Sometimes I think: “Is it me, or is the world going mad?” This weekend is one of those occasions. We’ve had weeks of the Chancellor flying all sorts of tax raising kites and leaking different budget proposals, as if she is just flailing around=d without any clue of how to balance the books. Then we’re told that the OBR have magiced up £10 billion of extra headroom for her. So what does she do? Well, what comes naturally to any Labour Chancellor – spend it.

This weekend she has announced that rail fares will be frozen next year, costing the taxpayer £600 million. And she has also apparently decided to abolish the two child benefit cap at a cost of £3.5 billion. She in twenty four hours she’s already spent nearly half the £10 billion. Oh, and then there’s another £1.5 billion to subsidise EV purchases – despite discouraging them by introducing a 3p per mile tax on EV owners. You couldn’t make this shit up if you tried.

There was clearly no thought of actually using that £10 billion to cut the deficit and reassure markets. On what planet can it be right to be increasing public spending in these days of virtually no growth?

Ah, but think of the children, they say. Alleviating child poverty should be a moral priority and a bigger priority than financial rectitude. I am all in favour of alleviating poverty – but the kind of poverty where children go hungry, have no clothes and have no home. That is called absolute poverty. Relative poverty is something very different.

There is nothing moral about bankrupting the country. And there is nothing moral about encouraging people to have children they can't afford.

Government has two primary roles. To defend the security of the nation and ensure the public finances are in order. Because if you think about it, everything else follows from that. If your economy is wrecked, there is no money for public services or a welfare state. The better the economy does, the more can be spent on those things. When debt is out of control, and debt interest consumes ten per cent of our public spending, Houston, we have a problem. And when we are constantly told there is no money and taxes have to go up, which will have a negative effect on growth, then I do not think that extra subsidies on the railways can be justified, or indeed a further £3 billion on extra money for child benefit

The welfare state is there to deal with absolute. Left wing pressure groups only consider relative poverty, which is a totally manufactured and arbitrary construct. Not being able to fund a school trip is a shame, but it is not a sign of absolute poverty. Relative poverty is just a way of screaming “But it’s not fair!!!”. No, life isn’t. And we don’t live in a Communist state where everyone is equal. Human beings aren’t made like that. It is not the function of the state to make everyone equal. It is the function of the state to provide for those in society who for whatever reason fall on very hard times, and to help them pick themselves up. The state should not be paying benefits to anyone who is earning more than £50,000 a year. It is just not sustainable.

And if that makes me a hard hearted fiscal conservative, I am proud to wear the label. Because until those in charge of our nation’s finances come to recognise that going back to sound money is the only way to economic prosperity, the tax burden will continue to rise, and our economy will continue to stagnate. One day we may even have a Cabinet which contains people who have actually run a business and understand how markets work and the meaning of enterprise and entrepreneurialism. I suspect I’ll be dead before that happens, though.