Only three weeks to live

This Parliament has only three weeks to live.  It's looking like a factory in its death throes. No legislation to pass.  Select Committees postponing business to the new Parliament.  Low attendance.  Lots of electioneering.

For a year this over-extended five year fixed term Parliament has really been the stage for electioneering and custard pie throwing.  Most MPs have gone back to their constituencies to electioneer.  The party leaders (apart from those hanging round hoping to be offered jobs at £5,000 a day) are running round the country wearing hard hats.

Policy is pouring out of every orifice of every party.  After cutting and clobbering the North, the Tories are setting up a Northern Power-house on the wrong side of the Pennines.  George Osborne, who's told us for four years that government spending must be cut, is suddenly spending and promising to build the houses they`ve not built. 

They've been great centralisers.  Now they're pushing lop-sided devolution for Manchester and a City deal for us.  Too little too late.  Cameron, who 's frozen public sector pay to build  a low wage economy, is telling  employers to give their workers a pay rise.

It's all a death bed repentance.  The aim is to pretty up the scene and hide the austerity until afterwards.  The election is here at long last. Two years late but only eight weeks away.

Don't be fooled. If the Conservatives win they'll be back to their bad old ways.  George has already told us that austerity will be re-imposed with £30 billion of cuts in social security.  He`ll get on with creating a low wage economy, the Health Service will continue to suffer, as will young people without work.

Don't listen either to UKIP or the Lib Dems.  They claim that the two main parties are the same.  They're not. There is a wide difference between a party which represents wealth and big money and one which defends the people. There's an even bigger one between the future each offers.

On the one hand is a party which helps the rich and the big corporations and wants to protect both from tax and regulation in the belief that if they make money some of it will trickle down to the people.  On the other is a party which believes in public spending, investment, welfare and jobs so that people can provide for themselves, spend money, keep up demand for production, houses and goods and stimulates growth.

The economy has always grown faster and the people have had more to spend under Labour than under Tory governments obsessed with cutting down welfare spending to give tax cuts to the rich.  Demand has always been higher and welfare better under Labour.

 That's a world we must rebuild after the damage of four wasted years of cuts and austerity.  We build it by investing, building houses and boosting manufacturing, to put people back to work.  Then they pay taxes so the state`s finances pick up and it can begin the improvements in social services, education, health and transport we all need.

Only the state working in partnership with business can do this.  Britain needs a real and prolonged recovery, not a Tory switchback ride of cuts, spending, then back to cuts.  Real recovery means real jobs and higher pay, not the flash-in-the-pan of low pay, casual employment and ever rising house prices.  Britain needs better on 7 May.  Don't be fooled again.