Shameless

We had no transport yesterday and the little ones wanted to go to the cinema. To my great dismay, I found the County Council had recently dispensed with all Sunday buses from our relatively prosperous town. To me it was just an annoyance - to the elderly it is cutting off a lifeline.

This is just one tiny example of how public services are being lost despite the boast we are the fourth largest economy in the world.

At this weekend's Conservative Spring Conference, Cameron had a chance to show his master strategy of how he intends to lead us boldly out of recession.

His plan is.... to have no plan. His "only strategy" is to pray for a few entrepreneurs and "go-getters" to create a utopian business culture.

Cameron will help business by beating up those officials who insist on pesky planning applications and ensuring health and safety standards for employees. Eventhough they are simply abiding by the law of the land, these damned "bureaucrats" are the "enemies of enterprise" apparently. However I would have thought the banks continued refusal to offer credit was easily business's greatest enemy.

This pointless vituperation was in part warm-up to the Con-Lib budget to be delivered in a few days by Osborne and his compliant Chief Secretary, Danny Alexander (above). The Chancellor used a revealing phrase when he said the budget would be "unashamedly pro-growth" as if a growth strategy could ever be a source of shame. It could only be so when the stronger instinct is simply to cut tax for the wealthy.

As Polly Toynbee said last week in the Guardian, this Coalition's economic experiment "is one last chance to prove Herbert Hoover was right and FDR and Keynes were wrong."

So it would seem the recovery is to be placed in the hands of unfettered capitalism. Even if it yields some success eventually, I can't see much capital incentive for the entrepreneurs to restore the lost public services.

Still no buses, then.