The idea that there are lies, damned lies and statistics is a myth. The mathematics of our decline as a trading nation are an absolute truth that not even Brownite fiscal economics can deny.

Statistics do not lie: they are numbers: they are what they are. The lies are created by humans who either have (a) an agenda or (b) not enough cranial material.

At present in the UK, there are as many agendas as there are citizens. But when it comes to British trade performance (as with any other empirically measurable phenomenon) there is only one truth. To get at it, one must have access to variables, special considerations, acute objective observation, and creative insight. I only have as much of this as the next intelligent person. What I don’t have is an agenda…beyond my desire to maximise the viral spread of reality about our situation as a trading entity.

The questions I’m addressing here are twofold. First, how important is our financial services industry? And second, how will its decline affect our future in the context of other more physical things we can export?

All the figures quoted here – unless otherwise stated – are from the Office of National Statistics (ONS). The beauty of the ONS is that any politician caught trying to influence its output is shot. Or should be.

New Labour sticks like a Politburo to the idea that financial services – representing as they do just 8.3% of the UK’s GDP – are not an economic form upon which we are massively overdependent.

This is rubbish.

In the year 2000, goods manufactured and exported by the UK came to £160 billion, while Services exported came to £82 billion. The bad news was that our trade deficit on the former was £40 billion, while our surplus on the latter was £15 billion.

By the end of 2009, our deficit on manufactured goods was £75 billion, whereas our services export surplus was £50 billion. So the contrast between our manufacturing losses and banking profits was becoming ever more stark.

Including all the bits around the edges and little niche businesses of various kinds, our net trade deficit in 2009 was £33 billion. But without services exports, our trade gap in that year would have been 40% higher. The vast majority of those services were financial.

Financial services today represent 37% of our net profit as UK plc.

To measure the dramatic decline of this, our powerhouse sector, we must turn to International Financial Services London (IFSL Research for short). This respected source records that our 2007 trade surplus from financial services was £45 billion.

The following year, it shrank to £20 billion. Last year (2009), estimates suggest, it crept back up £23 billion.

This means that, since 2007, one Pound in six of our net profit as a nation has disappeared. Just think about the effect in your household of taking a 17% cut in net income.

Then imagine that your response to that issue had been to increase spending fourfold.

It’s a set of figures that Gordon, Alistair and Mandy would prefer you didn’t know about. But they know about them – and have the intellect to appreciate the scale of disaster they represents. Ed Balls lacks both the awareness and intellect to grasp any of this – and he wants to succeed Gordon Brown as Party leader.

So given that trading loss, and the cost of reviving the Golden Goose, how is the manufacturing sector doing in terms of export earnings?

Well in theory (given Lloyds/TSB’s monitors say we’ve seen a 24% decline in Sterling’s exchange rate since 2007) British exported goods should be flying off the shelves and onto overseas markets. But they’re not.

Since 2007, the trade deficit has barely narrowed at all. Our mining exports are down, and manufactured goods are almost exactly static.

This is reality – unmassaged numbers: we have been carried along on an effortless flow of North Sea oil since the mid 1970s, but now that income stream is drying up at an alarming rate. Between 2000 and 2004 alone, this caused the British trade deficit to rise from £18 billion to £32 billion. With the shattering of our reputation as financial Gods, the UK is at last revealed as a country whose physical exports are vastly exceeded by the things we export…and whose invisible exports are growing more invisible with every month.

The aggregate truth is that financial services are a very high margin export. We have nothing in reserve or down the line that comes anywhere near them; rather (the data suggest) we have almost nothing in the manufacturing sector upon which to build.

This gathering storm cannot be put down to the banks being mean with money in the short term. It is instead the long-term result of having four Conservative administrations unable to grasp the need to rebuild as well as destroy – followed by three New Labour governments lacking the commercial nous to do anything beyond ride on the back of banking industry hype.

But the apparent doom-laden nature of these observations hides a genuine opportunity. The horrible reality of Britain’s insolvency is that, given we have little or nothing in the way of profitable export income to worry about, a radically fiscal attack on the National Debt will do remarkably little harm to our real income as a country.

I know that Kenneth Clarke understands this, and I suspect that George Osborne is also (with perhaps the old boy’s help) up to speed on it. Perhaps this explains why these two very different men chose to get their message across firmly over the weekend.