Party for £4billion?

1993: The Last Party - Levin

You will be aware that the LibDems are in Brighton for their conference. Today Danny Alexander is expected to announce that the Coalition Government are making progress towards their pledges to clamp down on tax dodgers. He is expected to announce that £4bn has been recovered this year, which is on the way to the £9bn target by 2015. Whilst this is good news, I'm not entirely sure that doing the job of collecting owed taxes is something to shout about - anymore than one would praise a ticket inspector for checking people had tickets.

The LibDems also seem to be discussing and widely supporting the break up of RBS and Lloyds Bank, two of our national banks. I doubt that many would disagree that it would make sense to use public banks to fund the economy, however the detail of such agreements is rather vital. Simply taking over other debts so that businesses can borrow from the usual culprits again is little more than a game of pass the parcel. As with most political conferences, there's a lot of razzle and dazzle - no doubt over the next 2 months we shall witness a pretty grim display of this at its worst in America. Hopefully amidst all the glitz and bunting are some good ideas about how some of the world's economic problems will be tackled positively. Something that we look to politicians to take the lead on implementing, but at the same time aware that ultimately we are responsible for our own actions and need to play our part in economic life.