Bernard Ingham: Economy will be X factor in the polling booth

Fortunately, you can safely close your ears to all the sound and fury. It will not change the fundamentals in the slightest. Indeed, in a rational world the outcome would already be decided.

I offer this as an infallible guide to the issues.

There is one overriding problem: the economy. Europe and immigration are secondary, though they can and do influence the economy’s handling. Without a strong, soundly-based economy, governments are hamstrung across the policy field, including – as we see today – foreign and defence policy.

The plain fact is that when the election comes round we shall have been struggling for five years to rescue an economy ravaged by the financial crisis of 2008 and gross Labour overspending. Over that period, Chancellor George Osborne has so far managed to reduce a £150bn budget deficit – the difference between the Government’s income and spending – by only a third. He still has £100bn around his – and our – necks.

Every year this piles up more national debt, which at the last count amounted to £1.377 trillion and costs about £43bn a year to service. In other words, we taxpayers have to find as much for interest payments as for our national defence.

Only fools can contemplate pouring that amount of dead money into UK Inc. Wise men know that our debts must be eliminated.

And that simple point lays bare the issue confronting the electorate in May next year. Who is more likely to be wise than foolish?

The honest answer is: the Conservatives. They have a track record for doing the right thing, if too slowly. They should have been fiercer on spending in 2010. But they know what is required and, for what it is worth, have set targets for eliminating the budget deficit.

To be fair to the Liberal Democrats under Nick Clegg, they also know what is necessary and can reasonably claim to have played a deficit dwindling game in coalition over the past four years. It is possible that the Tories would have cut more but for them, but they still deserve some credit. That is no reason to vote for them, given their incorrigible Europhilia.

Ukip might have its heart in the right place over spending but it is relevant in the election only to the extent that it leads to another coalition. As such, it is a confounded nuisance, especially as the Tories are clearly bent on an EU referendum in 2017.

This leaves us with Labour and their more extreme version, the Greens, who, to be blunt, are daft and dangerous.

Whatever anyone might say of them, Ed Miliband and Ed Balls are not innocents abroad. Generally, they know what the British economy needs and doesn’t need.

The question is whether they are likely to do their duty. Here we come up against two things. First, their chronic inclination to play Robin Hood – taxing “the rich” to spend on the poor and often not-so-poor. Miliband also suffers from a driving compulsion to reform capitalism by interfering willy-nilly in markets.

We already know where that has got him – and us. The energy companies are refusing to cut their prices because he has sworn to freeze their tariffs if he gets the chance.

The second question hanging over Miliband and Balls are their paymasters, the trade unions. Len McCluskey, the rather empty general secretary of Unite, has already made it clear that he has had enough of austerity, such as it is, and is very much into the old redistributive tax and spend game.

In other words, to hell with the economy. It’s only money. You can print it. And we have the weapons to get more from the taxpayer for our members to compensate for the consequent decline in the value of the currency.

McCluskey and his ilk are old-fashioned, blinkered union barons who, having learned nothing from history, feel righteous in pursuing their members’ vested interests at the expense of the wider community. Any self-respecting voter has to ask himself whether Miliband and Balls, with friends like this, can be relied upon to act in the national interest.

The next nine months will not change this scenario. The issues set out here will be just as acute when you enter the polling booth on May 7 next year. Mark my words.