The banking scandal in microcosm

We don't think I've seen anyone yet draw the stark parallel with New Labours "nod and wink" relationship with some of the more conniving turncoats of the City and financial services industry, and what went on at Westminster. Talk about a mess of pottage.

Looked at overall, we can see the familiar pattern of trough-diving socialism of the type that has always rotted through any socialist administration. Sly deals being done with the purse keepers - and the comforting group excuse and belief that "they're all at it anyway".

The worst of this is the revelation that we have allowed our nation and its sovereignty to be taken to the brink of the economic and political abyss by a collection of least desirable white-collar criminals ever to walk the streets. What else have they got wrong and done wrong in pursuit of personal agendas?

However, someone has to stand up and call a halt to the fun in order to resume the struggle with the monster of Brown's slump - but now it clearly cannot be Broon or any of his trough-diving colleagues.

Blair was left the Clark/Major legacy of contained inflation as a basis for future growth which it now seems was squandered on wide boys and girls of the Scottish financial services industry to help fuel the fantasy property-lead boom that provided taxes to fuel the fantasy welfare state - but just what on earth is Brown leaving to his successor?

A shoebox stuffed full of worthless IOUs.

At last ! It's about the economy, stupid

While those of us who had spotted the problems with the Blair/Brown vision of Britain in 1997 began to come out and declare the emperor and his chancellor to be stark buck naked, many of the glitterati and chattering classes still clung grimly on to the view that the mirage of a touchy-feely multicultural, diversity-tolerant, welfare-everywhere Britain was all we needed to go forth in an increasingly nasty, unfair, intolerant, competitive and brutal world. Never mind that just about all our innate advantages but one was being steadily overturned or overtaken: no more "free" oil/gas; agriculture and fishing industries neutered by the EU; barmy military crusades; barmy immigration tactics; hopeless housing policies; the near-destruction of parliamentary politics.

Blair has broken every toy he inherited and wasted virtually every tax he (and Broon) raised with almost nothing to show for any of it other than a vastly fatter public sector, with many pointless jobs for the boys and girls. He probably deserves to be impeached and locked up for many of his more wilfully stupid acts; however, marrying Cherie was a life sentence, so perhaps he is already suffering enough.

Perhaps top of the list of impeachable stupidity is the total neglect of power generation capacity that is at last being appreciated for the potential catastrophe that it truly is; but as long as there was that talismanic "chicken in the pot", naive voters were quite prepared to ignore the basics and leave Brown free to fritter away all (and more) of the benefits of John Major and Ken Clark's remarkable but completely forgotten last 3 years of financial recovery.

The feel good factor remained afloat on a sea of credit while inflation was suppressed by the transparency of markets as a result of the Internet and communications revolution.

All most doom mongers have ever wanted to do was to be able to drag the debate back to the core issues around the economy before it was too - but while that pot remains chicken-bearing, no one wanted to listen. It is astonishing how deaf the normally sensible British population has become as a result of the growing indifference to politics.

Perhaps we will start to hear less of the "I don't vote, I can't change anything" nonsense that has typified the Blair years. With the chickenless pot a reality, the fear is no longer one of change, but fear of no change, since the bloke in charge of the empty pot has clearly and so comprehensively lost the plot. Indeed, it becomes clearer by the day that he never actually had it; he just got very lucky indeed.

The frustration of being forced to watch the cabal of Blair's ruling minorities being allowed and encouraged to exercise their various irrelevant dogmatic prejudices while Rome burned, has been excruciating. Nicely exemplified by the bearded legions of local council Nazis and their love of the bin Gestapo.

This is no time for gentle adjustments. What we need now is a government willing to take on the big issues; David Cameron seems to be winning trust as the genuine family guy and ready to dare to say that youth crime and single parent families and working mothers might actually be connected in some way. Let's also hope he is surrounded by the necessary brutes that are needed to take apart 10 years of socialist faux-utopia, and replace it with sustainable policies and tactics - including ways to remind everyone in the UK and EU that it was the Common Market that we voted for - which was a very different thing to the Franco-German empire we now have.

Common sense is the cornerstone of the Majority Party: it should be an essential part of every policy - yet it is astonishing just how far old-fashioned common sense has been replaced by the common nonsense of the politically correct. The news that Ken Livingstone has more time to spend with his newts might have marked that tide's turn at last.

Oh yes, and that one innate advantage even Brown cannot completely squander (although he is doing his best) is the fact that we invented the English language and still have a great deal of creativity to provide within it just as the rest of the world has decided it is the de facto global lingua franca. (Please try and forget the cash being squandered to ensure that your council tax bill can be provided in Welsh, Gallic, Hindustani and 27 dialects of Arabic...)

Bring on the election before the lights go out, and stay out. Those chickens are coming home to roost anywhere but in that pot on the table.

Charity begins at home

TMP believes that many problems that have become intractable in the hands of traditional party politics have very simple common sense solutions for those who are prepared to dump the dogma and allow the people to decide how to spend their own money.

Perhaps the biggest "stealth challenge" now facing the UK is how to fix Gordon Brown's witless destruction of the pensions system without consideration of the consequences, and deal with the allied challenges of the growing need for social care solutions for the elderly. And the fact that social care is a function of local council budgets (now almost entirely Conservative controlled) should bother anyone that has observed the way the Labour government has been far too willing to gerrymander with the public purse across the country with regard to its own political interests.

The debate about the fairness of inheritance tax (IHT) tends to quickly align with the old class war arguments about the rich "getting away with it", whereas precious few estates where a freehold property is involved escape the £285k threshold. However, this has now become a major stealth tax during Gordon Brown's fiscal control, and we all know how keen politicians of any hue are when it comes to repealing any sort of tax, if they believe their opponents have already taken the PR hit.

Moreover, an enormous amount of skilled effort and energy goes into estate planning to try and mitigate this unseemly process of what we can only describe as state-sanctioned grave robbery.

So the TMP's simple solution is that any amount of an estate can be passed to the children and grandchildren of the deceased in the form of a pension and care fund for those children payable from age 55. This has several consequences apart from the obvious one of creating a massive care fund administered by the people who really care, it means that the money will generally be intelligently invested in a born-again pensions industry for the greater good.

God willing, that money will also remain out of political reach for all time. In fact, the rules of the scheme should make it plain that no party of any hue would ever be able to access the fund under any circumstances whatever. Not even to fund the gap in the 2012 Olympics budget.

With the NHS spending £80bn a year (it was £30bn in 1997), Defence running at £30bn a year, Education £60bn (yes, we are always shocked when we consider the value for money that figure represents) is there a sentient being left out there that could seriously argue the fundamental principle that we simply cannot trust politicians to spend our money wisely?