A wake up call while Rip van Brown sleep walks on

The current flood crisis in the West country might be a point at which the nation takes a step back to look at what 10 years of metro-Caledonian rule has done for the shires of England.

In two words: "bugger all".

It's no secret that Blair and his freeloading gang of Old Islingtonians had little or no time for the ways of English country folk, so the sight of them stuck floating down shit creek without the aid of their local council's paddle diversity officer won't send tremors through the PLP at Westminster; but the rest of us should perhaps ponder if this is not the precise moment at which we consider the plight of the English and decide once and for all if we are indeed a United Kingdom, or the collection of tribal fiefdoms that Labour has revived so spectacularly over the past 10 years, to the inestimable cost of the disenfranchised English.

That pointless Scottish parliament building cost some £500m, although in view of the ongoing pantomime of "Scottish Democracy", they might as well have adapted the Glasgow Empire for a lot less. Alex Salmond would strike a fine figure as Widow Twankie, along with cries of "No tickee, no washee" as the clarion call of his free spending administration - except that it's still the English picking up the majority of his laundry bill.

We are constantly told we are short of housing - yet we are told we must permit completely unexpected numbers of immigrants to arrive, allegedly to prop up our "stretched" service industries. We are now told the trains are running at bursting point, and that £500m needs to be spent by the travellers. Remember all you English travellers when you find yourself stuffed in like Sardines, that is a number curiously adjacent to the cost of that wretched Palace to the vanity of Scots in Edinburgh.

In fact, every measure that suggests England, if not the UK as a whole, is overflowing seems to be telling us to stop and reconsider the scope of the remaining infrastructure, but yet the process grinds inexorably onwards, and our population is swollen with ever more needing houses and seats on trains.

If the future really is flooding on the scale we have seen, then everyone on a flood plain will need relocating. Perhaps the answer is the return of the £10 assisted passage to get our unwanted English folk on boats to Canada and Australia to make room for all those lovely EU citizens, and the extended families of those many millions of earlier migrants that want in.

If Canada has any sense, it will vigorously encourage the good English country folk of Gloucester to fill up the vast open spaces of Canada (above the flood line) before some smart socialist politician in Ottawa decides to take a leaf from Brown's Book of Gerrymandering, and compete with Gordon to fill them up with more left-sympathetic voters.

And as for the Boy Dave at large in Rwanda, one can only hope that he goes on a fact finding mission on a crocodile farm, and finds himself "all in it together" with a particularly hungry one in need of a good hug.

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?