Britannia Radio

The Mail is right in the economic picture it paints but quite wrong 
about the lack of debate.

The economic policy of the country will be set in 2 weeks time in the 
budget and may or may not last till the election.  Until that has 
happened no detailed alternatives could possibly be put up by the 
opposition and even then their policies could - NO - will be 
overtaken by events.     Meanwhile Osborne has made it quite clear 
that state expenditure will have to be cut and taxes rise.

Mail gets it part right - fails to think it through. So the Mail's 
headline is a silly one and just indicates that the tabloid nature of 
the paper, unable to grasp hard facts, weakens its authority.

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DAILY MAIL - Leader 8.4.09
A frightening debate they don't dare start
By DAILY MAIL COMMENT

On by far the most important issue facing the British economy, Labour 
and Tory front-benchers are united in a conspiracy of silence and 
deceit.
[BUT ----"It's all economy, economy, economy for Cameron
"David Cameron has made only one speech dedicated to health and 
education in the past nine months, compared with 18 on the economy, 
according to Financial Times analysis." ]

This is the ever-widening chasm, now reaching truly hair-raising 
proportions, between the Government's spending and its income from 
taxation.

In a deeply disturbing study this week, the Institute for Fiscal 
Studies predicted the deficit would reach £150billion per year over 
the next three years.

This would mean that without huge cuts in state spending, going well 
beyond anything so far suggested by either party, every family in the 
country would face extra taxes of £1,250 a year by 2016, just to keep 
government borrowing manageable.

By then, says the IFS, the state's accumulated debts could reach 80 
or even 90 per cent of national income, leaving us crippled like 
basket-case Italy.

Yet the depressing truth is that even these dizzying figures are 
conservative, since they are based on a months-old forecast by the 
Bank of England, which looks more over-optimistic by the week.

With private job losses increasing every day (RBS announced another 
4,500 redundancies in Britain yesterday), the demands on the welfare 
budget become ever larger as the tax receipts to pay for them grow 
smaller.

Meanwhile, the hugely expensive bailouts continue, as the Government 
extends the first tranche of a £2.3billion rescue for the car 
industry (and no matter how ministers try to spin it as a European 
deal, it's the British taxpayer who will have to pick up the bill - 
as usual).

Yet not one single proposal have we heard, from either Government or 
Opposition, which would even begin to defuse this time-bomb ticking 
beneath our economy.

The reason, of course, is cynically obvious.

With an election only a year away at most, ministers dare not 
alienate taxpayers by revealing the massive extra sums they will be 
made to hand over.

As for David Cameron, he is loath to specify which spending 
programmes he will cut, or by how much. He dreads the Tories' 
becoming known once again as the 'nasty party' - the barb whose venom 
he has worked so hard to draw. Like Gordon Brown, he, too, will need 
votes from public sector workers.

And so we go on in this ridiculous limbo, with nobody daring to speak 
as the debts pile up unchallenged.

But the British people are not fools. We know very well that the 
medicine will taste foul, whichever party prescribes it.

This deficit will have to be filled, whether by huge tax increases 
(which would risk stifling recovery), by painful cuts in the public 
sector - or a mixture of both.

The very least we deserve is a full and honest disclosure of the two 
main parties' plans for us. Their silence is insulting.