The debate between the 3 parties on the environment was a showpiece of falsehood and dissembling:

Q1  Would a Tory Government build another runway in the South-East?   Tory answer: No.   The truth: They could still wriggle past this by expanding a smaller airport like Luton.

Q2  The pledge to cut electricity emissions cannot be met without new nuclear power stations.   The truth: the UK is required by a mandatory EU regulation to achieve at least 40% electricity generation from renewable sources of energy by 2020, and that would make the building of more nuclear stations superfluous.

Q3  The Tories state they will build new nuclear reactors without public subsidy.   The truth: None of the big electricity generators will build any more nuclear without some (large)  hidden or indirect subsidy from the taxpayer.

Q4  The Tories say they favour an expansion in renewables.   The truth: Dozens and dozens of applications for wind farms have been turned down by Tory Councils.

Q5   The Tories accept that climate change is caused by man-made emissions.   The truth: A majority of Tory Parliamentary candidates have made clear they do not accept this or that the Government needs to do anything urgently about tackling climate disaster.

A tory candidate said to me the other day that she had no idea what Cameron would actually do if the tories won.    I think we can help her.   Ignoring all the bucket-loads of political point-scoring, there are two unimpeachable sources of hard evidence.   One is what is now happening in Ireland where the Government is implementing a virtual carbon copy of tory economic policy.   Indeed the last Irish budget was hailed by the Daily Telegraph as a role model for the British Chancellor.

The former tory Scottish Secretary, Lord Forsyth, who is now chair of Cameron’s policy commission on tax, recently announced to the Conservative Intelligence (a bit of an oxymoron) conference that “It seems to me that we need to be able to reduce the overall level of public expenditure over a parliament by about £75bn (a year)”.   Now £75bn – just 1 year’s proposed cuts according to Forsyth – amounts to about 5% of the UK’s GDP.   That is exactly what the Irish have just delivered – 3 slash-and–burn budgets over the last 18 months which cut their GDP by 5%.   So what has happened?

The unemployment rate in the Irish Republic is now 12.5% and could well rise on the current trend to over 15% before the slump is over.   The rapid meltdown in the private sector has been exacerbated, not mitigated – not surprisingly when the prospects of profitability for private investment are so bleak, but contrary to current tory claims that rapid cutting of the deficit will produce a turnaround faster.   Mass mortgage defaults caused by unemployment and falling house prices are now forecast as the next stage of the Irish economic collapse.

All this is just in year 1.   Forsyth is recommending his tory Etonian friends to administer this poison per year for 5 years, which would cut UK public spending by a total of £375bn or 25% of GDP over the whole period.   That is almost unimaginable – it would amount to half of total current government spending at the present time!   But once again that is exactly what the Irish Government now intends to do, shrinking the Irish State by no less than 25% within less than half a decade.   Just think of what has happened in Ireland in the last year, multiply that by 5, and you will have some idea of what a Cameron Government is threatening to inflict on the UK.Some of the social consequences of this monetarist medicine are now becoming clear in Dublin.   It is already being predicted that tens of thousands of families will lose their homes, but because the government has used all the State’s resources to look after bankrupt banks and other institutions – the amount already expended on the Anglo Irish bank alone is equal to the total revenue of the Irish Exchequer last year – there will be little or no money to assist the victims of this vicious slump.

It may be said that this is a bit overdrawn and thetTories would never go this far.   But that too is wrong, as the second piece of hard evidence indicates.   In 1980, at the start of the Thatcherite regime and in the middle of a deep worldwide slump, the tories did exactly that.   In the budget of March 1980 the tory government doubled VAT, raised the minimum lending rate to 14%, cut money supply and government borrowing, and made the first of harsh cuts in public spending.   The results were brutal and predictable.   A mounting wave of bankruptcies, plant closures and lay-offs quickly ensued. Unemployment within 9 months had reached 2.13 million, and continued rising for another 6 years till it reached 3.2 million in August 1986.  Manufacturing employment fell by 28% between 1979-86, a loss of 2 million jobs. Inflation also soared to reach 22% in May 1980.   And the competitive position of British companies collapsed by a staggering 35-45%.

Moreover this was just one front in an all-out war.   The Thatcherites unleashed market forces without restraint, shifting the balance of power in industry and in violent confrontations (Orgreave and Wapping) in favour of capital.   They ended the post-war consensus of using macro-economic policy to ensure full employment and underpin growth, and directed it instead at combating inflation.   They rolled back the State by huge cuts in public spending, expenditure on housing alone being cut from 6.1% in 1979 to just 1.6% by 1990, a cutback equal to no less than £65bn a year in today’s money.   And they set about neutering the trade unions with determination and relish through 6 vehemently anti-trade union Acts of Parliament one after another increasingly turning the screw to destroy the Labour Movement.

To set markets free they introduced the new weapons of privatisation and de-regulation as well as sharply reducing cash limits.   It created deep demoralisation in the public sector and a permanent atmosphere of financial crisis and retrenchment.   Further still, to enforce compliance at local level, the Thatcherites also markedly centralised power, finance and functions away from town halls, with measures to empower schools and council estates to opt out of local authority control, to transfer responsibility for inner-city regeneration to private agencies, and to replace domestic property rates with the poll tax.   Much of the public sector was in constant turmoil, but the tory government repeatedly showed it was determined to squeeze budgets regardless, whatever the consequences for the organisation of the quality of its services to the public.

No attempt was made to formulate a national industrial strategy.   The Government appeared indifferent to the fate of manufacturing, seeing the expansion of services as a replacement.   Above all, the elevation of financial markets and the City of London were a central objective of the neo-liberal agenda that Thatcher forced through.   It is a system of market fundamentalism which is still being played out today, and the stark question now facing us as the election approaches is: does Britain really wish to return to the next stage of reactionary counter-revolution initiated by the last tory government?