Simple fixes are the best

Would everyone kindly stop complicating the problems the UK faces?

Reduce ALL public employment by 50% (it really is that overbloated cf Parkinson's Law) and put ALL the money saved into boosting private sector employment in companies employing less than 50 people. Reduce all tax reference to a max of 250 pages, and tell the EU "we'll get back to you when we can afford to".

Give the Post Office a combined eBay and PayPal role; carve a chunk off the BBC to take on Google search and advertising. Devolve BT to local control (could the dickheads running councils cope? probably not) and consolidate all street works to get real broadband installed.

Simple. So what's the catch?

Q: Where is the effective demand for the goods and services produced by all of these new enterprises? And BT is a private firm, how would a government "devolve it to local control"?

A: Where is the demand for the goods and services of the 50% of state "lard" we can safely cull?

And they're not new enterprises. It takes far too long to set up new companies, and failures are far too high amongst startups - we think this is only turbocharging the "get banks to lend" proposition.

China is quite quickly going to become increasingly uncompetitive as their home markets grow staggeringly quickly - and overnight if they were forced to adopt EU level H&S and employment practises.

BT has broken so many laws and rules over the past ten years that if all those who had been screwed were invited to complain and be heard, it could be tied up in regulatory legal hassles for ever. They'd have to settle.

Q: Obviously the demand for goods and services provided by the public sector is ineffective - not every individual could afford to pay privately for municipal, emergency services, healthcare, policing, etc.

A: We really can lose 50% of the public sector costs without affecting any of that lot. Really we could. Trust us, we are NOT politicians. With 50% less non-productive, tea-swilling, work-creating state to pay for, just imagine the tax cuts possible. Everyone would be able to afford Bupa and their own pension plans.

The biggest problem by far with this idea is that the 50% of state employees will need completely reprogramming in order to able able to resume a productive role in the community after years of institutionalised lead swinging. Hence pumping all that cash to bribe employers to do the gruesome task.

Q: Have you heard of the concept of transfer payments? The idea that low paid workers, the unemployed, the disabled, and pensioners would be able to pay for health insurance and the rest...

That sounds like another term for subsidies and the bureaucracy required to administer them. TMP needs people to earn and keep their own money, and make their own decisions with it. Nowhere in the history of the world has a bureaucracy spent money more wisely than the people that created the wealth in the first place.

We don't have the time or inclination to study fad political/economic trends and theories. They are a large part of what has screwed this country and most of the world where the political class has become grotesquely over self important since the 60s. As one economics professor observed, the questions for economics degree exams remain the same, only the answers change. They are no longer our obedient servants, they are George Orwell's Animal Farm pigs, writ large.

A big part of the solution is the resurrection of the family; this is one thing we could learn from many immigrant (religion/respect based) communities. Cameron's much derided "big society" - that for some reason is being systematically undermined by the out of control BBC who fears its grip on the social engineering agenda may be slipping , is a way to try and replace the nanny state by re-asserting family responsibilities.

Commuting strangles our pathetic transport infrastructure, but our new homes are the smallest in the developed world by some margin - so every new home should be built with a proper office and a parent annexe for starters. Our bonkers home costs are a factor of abysmal planning and population mismanagement over many years.

A solution to our present mess is much simpler than work-creating civil servants and politicians imply - but it's a revolution in modern terms, and needs proper leadership. So what is the political class currently gripped by? The debate over a voting system that would most likely guarantee paralysed leadership in perpetuity.