The truth, Prime Minister, is that you have run out of our money. The country as a whole is now in negative equity. Every British child is born owing around 20,000 pounds. Servicing the interest on that debt is going to cost more than educating the child.

Political reporters no longer get to decide what’s news. The days when a minister gave briefings to a dozen lobby correspondents, and thereby dictated the next day’s headlines, are over. Now, a thousand bloggers decide for themselves what is interesting. If enough of them are tickled then, bingo, you’re news.

The truth, Prime Minister, is that you have run out of our money. The country as a whole is now in negative equity. Every British child is born owing around 20,000 pounds. Servicing the interest on that debt is going to cost more than educating the child.

When you repeat, in that wooden and perfunctory way, that our situation is better than others, that we’re ‘well-placed to weather the storm’, I have to tell you that you sound like a Brezhnev-era apparatchik giving the party line.

You cannot spend your way out of recession or borrow your way out of debt.

You cannot carry on forever squeezing the productive bit of the economy in order to fund an unprecedented engorgement of the unproductive bit.

Prime Minister, I see you’ve already mastered the essential craft of the European politician, namely, the ability to say one thing in this chamber and a very different thing to your home electorate.

A trillion here, a trillion there and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.

The U.S. states that allow for citizens’ initiatives tend to have fewer laws and lower taxes than the ones that don’t. But the beauty of the system is that it encourages the spread of best practice.