I remember the year 2006.Pretty good summer, if I recall. Several weeks of hot weather. Nice few trips to Calais to top up the old baccy, bowling down the M20, windows open. Don’t recall beggars on the street or the place falling apart.Motors doing well. Petrol at a reasonable price. Country top of the league. Council chief executives still not quite on £200k salaries just to get them out of bed.That TV geezer Andrew Marr was busy getting his programme together about what a bleeding good place the old UK was to live in, loads of dosh, not like the old days in the 1970s, full of strikes and rubbish industries going down the drain.In fact, the year 2006 was damned good... So damned good, the prime minister wants to take us back there. He maintains that all his public spending cuts only take us back to what we were spending in 2006.Blimey, what with all this shouting and jumping up and down from town hall suits, unions, retired generals, probation officers, police chiefs, teachers and all the others feeding at the great public sector trough, you’d have thought we were being taken back to the year 1906.So, actually, all we’re doing is going back four years, to a year which actually wasn’t any different from this year or the last one, apart from petrol being 1.29p a litre – only public spending is so out of control now that, like a drug, we’ve all become hooked, and can’t step back and realise we’re all addicts.This is cold turkey. Bring us back to the summer of 2006, when the sun was shining and the M20 to Calais neverheard of Operation Stack...
