On Thursday I was debating the Blair years at the Cambridge Union. Hazel Blears put up a spirited defence of the Labour government. She said that when Labour arrived in power her own town was run down. By the time they left office it had new schools, a better hospital and other improvements from enhanced public sector investment.

I am glad her town benefitted from some of the massive spending and borrowing Labour undertook in office. I guess if there had been a Conservative government they too would have spent a lot of extra money on her area. Conservative governments, like Labour governments, traditionally spend much more of our money in Labour areas as they agree there is more need there than in the more prosperous Conservative parts of the country. I also agree with Hazel, unlike some of the people who write in to this blog, that the public sector can and does contribute to national output and wellbeing. The output of a public sector hospital or school is as much a part of national output as the output of a private sector school or hospital.

The missing parts of the Labour discussion, however, revolve around two sets of issues.. Why didn’t the large expenditure of money in the poorer areas lead them to catch up with the richer areas? Why did inequalities expand rather than contract? Why did London continue to outperform the areas attracting the most public spending? Secondly, don’t we need a bit more balance in public spending?  Whilst I do not begrudge Hazel her new schools and better facilities, there was no evidence of anything similar in my area. By end of  the Labour years we had grossly overcongested roads, and a shortage of school places, with a large backlog of building maintenance and replacement in the public sector.

The truth is the Blair years lived on credit too greatly, leaving us with a huge problem of paying the bills and repaying the debts which will continue to haunt us for some years to come.  The Blair model of public sector led spending gave some help to the areas that  benefitted most from it, but failed in the main to encourage a productive private sector to take  off and generate lots of new private sector jobs in the poorer areas of the country.  The public sector was not uniformly favoured either.

We are entering the long rebalancing. To make other areas as rich as London will require much more private  sector led growth in them. To regenerate the whole public sector, and not just favoured parts of it, requires reform as well as fairer funding.

I am all in favour of a free press. There will be times when they get it wrong, and will need to apologise. There may be times when journalists break the law. They should be punished like anyone else. There will be many times when they publish the inconvenient, the badly spun or the difficult to take. But I would rather live in a society where there is a free press than one where there is not. Sometimes they get their facts wrong, sometimes they express opinions I have good reasons not to  agree with, but that is no case for regulating them.

Labour and Lib Dems are now keen to set up statutory regulation for the press. I do not like that idea. Labour’s excessively complex and extensive regulation of banks and financial services did not prevent the worst crash of the last eighty years occurring on their watch. The EU’s excessive regulation of our energy does  not deliver enough cheap energy to homes and factories. No amount of health and safety regulation can prevent all untimely and unwelcome deaths in our hospitals. We need to be realistic about the limits of what regulation can achieve.

We also need to recognise that too much of the wrong kind of regulation can divert attention from regulators and governments doing what only they can do. The excessive detailed regulation of the Brown era meant they did not regulate the quantity of money, credit and capital that needed controlling to prevent boom and bubble, though they had  powers to do so and were advised to do so by some of us.

So why do Labour think they would be any better at regulating the press? What action would they have taken to stop phone hacking in  its infancy? How could a government regulator be truly independent of the government which has such a close relationship with newspapers? I will vote for the least intrusive regulation on offer, as I am suspicious of the motives behind the wish to regulate, and sceptical of the ability of any new regulators to get it right if appointed.

          Mr Cameron set out a good vision of the UK negotiating a new relationship with the EU. He does recognise that the Euro area is rushing on to full political, monetary, banking, and economic union. He has no more wish to belong such a union than many of you or me. He is in Coalition with a party which does welcome the current unacceptable level of European authority in the UK, and would happily accept more. There is little chance of the Lib Dems in the Coalition agreeing to early action to negotiate a new relationship or to hold an In/Out referendum.

         The policy of negotiate and decide for after the next election is fine. Those who claim the EU will not negotiate or will not offer anything we could accept will have their chance to vote for exit should that prove to be the case. The problem is many do not want to wait another two years before we start this process. Some want proof that a future government will deliver the In/Out referendum, whilst others worry that there could be another federalist Lib/Lab government elected instead.

           That is why some of us favour the Mandate referendum soon. This would ask the question Do you want the UK government to negotiate a new relationship with the EU, based on free trade and political co-operation? This might get through even the current House of Commons were the Conservative leadership to adopt it. It is difficult to believe Labour would join the Lib Dems in wanting to vote this down.

         If it did take place it is likely a very large majority of the British people would vote Yes. This would strengthen the Prime Minister’s hand with EU member governments, showing that he was speaking for the overwhelming majority of the British people and not just for the largest minority party in the Commons. It would also make it more difficult for other parties in the House to seek to block a renegotiation which I suspect is much sought after by the British people.

I have been very busy in Parliament this week. This causes delay in postings.

To speed it up it would help me if you did not

a) refer to other websites, apart from reputable official source websites or well based publications that I know

b) splash unsubstantiated allegations around about individuals and organisations. I do not have the time or investigative resources to check them out. The general criticism can be made without calling people names and using provactive adjectives.

In future I may just not post contributions which persist with difficult material.

            Whilst I believe some tax rates are self defeating, raising less revenue than lower rates, I do not think cutting the main rates of Income Tax or even Corporation Tax would lead to a surge of revenue in the first couple of years. Clearly VAT cuts would lose us revenue, just as a VAT increase was the one rate rise which did bring tax revenue gains. A lower tax economy will in the longer run be more successful, and will bring in more revenue as the growth accelerates.

          Mr Cameron in his recent economic  speech argued that the 50p to 45p tax change will bring in more revenue. I agree. I suspect lowering the rate ot 40p would bring in more as well. The current CGT rate is clearly counter productive, with a forecast fall in revenue this year. It is the most easily avoided tax, as people do not have to sell and realise gains, or they can sell something at a loss as well to offset. Why impose rates that lose revenue?

          This leaves the government and its tax cutting critics at odds over the main case. “Cut tax rates”, say the radicals, “to energise the economy. In due course it will pay off, but in the meantime we might have to borrow more”. Keep rates high, counters the government. We need to show “we are all in this together, so we need to tax hard anyone who does work and invest. Try to keep the borrowing down, as otherwise we might lose the markets confidence”.

           There is a mid point between these two. The tax cutters are right, that lower tax rates would stimulate more growth and create more private sector demand. It is tempting to try it. Give tax cuts to all. However, state  borrowing is too high and it would seem perverse to want to increase it. The government is right that it needs to get the deficit down.  So find some popular cuts in public spending that would pay for the tax cuts in the early stages, before the growth generated the extra revenue. I have often set out here easy or popular cuts. Start with getting our troops home, cutting overseas aid,  sell some state owned banking assets and stop Network Rail dealing in derivatives for starters. Cutting out expenditure abroad by the UK state is doubly helpful, as the money spent does nothing to stimulate UK demand at the moment, and having to buy foreign currency when exporting the money is another force selling the pound and driving up UK inflation.  I will look in more detail at this in due course.

          According to global warming theory we should be getting early springs and warmer winters. The most enthusiastic global warming theorists were busily forecasting the end to snow in the UK winter looking forward to this decade. They said the winters would not be cold enough to kill off unwelcome bugs. They said spring would come a lot earlier owing to the global warming trend.

         The last three years have seen some tough and snow ridden winters here in the UK. This March we have sub zero temperatures, and on Tuesday morning people were still stuck in their cars in the snow near Gatwick airport from the night before.

          Doubtless we will be told this is just more weather, and less climate. We will be told that the long term trend of temperatures is still upwards, despite the apparent hiatus in rising temperatures worldwide for the last 16 years. The fact that our fuel bills are so high, and that it is so perishing cold in March makes global warming theory a difficult sell to many people. Understandably many people are far more worried about keeping warm and how much it is going to cost. Many businesses are worried about whether it is still economic to make things needing lots of energy in the UK, or whether the intention of EU policy makers is to ensure more and more of the high energy using activities take place outside the EU altoegther , where energy is more realistically priced.

          The Uk is short of roadspace, electricity generation capacity, fast broadband, airport capacity, gas storage, deep water port capacity and homes in the right places. Most people agree it would be good to have more of all or most of these. Most people agree it would be good if the building and construction industry had more work, before its underlying capacity to work is reduced more permanently.

          The government is involved in these matters. Businesses and individuals need planning permission to build. They need Building Regulations approval, and  Health and Safety approval. In cases like energy and aviation the government is involved in pricing decisions and special taxes.It does not mean, however, that the government can or should own the assets and build new ones out of taxpayers money.

            There is a lot of money around in pension funds, insurance funds and held by individual savers. The income  returns on this money are now very poor if you try to stay in low risk assets. If you keep it on deposit or place it into “safe” government  bonds the income is small. Many say they would like some new assets safer than shares that would give them a better yield.

           The government should be able to work with the private sector to develop just such instruments to finance the infrastructure projects we need. The cashflows on a popular tollroad like the Dartford Crossing  or from a baseload new electricity power station are good and reasonably reliable. Finance for such projects could be available where the investor agrees to make money available for say 25 years in return for an income of say 5% or so. The bonds could be traded on the market like government bonds, so you could get out long before the repayment date.

             Many of the potential projects are held up. The government is trying to address the delays. More progress is needed to grant the permits, licences and the planning permissions and settle the tariff regimes so more projects can go ahead.  It would be quite possible to have a much larger capital programme largely financed by private money. So far this has proved elusive, as there are so many obstacles in modern UK and EU government that can get in the way.

          The immediate task of providing more cheaper energy is something we have often discussed here. Ministers do need to revisit damaging EU energy policies which are pricing us out of international markets owing to the business bills, and making it very difficult for many people to afford the domestic fuel bills.

The Coalition government has some sympathy with the idea that the public sector needs to boost its own capital investment. The Chancellor has made modest increases to the inherited much cut plans. He does not do more, because he says if he undertook to borrow more markets might lose faith in his fiscal management. If markets drove up the cost of state borrowing, that will take demand out of the economy as interest rates generally rise. That not only hits borrowers, but also undermines confidence and knocks business. It would of course offer some offset as savers had more to spend.

I think there is a larger problem with rolling out big public sector capital programmes. So often the projects the public sector chooses fail to raise productivity but instead gives the state large new future liabilities. The state has to maintain and staff the new buildings and pay the often large losses on the trading assets acquired. The UK is not competitive enough. It needs to raise productivity. It needs to have an affordable public sector. The wrong kinds of public “investment” can make these aims more difficult to achieve.

Some might think, for example, that a new library would be a welcome project. The state then has to provide tax revenue to pay all the future running costs of the library for many years, as it will not bring in any revenue. Meanwhile it leaves open the question of how and when will the UK adapt to the new technology of the web and ebooks. Some believe that HS2 is a crucial economic project that can open up business to the North. However the business plans show it will be heavily loss making and struggle to attract enough passengers. It is twentieth century technology, when China is pressing on with maglev, and the US with its digital revolution allowing good communcations from remote locations.

It seems unlikely that the state can come up quickly with a series of projects that could raise productivity in the state sector, thereby boosting growth and helping reduce future costs of state provision. Short of that it is difficult to see how an enhanced public sector capital programme will lift us out of low growth. Japan has tried this for many years, and just ended up with even more massive state debts than we have. Tomorrow we will consider a larger  privately financed capital programme. This has the advantage that the projects need to meet commercial tests, and do not lumber taxpayers with any failures.

In the run up to the Budget there are three main families of  proposals on offer to boost demand and stimulate growth.

There is the public sector led approach. People argue that the state can still borrow very cheaply, thanks to Quantitative Easing. The state should therefore borrow more to finance state investment projects. They argue that building new schools and railway lines would boost output. Capital budgets which were cut substantially by the outgoing Labour government, largely confirmed by the Coalition, should be temporarily restored.

There is the private sector led approach.  People argue there needs to be tax cuts. The private sector has so far experienced a much tougher squeeze than the public sector overall. If people were allowed to keep more of their own money to spend, it would provide a welcome boost to demand. If companies could keep more of their profits,or could generate more profit in the first place thanks to lower tax bills, there could be an enterprise led revival.

There is the bank led approach. If the banks can be mended and the Central Bank can push money into the banking system from Quantitative Easing, then people argue there will be more credit extended. People will be able to afford new homes and new cars and other goods, there will be more demand. Businesses will be able to borrow to invest and expand.

I will provide a critique of each of these over the next few days. As readers of this site will know, I do think the priority is to fix the banks to allow them to finance a more normal recovery. Tax rates that are cutting the revenues should be reduced. Any other tax reductions to boost people’s spending power  which would be welcome has to be matched by reducing wasteful public spending. More capital investment is needed, but should be undertaken mainly by the private sector.