It’s a pity Osborne and his advisers have no intelligence and no imagination

Osborne was meant to cut public spending to reduce the deficit. But it seems the ‘highly educated’, ‘never had a proper job in his life’ Osborne and his equally ‘highly educated’, ‘never had a proper job’ advisers haven’t a clue how to do this. Instead they keep on increasing taxes and reducing tax thresholds to pay for their Brownian incontinence with our money. The political argument should not be between a supposed conflict between ‘cuts’ and ‘growth’. What we need are drastic public-spending cuts while funnelling the money saved into creating jobs. It’s not complicated, Mr Dumbo Osborne.

How do you do this? Here’s a simple example. Put the 300,000 highest paid civil servants on a 4-day week. That would save about £100m a week – £5bn a year – in real cash. You then take this £100m a week (£5bn a year) and use it for infrastructure projects – building homes, schools, roads etc. Allowing for raw material costs, this would be enough to pay for about 100,000 unemployed people to get jobs. That would reduce benefit payments by over £10m a week (£500m a year). This would also reduce the social costs of unemployment (crime, hopelessness, family break-up, illness, depression etc) and produce something of value – roads, schools, houses and so on – instead of more worthless paperwork from unnecessary, underworked, overpaid bureaucrats. Thus the real benefits for society would be much more than the £500m a year.

That, Mr Osborne, is how you reduce the amount of money wasted on government and reinject it into creating jobs and growth. Even my dog can understand this, though it seems to be way beyond the capabilities of Osborne and his advisers. So we are doomed to decline and recession until we can turf the useless Osborne out of No. 11.