We start from a position of strength - the final declaration from Labour

With quite possibly the most absurd opening line in the history of politics, Darling announced an absolutely horrific budget yesterday. The real reasons for it being horrific hidden its vagueness more than the numbers.

What Darling wants is to give people things whilst seemingly punishing those nasty bankers. Of course, it is all the City's fault you see, because they dictate policy and unaffordable spending plans. And that is what he has done.

On Newsnight an economist from HSBC pointed out something that simply hasn't made any sort of wave at all, indeed the media have already moved onto the new expenses revelations - revelations I am incredibly suspicious of by the way. That is, Darling raised £19 billion yesterday at a time when we are staring at a near £180 billion black hole. He spent £22 billion.

The taxes he raised yesterday have nothing whatsoever with sorting out the state of this virtually bankrupt nation. The populist attack on City bonuses is farcical in the extreme and will simply never happen, hence the Tories backing it. Bankers, strange this, spend quite a lot of time coming up with ways to not pay tax and they are never going to take one for the team and pay it themselves.

No, the taxes he raised yesterday were there to give away yet more pointless little presents to core voters, like the bingo tax drop. I can't remember a tax cut offending me so much. He will help you out with your boiler and he will not tax the non-profit you make from your non-wind turbine.

What he has done in the process is the classic Labour mistake of thinking anyone who owns anything must be minted. So poor bastards like me on over twenty large will now get smashed in order to pay, not the debt, but for his presents. If you earn the average £25,000, you will now be paying £4 a week more.

And his forecasts have been taken outside, thrown on the floor and pissed on by every economist alive. -4.75 this year - the worst since 1921 by the way - and +1.5 next year. Of course that will happen! Because six point rises happen all the time don't they...

These forecasts allow him to make wildly optimistic assumptions about future debt and therefore spending. Numbers that will never happen.

Hidden on page 172 of the PBR is a little table about the public finances. In there is a little line about public sector net debt. The sustainable investment rule set up by the government states that "Public Sector Net Debt as a percentage of GDP will be held over the economic cycle at a stable and prudent level". Would you like to see the numbers?

2008-09 2009-10 2010-11 2011-12 2012-13 2013-14 2014-15
44.0% 55.6% 65.4% 71.7% 75.4% 77.1% 77.7%

Yes, it is going to explode.

This government has totally bankrupted this country yet all the media care about, in the blink of an eye, is how much a telly was and was porn on it.

Last week The Times had this page which gave a pretty good list of how Gordon Brown and Tony Blair have utterly fucked this country into not the middle of next week, but the middle of 2020. Every tax decision that has been made has resulted in the poorer getting poorer, the richer getting richer, the debt getting bigger, the tax burden becoming truly mighty and this country now being the 7th richest in the world from 4th in 1997.

Not all of it is bad of course. It can be argued that at least new hospitals and schools have been delivered. But our health is still as bad and our education even worse.

What do we really have to show for all this other than a vast debt?

Our soldiers are fighting a lost cause with Swiss Army knives;
Our education system still can't get more than half the kids to get a C no matter how easy they make it;
Violent crime is getting worse every day;
Our health system has been rated amongst the worst in Europe;
The average couple now pay so much tax that both are forced to work and cannot afford to stay at home and look after their own children;
Our pension system is destroyed, public and private;
House prices are huge - not just because of the population but the amount of stock removed for right-to-buy in a vain hope for a pension;
Food prices are huge because of the absurdity of the CAP and CFP that this spineless party won't stand up to;
The biggest national debt in peace time;
The biggest yearly contraction since 1921;
We can't even have a fucking fag without paying £5 to Gordon and being thrown outside;
We have the most CCTV in the world;
We have 'anti-terror' laws that would make a banana republic blush;
We have so many offenders in prison Judges need to let people off, yet none of them are ever properly punished or rehabilitated;
There is massive unemployment;
The hard right are on the march;
We have whole areas of the country that ravaged with crime and poverty because after 12 years there is still no regeneration;
We owe £178 BILLION.

This is what socialism gets you. Forget New Labour, or Labour or any other name they come up with, it is social-democracy and it has destroyed this country.

Darling's budget yesterday was the last pathetic whimper of a dinosaur on the way out. He didn't even have the guts to stand there and make the hard choices needed to at least try and save this nation from the brink.

The Cameron experiment will be like Heath, sucked dry of any possibilities by a bankrupt economy and by striking unions practicing a bankrupt ideology coupled with the Tories inability to see that proper, hard decisions need to be made that take this country well away from social-democratic thought. The recession was about fighting fires, the after party will see the host thrown out and the gatecrasher left to clear up the mess. And it's one hell of a mess.