When Labour’s spin machine has finally exhausted the Ashcroft non-event, we must hope that voters will come round to thinking about important things.

There is no recovery. It is a myth, and everyone in Government knows it.

These are four things a first-year Economics student would expect to accompany an economic recovery:

1. Rising exports….especially with a cheap Pound. Today’s trade gap has widened to £8 billion, or half an Iraq if you believe Gordon. Exports are not rising because we have very little to sell, and almost nothing people want at the right price.

2. Rising property prices….with more people feeling confident enough to trade up, and more retail entrepreneurs opening. The housing sector is static and nervous, the retail sector is very close to a frightening level of collapse…and the high streets are full of charity shops.

3. Falling unemployment…with more confident businesses staffing up. There was a minute rise in all employment last month…and a 95,900 rise in people working only part-time. Out of 36 countries polled by the employment group Manpower last week, 27 were taking on new hires. Britain wasn’t one of them.

4.An end to Government stimulation of economic and lending activity…the new buzz-abbreviation QE. Last week BoE head Mervyn King hinted strongly that the Bank would restart QE. This vindicated The Slog’s claim of two weeks ago that ‘the private sector is nowhere near strong enough to support a recovery on its own’…because our manufacturing base is knackered. (Now go back to Point 1 and start again).

Any nation allowing thick, greedy bankers with tunnel vision to ‘guide’ the economy is asking for trouble.

Any electorate believing the economic fantasy predictions of a Chancellor (who has not so far got a single forecast right) in an election year is naive bordering on mad.

And finally, any country allowing the State too big a say in how economies develop is doomed to fail. (I shall be enlarging upon this last piece of advice with an interesting news story – all being well – first thing tomorrow.)