A TAX ON ALL YOUR HOUSES

Today is the day of the emergency budget. The Chancellor, George Osborn, will announce cuts in public expenditure, as well as increases in indirect taxes such as VAT, alcohol and tobacco. To say that this will be an unpopular budget only states a commonplace of almost every budget, even in a good year.

Everybody knows, or should know by now, that this country is in a financial mess. We are carrying £180 billion of debt, and we all know that if we do not tackle it our children and grandchildren face an awful future as citizens of what was once a proud and successful nation; but will have been set upon the road of regression and impotency, where the likes of Portugal and Greece, rely upon stronger economies to continually bail them out.

The public sector unions have threatened to resurrect the 1970s and bring chaos once more onto our streets. For those of you who were not around at the time, it had its appeal to young leftists like myself, who enjoyed seeing the proletariat with their boots pressing hard on the necks of a weakened management; and seeing managements from all sectors kowtow to this militancy. 'Red Robbo' in Birmingham and Arthur Scargill in South Yorkshire played their enthusiastic part in this country's humiliation culminating in a British government . . . .a British government; going cap in hand to the International Monetary Fund to bail us out.

The unions then were politically motivated; they either wanted a Left-wing Labour government, or a more purer form of socialism unadulterated by democracy, known as Marxism. To these people the working class were merely a means to an end, and they nearly achieved that end. But British people declared that enough was enough by voting in, not only the first woman prime minister, but a Tory one at that. Margaret Thatcher brought in new industrial relation laws to bring union militancy into line, and she has never been forgiven to this day, for so doing. Yet she gave this country another chance to succeed in the world by binging in the tough measures George Osborn finds it necessary to replicate in today's budget.

If we chose to go once more the way of the 1970s, it will spell our end as an entrepreneurial nation for such talent will be driven abroad. If the changes needed to lower the deficit prove unacceptable to this nation then the consequences will be dire. If we cannot 'suck it up' as the Americans say, and make the sacrifices needed, the markets will respond in the appropriate fashion.

The public sector in this country suffers from clinical obesity. It is fed on taxpayers money, and figures announced last week suggested that a worker employed in the private sector works nine years longer over a lifetime than one working in the public sector. The public sector also has a jobs for life culture with a generous pension at the end.

The public sector needs culling, with the exceptions of the NHS, Education and Defence. This does not mean that these ring fenced services should not face job cuts; but only that they should be made selectively and prudently without effecting the performance of each sector.

The welfare state, once a safety net, has grown into a supermarket of benefits, many of which are stolen from the shelves by fraudsters. The first step should be to freeze all benefits with the exception of state pensions. Then a closer look should be taken at Incapacity Benefit. This is the benefit that politicians from all parties have allowed a claimant increase to occur in order to disguise the unemployment figures; thus to circumvent the greatest curse to befall any democratic government - unpopularity.

The argument has been made by this government's opponents that any reduction of the public debt should wait until next year, thus giving the recovery the chance to take root. The city seems to agree that by acting now on the deficit, the recovery may suffer somewhat, but by starting to trim the deficit now this country will show the rest of the world that we are serious, and that it is not mere political rhetoric, as seems to be the case in many parts of Europe.

We are at a crossroads: we can turn to the past out of anger, envy and resentment; or realise that the medicine has to be taken. Marx said that 'history repeats itself, first as tragedy then as farce'. I hope this does not prove to be the case in the coming weeks and months following this budget.