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Bernard Ingham: Britain is bankrupt financially and morally
DOES anybody have the slightest idea how deep our national crisis runs? I ask because MPs are calculating that getting on for a third of their 645 colleagues will leave the Commons at the next election.
Most of them, both Labour and Tory, have decided after the expenses fiasco that they and their families have had enough or – and these are generally Labour – are going to lose their seats anyway, so why bother.
If the worst predictions are borne out, there could be well over 200 novice MPs in the next Parliament. I have even heard a Labour MP wondering whether, given the politically correct determination to discriminate in favour of women,
they will be able to find enough candidates.
This may well be male chauvinism. What is not in doubt is that the next Parliament will have the least experienced Commons while confronting the gravest national reconstruction mission since the Second World War – and, in stark contrast to 1945, with the public harbouring precious little respect
for politicians.
And after 13 years of Labour governance – as after 18 years of the Conservatives in 1997 – we shall have a Cabinet mostly without invaluable Ministerial savvy in running a department. Unless I am much mistaken, the Commons will also have a Toytown Speaker in love with his own publicity with next to no respect for tradition – a man foisted on Parliament by the Labour majority in one last throw of petty spite.
But that is not the worst of it. We also have a "psychologically flawed" Prime Minister – as Alastair Campbell is reputed to have described him so perspicaciously years ago – kept artificially alive by one of the more treacherous life support systems in Westminster, otherwise known as Lord Mandelson.
Speculation is rife that Mandy will pull the plug on Gordon Brown at electorally the first reasonably propitious opportunity after Ireland, at the second attempt, has ratified the Lisbon Treaty, thereby doing his duty by the Great European Enterprise, if not by his country. In this way he would render our Parliament even more pointless by transferring more power to Brussels without, of course, the promised referendum.
You don't have to believe all these fevered imaginings to recognise that we are in a terrible mess. It is also quite conceivable that our Prime Minister will make it much worse with his mad compulsion to spray around money neither he nor we have got.
He has just called for another 60bn of the world's brass to be thrown at developing countries to combat that entirely unproven phenomenon, climate change, which some scientists describe as "the greatest scientific hoax in history".
He has done so while failing after 12 years in office to provide this country with an energy policy that is more likely in a few years to put the lights out than keep them on when we need every ton of saleable goods and every hour of productive working time to pay off well over 1 trillion – 1,000,000,000,000 – of debt.
The country is effectively bankrupt, though public sector salaries and bonuses are out of control. Our budget deficit is predicted to reach 175bn this year or even 200bn. We shall pay out 25bn more this year in benefits than the Government raises in income tax. Unemployment is rising steadily towards three million. We cannot properly provide for our troops fighting a political war in Afghanistan.
We can't educate our children properly because we believe in equality of ignorance rather than academic and technical
achievement. Social discipline has broken down and our chief constables, assuming they have the will (which I seriously doubt), are terrified by the Human Rights Act of imposing it.
Such is our firm grasp of
essentials that on the day we
learned 60,000 youngsters won't be able to get into university or college to study rather than sit at home on the dole, eight national newspapers devoted 142 pages, including souvenir pull outs, to the death of Michael Jackson. Raddled so-called celebrities, not one of whom could
be rated as a role model, are our national obsession.
We are a financially and morally broken society. At least David Cameron has recognised that. It would help Britain if he would tell us how he proposed to fix it since he has beaten into a cocked hat Brown's argument that spending – any spending – is virtuous and economy
is vile.
Let us pray for Cameron's divine guidance. To repeat, he's all we've got. If he fails, God only knows who can help us.
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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