The problem is that many young mothers want to return to work to boost the household income and living standards and to fulfil themselves.

As Paul Krugman pointed out productivity isn’t everything. But in the long run it’s almost everything.

The UK state pension is unfunded, a pay-as-you-go system funded out of general taxation and the National Insurance payroll tax. Today’s payers-in fund today’s drawers-out.

Sure and it’s lovely if someone walks in with a freebie cheque for you. But cheques very rarely stay freebie - there will be an insistence upon imposing some costs in return, obviously enough:

Gary Stevenson, the tax the rich populist du jour, continually tells us that taxing the rich is easy. Because while the individual might move they’ve still got assets.

Given our greybeard status one of the things we’ve learnt is that bad policy, bad economics, keeps returning like the acid reflux after a bad curry.

No, no, there must be some mistake here. We all know that people called upon to proffer up their mere fair share to the common weal don’t change their behaviour in order to dodge that righteous gifting.

A reasonable way to predict future living standards in the UK is to look at what well-to-do people are doing today, and to suggest that more middle-of-the-road people will be doing that in future.

On Wednesday, the Chancellor delivered her Spring Statement. Initially branded as an update on the UK’s fiscal situation, the statement had morphed into a quasi-budget in anticipation of the OBR’s Economic and Fiscal Outlook (EFO).

Every government tries to hack back at the Civil Service. Given that every government does try to hack back the Civil Service then, according to the media aimed at the Civil Service, this proves that hacking at the Civil Service doesn’t work:

It is fashionable in some circles to stigmatize economic growth as ‘materialism,’ recklessly using up the planet’s allegedly scarce resources in a rat race to acquire ever more material goods.

Or, to be more exact and precise, this specific idea of the European Union that strikes us as wrong: