them and to others why those laws make sense and are for the good of us all.) Somehow, they must see doing good-quality work as being cool.

If Labour carry on cutting and accept what the Conservatives and Liberals said at their conferences was inevitable, there may be no need to change the government.

Meanwhile, a theme I’ve banged-on about has briefly surfaced: food-security. Growing our own would mean less reliance on exports and might mean that fewer of the above-mentioned young people would have to work in Chinese-style factories.