The UK was short of transport capacity as the new century dawned. The pathetic failure to build much in the last 25 years has compounded the shortages. Hundreds of thousands of new people each year have been invited in  with no thought of the need for roads and trains for them to use.

I am writing a couple of pieces about the difficulties of getting about. I am taking as an example  three speeches I have made by coincidence this year in the Tonbridge/Tunbridge  Wells area. The first was an Investment lunch in Tunbridge Wells, where I was setting out the prospects for world economies and markets. The second was this week’s guest speech to the Freedom Association meeting . The third was on the following evening when I was being questioned on my experiences of government and the UK economy at a  meeting in a village to the east of Tonbridge.

My computer told me the journey should take around  1 hour 30 to 40 minutes   by car from my home to the venue, and about 2 hours 30 minutes  by train from my local station with a 20 minute walk to the station and a 30 minute taxi ride from the destination station. That made it a total time of 3 hours 30 minutes door to door by train allowing a few minutes to find the platform and train at the stations.

Despite this obvious drawback of the train , allied to the fact that it would work out considerably dearer than driving my own car, I decided to undertake the train journey for the Investment lunch. To make it easier I planned a train journey from London where I had meetings before setting out for Tunbridge Wells.

Even though I was starting in London, it would take two changes of tube train and a longish walk from the station to the venue. I allowed extra time for the possible delays on the tube and for a possible late mainline train.

All went unusually smoothly until we neared Tonbridge. The train stopped in a  station and we were told there was an incident on the line ahead. The train would wait for as long as it took and there was no indication of how long it would take to clear. I made a dash for the taxi queue, got a cab and sat in traffic jams on my way to the hotel in Tunbridge Wells. All my allowed time for delays and more was used up and I only just made it to the time of my speech. There was a nice big taxi bill on top of the train fare.

This week I had  no need to be in London Wednesday or Thursday. The train seemed a very unappealing option for either journey, with several  changes of train and the need to find taxis I could rely on to do the last few miles. I resolved to drive there and back each evening, covering a distance there of around 70 miles. See tomorrow what happened.

Summary of train issues

You need to look at door to door time. Often getting to and from  the station is expensive and subject to delays. The Councils who want us all to go by train try to stop us getting to stations.

The train is never early but is often late. Trains are subject to cancellation or unacceptable delays, making them difficult to trust for important meetings unless you go hours in advance of need leaving open the option of an expensive taxi to rescue you. Government owns  the track and signals which often cause delay, and runs bad timetables.

I have many times set out the easy cuts to excess spending here. Bank of England losses, Post Office losses, railway losses, steel nationalisation costs, illegal migrant hotels, migrant benefits and the pressure of numbers on public capital and services. The government has unsuccessfully tried disability benefits and pensioner winter fuel payments, which I did not support.

I read they are now thinking of reneging on the triple lock for pensions. I would suggest they do not do this. Both main parties pledged to keep the triple lock at the last election. Cutting pensioner poverty has been a success of recent years, with the triple lock helping in that cause.

I have in the past recommended raising the pension age, with suitable longer term notice so people can save for more  private pension if they wish to retire earlier. The current age of 66 is scheduled to rise to 67 next year. There is a rise to 68 pencilled in. Why not bring this forward a bit, and why not add a target date for 69 thereafter?  As the real value of the pension climbs so people  should need to pay in NI contributions for longer to qualify. There could also be an option to pay more into the state to have an earlier access to the state pension.  This could be a substantial saving in future spending and borrowing with no direct impact on anyone living’s standards any time soon, and with notice for people to strengthen their other pension arrangements.

(I have attempted to write  up what I said. This is a reconstruction of a spontaneous speech.)

It is an honour to speak  at the fiftieth anniversary dinner of the Freedom Association. 

The Freedom Association was established to campaign for individual liberty, freedom of expression and free markets. These have been the themes of my life in politics, as government adviser, Minister and writer.

Today they have never been more needed.

The forces of oppressive government, excessive laws, confiscatory taxes, bossy officialdom and the thought police are  always threatening us.

They come from outside, from foreign tyrannies.

They come from inside, from government that places itself above the freedoms and wishes of the people it should serve.

Today we need to do more  to restore our freedoms.

Our work is never done.

We remain under such grave threat to our liberties.

Freedom is our birthright.

Let us be proud of our country and all it has done to advance freedom in the wider world. 

My grandfathers fought for our freedoms in the 1st World War.

My parents fought against German tyranny and conquest in the Second.

I have recently written a short book on what it was like to be a small boy growing up in a world of giants around me. Like most children  it was a story of exploring and grasping freedoms. I remember land marks on the journey. Learning  to walk unaided by an adult. The first  time I went to buy something at a shop on my own. My first bike ride. The first time I had to stand up to my mother. Each brought a new freedom before I had the words and understanding to explain it.

 If only those who  now run our country would try out the equivalent steps of self government instead of  hiding behind the international grown ups as they call them. Many in our establishment wish to infantilise us, transferring responsibility to international courts, to global institutions and to a mesh of international treaties.

I spent my youth  reading too much history and playing too little cricket. I read enough to know that England  pioneered freedom under the law from Magna Carta onwards. The UK led a  progress  to all men and women having a vote to determine who makes the laws and governs the country.

When I studied history we talked proudly  of the UK having the Mother of Parliaments. We spoke  of  the English civil war fought to make Kings accountable resulting in  the triumph of an elected Assembly. Depositions and Acts of Succession made even the kingship more like an elected post.

We remembered  the  successful wars against Imperial Spain to stop them annexing northern Europe.  We read of the wars  against  Louis XIV’s  and Napoleon’s  France when they tried to expand and suppress free peoples by ruthless conquest. We studied  the twentieth century wars to stop German domination of the continent. Our country  was on the side of independent states,  freeing them  from aggressive neighbours. We were  on the side of freeing slaves and enfranchising the workers. We cheered on the Great Reform Bill and the suffragettes. 

Over the  last sixty years the elites of western Europe have  tried to create the unity that escaped them by conquest through imposing Union Treaties and common law codes. They have been building a Europe of lawyers, charged with regulating most aspects of our lives and business.  It is all paid for by growing EU taxation,  a money printing  Central Bank and billions of debt. The UK elite was by large majority in favour of surrendering our freedoms by stealth, and placing us under the domination of international lawyers and a European bureaucracy with anti democratic views.

The UK public saw the dangers and once again proved themselves to be the allies of liberty and the champions of freedom. They voted decisively No to staying in the straight jacket of EU laws and taxes. They wanted a free country again.

Today we need to remind our government that the change we want does not include meekly submitting ourselves back under EU laws and control. A fundamental tenet of freedom is we the people decide who governs, and we the people can throw them out of office by our votes if they fail to do as we wish. A fundamental principle of the European Union is no country can change EU laws, decisions and governing personnel through a national election. European elections cannot change the Treaties or much else, given the power of bureaucracy and the reluctance to repeal. It is government by the lawyers, of the lawyers for the lawyers.

At home we see a daily erosion of our freedoms.

The elite want to remove the car from most of us. They see it as an environmental problem. We see it as our freedom to get to the shops, to get to work, to visit friends and go on holiday.

 Those who most want to tax and ban us from the roads expect the chauffeured limo or the expensive taxi to be awaiting their trip to the next anti car conference. They replace freedom loving roundabouts with authoritarian traffic lights. They make us sit at a red light when nothing moves , instead of the freely chosen decisions of drivers ensuring a roundabout flows smoothly with  no delay. 

The elite want to stop people being self employed and innovating. Tax rules seek to make people stay as  employees. EU style laws over product specifications and ways of making things impede change and block new ideas.

They seek to nationalise, to cut out what they wrongly see as the inefficiencies and extra costs of competition. Surely they must see that nationalised HS2 shows how  state monopoly wastes time and  money on an industrial scale? Do they really want more businesses to adopt the nationalised Post Office approach to employee management, sending innocent men and women to prison for alleged fraud?

So how do we restore our precious flower of freedom to this garden of England?

We do so by daily vigilance.

We need  to challenge giving away our sovereignty, our birthright, to foreign institutions and lawyers each time it occurs.

We need to make again  the case for freedom of speech.

We need to speak up for free enterprise, innovation and the importance of profits for success and investment.

We need to remind that wider ownership and savings creates a better society

We need to explain why the car is crucial to our personal freedoms

We need to explain how competition is always better than monopoly, offering choice and keener prices

We should uphold the idea that anything is lawful that is not expressly condemned by our statutes

We need to remember the rule of law is crucial to exercising our freedoms. It needs limited numbers of the  right laws, leaving much to individual decision. 

England was built on common law. We need to restore common law over Treaty law. 

Long live freedom. Long live liberty. Long live the Freedom Association. 

I

The OBR have revised their net zero and climate change cost forecasts. They now see the UK needs to invest £720 bn up to 2050 of which 36% will be public sector. This entails a £10 bn a year cost in the public sector up to 2050. The first ten years sees the highest spend, with annual amounts reaching a peak of £16 bn before subsiding. The costs include subsidy for new power generation, investment in public sector buildings and the cost of carbon capture and related technologies.

There will also be large revenue losses. Most of the petrol and diesel tax disappears as new petrol and diesel vehicles are banned and replaced by battery ones. The double corporation tax and windfall tax on domestic oil and gas production will shrink as the industry is run down. There will be the loss of employment taxes, business tax and VAT on industrial activity as the government advances  its de industrialisation policy through dear energy.

All this points to net zero policies adding large sums to the deficits and forcing government to look for new sources of revenue.

The government will probably shift car and motor fuel taxes onto users of battery cars. It will need to find new household taxes when people discontinue gas heating  and so cease to contribute to the big fossil fuel tax take.

How will it replace lost industrial tax revenue?

There is general agreement amongst the commentariat that the Chancellor faces a big bill this autumn to make the numbers add up. There are spending cuts that Parliament will not accept, particularly in welfare and the pensioner fuel allowance, There will be changes from the OBR probably having to cut its forecasts of productivity growth and GDP growth. There could be cuts to forecast revenues as the reality of rich people leaving hits home. Here are the questions the Chancellor needs to answer and issues she needs to tackle.

1. How much is the extra cost of pensioner fuel grant?
2. How much is the extra cost of disability benefits?
3. What reduction needs to be made in public sector productivity forecasts, and how more does that add to public service costs?

4. How much slower will UK growth be and what does that add to the deficit?5. How much is added to spending to handle record levels of illegal migrants, including hotels, legal costs and benefits?

6. How much is the steel industry losing and how much money will the government need to give it to keep making steel?

7. What are the current additional  losses and costs of the nationalised railway and HS 2?

8. How much extra is going to be given to France to secure a new border deal?

9. How much money will be given to Mauritius to take Chagos in the early years of the deal?

All this probably adds up to a new bigger black hole than the £22 bn the Chancellor claimed to fix with the last budget.

The PM is wasting his time trying to get a one out, one in migrant deal with France. One for one will not cut the totals drastically in the way the public wants. We should not have to take more migrants we agree to take just because more illegals have turned up by boat.

The PM presumably thinks being able to return a few illegals in exchange for others might act as a deterrent to people risking the small boat trip. The truth is much of the risk has been removed by the French authorities accompanying small boats out of French waters and UK border force then providing a safe taxi service. All the time lots of people want to try the small boats numbers will far exceed France’s willingness to take illegals back.

Meanwhile other countries in the EU are querying the French idea saying they do not want to accept those France might take back. As they have common borders it is a matter of concern to them.

The PM has at last understood he needs to be able to send illegals elsewhere to act as a deterrent. That  was the point of the Rwanda scheme. This French idea is not up to the task.

The 1974-9 Labour government ran out of money by 1976 and had to go to the IMF to borrow. That entailed agreeing to cut spending and sell some assets as the state had over extended. Tax rates were high, driving rich and hard working people abroad in the brain drain. Borrowing was excessive. Interest rates were very high. The government had to borrow some money at more than 15% interest rate. The country effectively  went bust. The Labour government fell thanks to its economic disaster.

The next Labour government elected in 1997 followed Conservative spending and borrowing policies for its early years, which worked well. Then it decided it should spend and borrow more. It worked with the Bank of England on an asset bubble with excessive bank credit driving up prices and creating excessive options, leveraged funds and futures. By 2008 it was clear they had overdone it. They created a credit crunch which brought banks down and meant once again the state ran out of money. The great recession followed.

This time round they are seeking to overdo the spending and borrowing right at the start of their term. They have spent and wasted too much, with plans   to borrow £180 bn more than the Conservatives planned over five years. How long before markets teach them another expensive  lesson?

US GDP per head of $83,000 is already well ahead of the UK at $58,000. It is almost double the EU at their pathetic $43,000.

So why does the UK government want to lock us into a failing poverty machine called the EU instead of adopting US policies which promote growth and greater prosperity?

The US  has just gone for lower taxes. No tax on tips and overtime. What an incentive . The UK with its growth busting tax raising budget last year is planning another higher tax teach the rich a lesson budget.There will  be fewer and fewer rich to do detention in the government low growth school.

Why are so many in the UK establishment wedded to the notion that tying us to low growth low income EU will make us prosperous? Why do they not see the US has outperformed the  EU all this century to date. With the tax cuts coming and the dominance of US digital and AI the US  will again this Parliament beat the EU and UK in a big way.