FOR too many years now successive governments have increased their power and influence over our lives and created a mammoth bureaucracy that is financially unsustainable and can no longer be afforded.

Please remember the money they spend is ours. Governments don't have money. The money they spend is collected from taxation, working people, businesses and a plethora of other means to gather money have been created overtime to fill the government coffers to pay for poor and misguided policies. Waste is endemic in government and would appear to be of no concern to the heads of departments with vast budgets.

We have the ridiculous situation now where 53 per cent of working people, work for the government, and 47 per cent work in the private sector. (Remember the private sector earns money and the government spends money). It is now and has been for decades too far out of balance for this type of system to work. We currently have for every one person in the front line of services four people who do not give a direct service to the public.

I am no economist but it doesn't take a financial wizard to see that this has gone on too long and the cost to maintain this system is grossly out of control.

You can now hear successive ex chancellors of the exchequer talking with authority about what is wrong today, but it was wrong in their time also and they did nothing to reverse it!

Now the reverse of their blind political dogma will have to be introduced. It will be painful but we need people freed from the shackles of ever increasing taxation to maintain the status quo, and get people working in real jobs that create real wealth for the country and themselves.

The service industry creates jobs but it doesn't create wealth. The only way to create wealth is by exporting manufactured good and services abroad.

It has been long argued that we are too expensive and we cannot compete in the world market place. Well I suggest that is where highly paid politicians and bureaucrats should be focusing their minds, not on creative ways to collect taxes.

They have the ability to travel the world at our expense and can see for themselves "what works". It is now time that the jollies in government and the civil service stopped and the business of UK PLC was the most important thing on their agendas.

– Robert Harris, ex Berry Hill.