A checklist of 4 key items will determine the nature of this new Government and its likely fate.    They are:

1   Who will carry the burden of the big spending cuts which the Tories have repeatedly declared their intention to impose in this next year and which the LibDems have now succumbed to?   If it is low-paid public sector workers – nurses, teachers, porters, dinner ladies, low-level administrative staff, local government workers – rather than the top echelons especially the bankers with their bonus millions, there will be serious social unrest – maybe not on the Greek scale, but certainly enough to prevent a Tory election victory any time in the next year.

2   Will robust banking reform be introduced which would stop a recurrence of the recent financial meltdown?   This must require a splitting up of the banks between their retail High Street arms and their casino investment arms, otherwise there is no guaranteed  mechanism to prevent a further crash.   Equally, the bloated City of London needs to be thinned down to a size proportionate to the British economy and the manufacturing sector, the lifeblood of the economy, needs to be correspondingly expanded.   Will the Tories show the toughness of purpose to realise this necessity and implement it?

3   Will the Tories end the era of de-regulation (probably the single most important cause of the financial breakdown) and privatisation of services, especially in the NHS and education?   Cameron has denounced PFI as busted system: will he now close it down?

4   Britain is now the most unequal and most unfair society for a century, fragmented between a large sullen alienated under-class and an elite at the top with stratospheric wealth and inordinate power.   Will the Old Etonian PM now suppress his natural class instincts in the wider interests of the country as a whole, as he constantly proclaims, and put the greater equalising of income, wealth and power as the major social goal of his government?

If Cameron has the courage and magnanimity to do these things, he may well succeed at least for a time.   If not, Britain will burn.

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