Make our sacrifices mean something - shrink the state!

Junior spent the afternoon applying for a student loan. Just to remind everyone, tuition fees will almost treble to £9,000 for English undergraduates starting their courses this year compared to those lucky enough to have been born a year earlier. This is a horrendous burden – but I’m sure the young chap won’t mind helping out the state by paying back the debt for the first thirty years of his working life.

Because we live in such a fair, just, equitable and progressive nation, Scottish students don't have to pay any tuition fees at all, and Welsh ones will be paying a fraction of the going English rate - all funded, of course, by English tax-payers. Racist or what?

Of course, we, his parents, are making our own contribution to keeping alive an economy that was thriving before a number of prominent Caledonians - including the most profligate Chancellor and the most inept banker in British history – decided to take revenge on the English for all the wrongs visited on the Scots by their snooty southern neighbours: artificially low interest rates and the effects of printing oodles of money mean that everyone’s savings are losing their value month by month. (This is great news for the government, which, of course, only has debts.)

But we mustn’t grumble, really. Other people are out of work through no fault of their own, many businesses are in pain, and a few top civil servants have taken early retirement and face a bleak future with nothing but an £80,000 index-linked annual pension to keep the wolf from the door. And, of course, our hearts go out to those public sector workers facing the cruel indignity of being treated like private sector workers by being asked to chip in a bit more towards their fabulous, taxpayer-funded pensions (no wonder the poor dears are often on strike these days).

Normally, we wouldn’t mind. As members of the British coping classes, we rather enjoy doing our bit in times of crisis (I suspect that my wife, who is very English, loves it). Or we would do, if the government was doing its bit by savagely cutting public spending and using the money to pay back our shameful debts. But, of course, it’s doing no such thing.

That frightful commie ratbag, Polly Toynbee, has been urging the Liberal Democrats to cut loose from the coalition and get in bed with… (no, I’d better not use that analogy when talking about LibDem politicians)… form an alliance with Labour. Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband – what an irresistible dream team!

Simon Hughes, deputy leader of Clegg’s pathetic band of sexual perverts and misanthropic social misfits, had this to say concerning Toynbee’s charge that he and his chums are diminishing the power and size of the state:

…by the end of this parliament the government will be spending about £730bn a year, a full 42 per cent of GDP and roughly the same as we did in 2008. Hardly back to the stone age. Second, our deficit reduction plan is broadly in line with those being pursued by presidents Obama and Hollande – not exactly small-government rightwingers. Third, last autumn when it became clear we would not meet our target of clearing the structural deficit by 2015 we didn't decide to cut harder and faster, we gave ourselves an extra two years. This makes our plan very similar to that proposed by Labour chancellor Alistair Darling at the last election.

So, if Hughes’s analysis is correct (and he’s backed up, as it were, by annoying teenage Telegraph scribbler, Daniel Knowles), it means this dickhead government hasn’t made a blind bit of difference! It’s business as usual! Pile all the myriad sacrifices of millions of Britons one on top of the other… and they don’t amount to a hill of beans: we’re pretty much back where we started, only we owe a lot more.

Gosh, how satisfying!

For a government to spend 42% of GDP is common enough these days – but that doesn’t make it any less shameful. Tory politicians – at least those who class themselves as right-wing – should be in an absolute rage to drive that figure down. But I can see very little purposeful fury on the front bench. Apart, perhaps, from that trio of right-wing warriors, Michael Gove, Iain Duncan Smith and Eric Pickles, no Tory minister seems to be in an hurry to roll back the powers of the state. As far as I’m concerned, anyone who doesn’t believe that a huge public sector is both morally and economically wrong should join the Libdems or the Labour Party, and stop stinking up the Right. The Tory front bench should be packed with red-in-tooth-and-claw Hayekians aching to sew up the state’s enormous, greedy maw and make it suck carrot juice through a straw until it has slimmed down to the size it was before the First World War, when it was eating up less than 20% of GDP.

Making sacrifices in order for a bunch of weedy, vacillating Butskellites to not make very much of a difference at all really isn’t exactly satisfying. Passionless leadership is probably a good thing when everything’s ticking along nicely: but when the ticking’s coming from a bloody great bomb, a bit of passion – and some intellectual rigour – are what’s needed.

Please, Lord, at least until things pick up, send us someone who’s in a rage to win this war!