Are Peter Oborne and Peter Hitchens in fact the same person ?

Well any reader of their rants this week might think so  ...  both growling and grumbling and groaning on, about how terrible it is that the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats have formed a coalition,  and what dreadful moral failures the various participants are to do so,  and both of them full of self-righteous certainty that they predicted the whole thing.  

Peter H  applies a lot of   "... and then add the number you first thought of.."   arithmetic to assure us that Labour has cost us  £2,000,000,000,000.    Yes Peter.    For your information we are not all fools out here,  we can do our own mathematics and yes we do know that the country is deep in debt.    But it is pure scare tactics to quote figures like the one above.   

The broad numbers are as follows :  

• We have annual government spending (budget total) of around £700 billion ;
• We have current government annual income of something under £600 billion at present ;
• We are hence borrowing annually over £100 billion to fill the gap (£163Bn this year).
• Some of that was due to the large outlays in stimulus during the 2008-9 crash ;
• The structural part of it, the overspend level before the crash, was nearer £70-80Bn a year.

So - we have to SAVE something like £70Bn a year in the long term - about 10% of government annual spending.  

And in the short term we could do with saving a good bit more than that: say 20% of government annual spending.  

The real question is - can we stomach that ?   Yes - we can - split the 20% in two and you have the simple, stark reality we all need to get on with :  tax take needs to go up about 10%, falling back over a few years;   and government spending needs to come down 10%, at least for a few years.    

Can we cut 10% off the £170 Billion welfare budget ?  Yes.

Can we cut 10% off the pointless investment in illegal wars ?   Yes. 

Can we haggle down supplier prices 10% for most government outlays (by not taking no for an answer) ?  Yes.  

And the tax ?   A one-tenth increase in the major taxes would be :

• Personal tax up by about 3%
• VAT up by 1.75%
• Capital Gains Tax up by about 2%
• National Insurance up by about 1%.

Can we afford this ?    YES.  WE CAN.    It is not the cataclysm that the Peters and other ritual moaners would have you believe.   Every small business has already cut back massively more than that as a matter of ordinary daily planning.   

Now get over it and stop moaning.     And good luck to our interesting new government.