Who would have guessed it?The clearsightedness of the Government is impressive

Who would have guessed it?The clearsightedness of the Government is impressive. Mr Blair says there is “huge frustration” with the existing state of things Well, yes. There would be, wouldn’t there? A recent poll showed that seven times as many people believe rail services have deteriorated since 1997 than believe they have improved since Labour came to power.Mr Blair says that the privatised rail system which the Government inherited was “too complex and fragmented” – but he fails to point out that Labour itself contributed to the mess. A plan that could have kept the lunacy in check was stymied because Labour, in advance of the 1997 elections, was wary of seeming ready to make public-expenditure commitments. In short, an important opportunity was lost.There is something deeply depressing about the Government’s determination to commission reports galore, instead of common-sense solutions For benighted rail travellers, things only get worse. Far from indulging in the much-vaunted “joined-up writing”, the Government seems on this issue to be illiterate. His timing was lamentable, even as Mr Blair declared that he was “absolutely” the right man for the job.

The truth is that the Government seems quite bereft of ideas; the interventions of the noble Lord Birt are unlikely to make it less so.. Economics may be a notoriously inexact science, but the signals from the British high street are clear and unambiguous We are enjoying the biggest boom since the late 1980s. Car sales for 2001 exceeded the previous record, set in 1989; house prices are rising at their fastest level since 1987; and high-street sales are, similarly, rising at a speed not seen for a decade. When real wages are growing by 4 to 5 per cent and the economy as a whole by 2 to 2.5 per cent, we are simply spending beyond our means, paying for our new cars, DVD players and Playstations with short-term credit.

We are saddling ourselves with debt.In November, for example, total personal borrowing rose by about £7bn, the largest monthly increase since the Bank of England started keeping records December’s increase should comfortably exceed that The economy is becoming severely unbalanced. We should also ask ourselves whether we, in the world’s fourth-largest economy, and one that is still very dependent on overseas trade for its health, can continue to grow healthily when the world’s three largest economies – those of the US, Germany and Japan – are in recession.The question now is not whether this consumer boom will end, but when and how. The danger is that the Bank of England will repeat the policy mistakes of the past – made, admittedly, before it was granted operational independence – and allow the boom to continue until the global slowdown catches up with the British economy and consumers capitulate under a mountain of debt The consequences of such a denouement could be gruesome. Some, in particular those who are unlucky enough to lose their jobs in the process, will endure the sort of pain and misery that we last saw in the negative equity slump of the early 1990s.