Why do we feel so broke?

My report for the Centre for Policy Studies Why do we feel so broke? appears to have struck a chord judging by the coverage.  It put some numbers to the increase in the cost of running a home with a mortgage.  This is up from £130 a week five years ago to £230 a week today. The amount of interest on a mortgage has doubled in five years.  Payments on a £125,000 mortgage are around £150.  It's not just the interest rates.  We've also had to get bigger mortgages with bigger payments to keep up with house prices and sort out those credit card bills.

At the same time, wages have been pretty flat and taxes have rocketed.  A middling household now pays £150 more a week in tax than 10 years ago.  After you've paid the tax and for your house costs, we've not been much better off for some time.  Striving families seem hardest hit.

Why has this happened? There is evidence that mass immigration has kept pay rises down. Taxes have been going up relentlessly. Meanwhile there has been a debt explosion.  This is all due to the Government's policies.  They'll say it's a global recession.  It's not.  It's their mind-blowing economic incompetence.  They've put up taxes loads and wasted stacks of our cash.  They've encouraged us to borrow silly. They've allowed mass immigration. Now we're all paying the price.

But the difficult message for our side of the fence is that there really isn't that much room for tax cuts.  That's thanks to Labour's quite shocking mismanagement of the public finances.  The priority must be sound money -  balancing the budget and getting the national debt back under control.  This is why looking at public service reform - sorting out quangos, accountability, transparency, ending overlapping functions etc. is increasingly important.