We can't afford to keep spending money on recovery. Also, the Government is a useless banker/ VC.

Poor old Alastair Darling (ahem). He knows better than anyone that the one thing UK plc really needs to get to grips with, now that the worst of the recession is over, is public spending. But he’s a politician and there’s an election on the way. He can’t afford to be seen as the axeman, at least not until after May 6th, and Gordon wouldn’t let him if he tried.

So here’s the line he has tried to walk instead. Yes, we need cuts, but not yet. It’s too soon, the recovery isn’t safe. We need to keep spending, but on recovery rather than rescue. Big government saved you in the dark days of 2008/2009, and it can do the same again this year – just keep the faith. Don’t trust Dave and the posh boys, they’ll turn the taps off straight away and the cure will be worse than the disease.

All well and good in theory, especially for all those pundits who have rediscovered Keynes in recent months. But in practice, we’ve been pouring money into cushioning the recession for 18 months and – however successful or otherwise the outcome – we simply can’t afford to do it any longer. Every day we continue to keep spending now will simply make the final, inevitable day of reckoning more painful.

The fact is the deficit is already bigger than when Denis Healy went to the IMF in the 1970s. That’s simply not sustainable - yet there's little sign in today’s Budget that the Government is ready to do anything serious about it. A green investment bank so we can pour more of our hard-earned tax dollars into the dubious benefits of offshore windfarms. £500m of taxpayers money to be ‘invested’ in start-ups by Whitehall’s finest commercial talent scouts. 15,000 civil servants to be relocated out of London - a great opportunity for Waitrose to open a bigger store in Cardiff but not much good when it comes to protecting sterling, our national credit rating or our international economic reputation.

I’m also wondering about the wisdom of forcing state-owned Lloyds and RBS to massively increase their loans to SMEs. The Treasury wants to double the current figure to £94 billion. There will be plenty of weak and badly-run SMEs at the front of the queue to get access to this money, and default rates will go up accordingly. The government is a useless banker and an even worse venture capitalist. If Lloyds and RBS thought there was more easy money to be made from UK SME lending, it would be already doing it. Irrational exuberance combined with an overly-lax attitude to risk is what got us into this mess in the first place.

What matters at the moment – and it galls me to say this – is what those wretched 'markets' think. If they do not like the look of the remedies offered to what they see as our massive problems, they will punish us. That means potentially losing the AAA-rating, buyers getting sniffy about our bonds, lumping us in with the Greeks and the Portuguese as honorary PIGS. Darling has done his best to set out his stall for the general election and first reactions aren’t good. The pound fell below a dollar fity again as Darling sat down. Whether it will make any difference to the voters we won't know until May, of course.

The case of a (now ex-)parrot in Miami got me thinking about the caring professions and their relationship with lucre.

I do wonder about some people. Not least Anne Lowery from Florida, who spent £50,000 on chemotherapy for her 42-year-old Wagler’s Conure parakeet called Areba - who then became an ex-parrot within a year. Dr Teresa Lightfoot, the vet who administered the avian injections (and swiped Ms Lowery’s card) said, 'It was tough for Areba. But we improved her quality of life and gave her and her mom more time together.' (I don’t know what they teach them at Miami vet school, but I doubt if the prospect of homo sapiens giving birth to a Wagler’s Conure parakeet is included in the curriculum.)    

These kind of stories are ten-a-penny in our mad world. Kids starve in Africa and some nut job spends fifty grand on her parrot. But it was all brought home to me last week by my brother and his dog Sidney. Sidney is a crazed lurcher/greyhound cross with an IQ of around 12, breath like an open sewer and a bad attitude towards small furry animals such as foxes and squirrels. Last week he made the serious error of taking off across the road in pursuit of his prey and was hit by a Transit (tt didn’t bother stopping). My brother took the broken-legged mutt to the vet and they donned the mask to have a look.

After an X-ray came the bad news – the specialist orthopaedic operation required would cost £4,500. I can’t say this surprised me – when you spend eight years getting trained to acquire your veterinary certificate, you really want to fill your boots when you're finally are let loose on Satan the Rottweiler and Squeaker the hamster. I recall the bloke who used to see to our childhood cat Marmaduke when felled by fleas or feline enteritis drove a Jaguar XJS. The emotional blackmail used by vets will be familiar to any pet owner.

This got me thinking about the caring professions and their relationship with lucre. Not least because after failing to visit my wife and children on the last two occasions they were really pretty unwell - a nasty allergic reaction in the case of the 8 month old baby - we’ve just had a seriously snotty letter from the GP, saying if we don’t get the toddler in for his second dose of MMR, we're going to get slung off their list. The fact that they lose money if they don’t reach their children’s immunisation targets is the reason for this. I feel like ringing up to suggest that if they agree to visit, we’ll do the immunisation - but that would be childish. And they probably wouldn’t answer the phone anyway.  

What they need to remember is that following their contract renegotiations and the huge uplift in their salaries, the out-of-hours service offered – or rather not offered - by most GPs is now a shambles. Only one in 50 services is meeting the out-of-hours performance targets set to ensure patients get proper advice and treatment.

GPs, like vets, are not saints - they are small businesses operating in a very odd market. Many are hugely successful. Take Dr Suppiah Ratneswaren, 61, who is linked to four separate NHS practices in the south London borough of Greenwich. He’s admitted he is earning between £300,000 and £400,000 a year, 90% of it from the health service. And yet I notice today their Royal College is yet again trying to make access to them more difficult, because they don’t want to be bothered with 'minor ailments'. It seems to me that GPs have spent the last decade telling us all that they wish to do less work for more money. You can't blame them for trying; but that doesn't mean we have to buy it.

The point is a simple one. As members of the NHS resist the inevitable public spending cuts that will come after an election, they will scream blue murder about protecting patient care and why health should be ring-fenced. It should not. Many of them will genuinely be concerned about this. But, human nature being what it is, they're anxious to keep their own nests feathered too. 

Beating up on our feckless youth appears to be back in season again. I think we should give them a break.

With everyone feeling a bit grumpy at the moment, having an irritable nag at the up-and-coming generation seems to be in vogue. Yesterday the daunting figure of Lucy Neville-Rolfe, director of corporate and legal affairs at Tesco, made a speech in which she had a go at school leavers, claiming they suffered from a poor attitude, didn’t understand time-keeping or teamwork, and turned up for interviews looking a mess, while their degrees were devalued. 'They can’t read, can’t write and think the world owes them a living', was the Mail’s solemn headline.  The woeful state of our education system seems to be a particular bugbear of Tesco: their normally reserved CEO Sir Terry Leahy recently expressed similar dissatisfaction with the output of our schools. It’s worrying that they think this, because they are the UK’s largest private sector employer.

Hot on the heels of the Tesco attack comes another Mail report that I found hard to disentangle. It was slamming Generation Y for, amongst other sins, 'valuing leisure time far more highly than older members of the workforce'. Well, blow me. Put them into detention for wanting to have a nice time after 5.30pm.

A couple of points spring to mind. If this feckless youth really is as bad as Tesco is making out, it’s hardly the fault of the kids themselves; it's the fault of the education system that has worked them over and spat them out. I’m unconvinced that the 75% increase (in real terms) in the education budget since 1997 has led to 75% more output. Many nettles remain ungrasped; many children remain failed by their schooling.

Secondly, we’re hardly welcoming those in their late teens and 20s into the wonderful world of work with open arms at the moment. It hasn’t been as tough to get a proper job for a long while, and the dole queue is brimful of youngsters, many of whom feel understandably cheated by and disillusioned with the system.

Only last week the Mail, in its delightfully schizoid way, highlighted the way in which companies are exploiting this situation and using unpaid 'internships' to get real work done at no cost. It found 'a prestigious PR firm' at which a 22-year-old with a 2:1 from one of the country's leading universities was given the task of directing incoming phone calls for eight hours a day. She didn’t even get her train fare back.

Moreover, grown-ups have been moaning about youth since time began. It’s programmed into us to think we had it ever so tough, and the next generation gets an easy ride. If you think it’s bad at the moment, look how the change in attitudes during the 60s went down with the oldsters. Those who had lived through the war and the misery of rationing into the 50s were none too pleased to watch kids enjoying some freedom, and replacing Vera Lynn, Russ Conway and powdered egg with the Rolling Stones, the pill and kilos of wacky baccy.

We don't want our kids embracing the world of work too soon. Do you really want your child to be some freak who spends all their time in the playground trying to start a business selling conkers, or even dreaming of working a till at Tesco?

Equally, it’s no bad thing for kids to refuse to be supine and unquestioning of the status quo. Indeed when you look at the mess their elders and betters have made of the global economy and ecology, it’s hardly surprising that they're not impressed. But in their own time, they’ll buckle down to the grind, as the rest of us did. They’ll lose the wide-eyed naivety of youth. They’ll turn into their parents, and there’s nothing much wrong with that because that is what growing up entails. As The Who said initially 'The kids are all right' - and then later (in 'Won’t get Fooled Again'): 'Meet the new boss - same as the old boss'.