Boris Johnson in the Torygraph today rails against our dear leader, long since named ‘Tax and Waste Brown’ by otber bloggers, after the pre Budget announcements aimed to rescue our economy at a stroke.

What muppets.   As good old Boris says, you got us into this mess Gordy, with your NuLab policies.   And like a  broke and desperate gambler who has already lost the family siliver you are now putting the house on the next spin of the roulette wheel.    Our national debt will  increase to over 8% by 2010 – levels not seen since Harold Wilson.   It is madness.

I’ve been whingeing on about the level of government spend for as long as I’ve been blogging, but there is a statistic at the bottom of Boris’ article that really brought it home to me….read on:
We now know that to fund this fiscal stimulus, taxes are going up on incomes over £40,000; we know there are going to be huge increases in national insurance that will hit employees, employers and the self-employed. How on earth is that supposed to boost job creation?

Might it not have been better, if you were going to splurge £20 billion in tax cuts, to spend it on cutting National Insurance and helping business to keep people in work?

There is nothing wrong in principle with a fiscal stimulus. What makes the remedy so desperate is that Gordon Brown managed to squander such eye-watering sums when times were good.

It now emerges that of all the jobs created since 1997, two thirds have been in the public sector. No wonder the country is broke. The more Gordon Brown swanks and preens and claims he is the man to fix things, the more he recalls the firefighters in that American movie called Backdraft, who tried to claim credit for heroically (and abortively) attending an inferno that they had ignited.

So much for fiscal prudence.   Spin, spin and yet more spin.    And all those civil servants on sweet final salary pensions.   They’d better hope there is some money left.