Austerity isn’t working.

The party conference season is over and the political circus has packed up the bunting along with its hangovers and trooped back to Westminster as the leaves begin to turn. If there is a nip in the air this year it has as much to do with the state of the economy as the arrival of autumn.

Unemployment figures released on Wednesday show that the number of people out of work has risen by 114,000 to 2.57 million, reaching its highest level since the mid nineties. Part time workers have been hit hard as have the young with youth unemployment rising to 991,000, meaning that 21.3% of 16 to 24 year olds are without a job.

Alan Clarke, an economist for Scotia Capital, told politics.co.uk the spike in unemployment ‘shouldn’t come as a surprise because the economy is growing at half the pace it needs to unemployment stable.’ Things are likely to only get worse with huge cuts in the public sector workforce and a failure on the part of the private sector to make up the jobs lost with fresh recruitment.

Labour leader Ed Milliband has called for an emergency budget to deal with the effects of the looming economic crisis saying the government needed to show a ‘greater sense of urgency’ and that its deficit reduction plans risk sending ‘our economy into a tailspin.’

In a speech made at a college in Southend this week he called for a plan for jobs to be implemented that would feature, amongst other elements, a one off tax on banker’s bonuses the proceeds from which would be used to create 100,000 jobs for young people; investment in large infrastructure projects that would create jobs and demand for services and tax breaks for small firms that take on extra staff.

The was, Mr Milliband said, ‘an economic emergency’ and that through its economic policies the government had shown itself to be out of touch ‘with what is happening in Britain’s factories, its high streets and its homes.’

The response from Tory MP Matthew Hancock, a former advisor to Chancellor George Osborne, was both predictable and cynical. He told the BBC that Labour had ‘abandoned the Darling plan and now freely admit they would just keep spending on the taxpayers credit card’, he added to this a jibe that just as ‘you wouldn’t bring Fred Goodwin back to run the banks, so why would you bring Ed Balls back to sort out the economy.’

I am, it is fair to say, not the most enthusiastic of cheerleaders for Red Ed, not least because most of the time he is barely pink at best; but his assessment of the damage being done to the economy and society by an arrogant and out of touch government is spot on. Quite how wide the gulf between the antics of our leaders and the experience of most Britons has become is amply demonstrated by the behaviour of Liam Fox and Oliver Letwin.

I don’t much want to join in the schoolyard game of nudging and winking that has been played by the press all week over the relationship between erstwhile Defence Secretary Liam Fox and Adam Weritty, a close friend who pretended to be one of his ministerial advisors in a political equivalent of saying ‘I’m with the band’ as a way of blagging stuff for free. What angers me and I suspect most people is the though of the not so fantastic Mr Fox and his VBF trotting the globe at the public expense while at the same time service people returning from Afghanistan were being handed redundancy notices along with their campaign medals.

As for the antics of ‘Posh Ollie’ Letwin, who it was revealed this week likes to read his ministerial correspondence in the park and then drop it in the bin because carrying all those confidential papers back to the office is the most awful fag, it is all too clear what has been going on. This is the latest incident in the gaffe prone career of a man who thinks his, alleged, intellect frees him from having to apply common sense to what he says or does. There are occasions when eccentricity can be a sign of brilliance; here though it is just a symptom of pathological self indulgence.

Far worse that this is the divorce from reality that has been occasioned by the vanity of the Prime Minister and the cynical ambition on his Chancellor, which could, in time, prove to be every bit as damaging as the decade long feud between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

David Cameron spends his time strutting the world stage pretending to be a world statesman whilst ignoring the growing problems in the UK, apart that is, from when he feels the urge to do his patronising ‘somewhere over the rainbow’ routine in the name of the ‘big society.’ George Osborne is sticking to his damaging deficit reduction plans not out of an intellectual commitment to their economic accuracy, which by the way seems to be disproved at least twice every week, as a cynical belief that if rather than when the coalition collapses and the Tory grassroots decide it is time for Citizen Dave to spend more time with his ego he will be ideally placed to sweep to power as the heir to the Iron Lady.

This is a government charged with leading our country through the worst economic crisis the world has faced since the thirties and at its heart is a toxic mix of arrogance, entitlement and jockeying for position. Across Europe young people are rioting in the streets because they have had their future stolen, but the political elite are carrying on as if nothing has changed. An austerity package implemented by these people is a recipe for disaster.

Years ago I used to drink in a bar that had by its exit a sign reminding leaving customers ‘You are now entering grim reality’; maybe it is time someone put a similar sign up in David Cameron’s office. He could get his new friend Tracy Emin to make one out of her old knickers if he likes anything so long as the message gets through that life for most people is getting harder by the day. Time to face the facts Dave, austerity isn’t working and you are leading a complacent government into an dangerous era.

Out of control expenses and an expendable Speaker.

Sunday is the day when the opinion polls come out and, for the government; it is the day when they find out that things have got a little worse since last week.

This week things got off to an even worse start than usual, a poll conducted for the Sunday Times by Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher showed that Labour are trailing far behind the Tories and the Lib Dems in the 34 local authorities where elections are due to be held on the 4th of June. Another poll, carried out by YouGov this time, puts the Tories on 43 points, Labour on 27 and the Lib Dems on 18.

Speaking to the Sunday Times former general secretary of the Labour Party Peter Watt said the Brown government appeared to have ‘absolutely no direction,’ nobody asked why Labour had seen its support fall by another seven points because everybody knows the answer; MP’s expenses.

Only a day earlier the Daily Telegraph published a damning list of the expenses claims made by members of parliament. The items claimed for ranged from kit-kats and tampons to the activities of Margaret Moran and several other members who repeatedly changed the designation of their second home in order to play the system for a fat profit.

As for the most absurd expenses claim of all, made for the £25,000 cost of providing police protection for Tourism Minister Barbara Follett. Politicians, like everyone else, have a right to overrate their importance, but if they happen to be married to a multi-millionaire novelist they shouldn’t expect a lot of much poorer people to pick up the tab for their hubris.

Labour aren’t the only party with skeletons bought on expenses rattling in their closet, the Tories have had to answer some awkward questions, but David Cameron was able to make his apologies in the certain knowledge that sleaze sticks closest to parties in government.

Amongst the most prominent political careers turned into ashes by the scandal over MP’s expenses is that of House of Commons Speaker Michael Martin.

Gorbals Mick, as he is not at all affectionately known looked unlikely to be one of the more illustrious Speakers before the expenses issue blew up in the faces of our legislators, he has been soundly criticised for being partisan, living high on the hog courtesy of his own expenses account and being generally below par.

Now he faces a possible vote of no confidence instigated by Tory MP Douglas Carswell and has come under fire from the Labour benches with David Winnick calling for him to apologise for ‘personal comments’ made to former Sports Minister Kate Hoey during a commons debate on expenses.

It is unusual for a Speaker to be forced to resign before he or she chooses to retire but an exception could well be made for the deeply unloved Mr Martin. What, you wonder will history say of this pygmy of political debate? Only, I suspect that he contrived to make being a middle aged man in knickerbockers look even more ridiculous than usual.

A dual carriageway complete with cycle path runs for half a mile or so from the gates of the University Hospital of North Staffordshire before losing itself amidst the closes and cul-de-sacs of a rather dowdy housing estate. It is a road I have travelled along almost daily for the best part of twenty years without ever having really thought about why it should end so suddenly as it does and why it should be there at all.

I know now, thanks to a well informed friend, that it was built during the 1930’s as part of a project to make work for the unemployed, a little piece of historical trivia that has acquired an unsettling relevance over the past few months.

This week the unemployment figures for the first three months of 2009 were published, they make for grim reading; there are now 2.2million people out of work in the UK and the rate at which unemployment rose over the period covered was the most rapid since 1981. Despite this a few brave souls have claimed to see the green shoots of recovery poking through the wreckage of the financial disaster that started with the collapse of Northern Rock on the eve of the 2007 Labour Party conference, there optimism is based on a modest rise in the number of new mortgage enquiries and surprisingly robust consumer spending.

All well and good I’m sure, although my own opinion leans towards that expressed, in more erudite terms, by Mervyn King, Chair of the Bank of England, that we have no grounds yet for being sure the light we think we can see at the end of the tunnel isn’t the headlamp of an oncoming train. More to the point I wonder if we will have to build more than a few of our own roads to nowhere before the good times return.