Deborah Orr is usually one of the least readable Independent columnists, but fair play to her today:

I don’t actually understand why anyone would wish to step forward and run the country now, it is so totally screwed up. I can’t understand why the left keeps arguing for huge public spending projects when there so clearly is no more money. I can’t understand why economists seem to believe that rising house prices are a sign of “recovery”, when actually they are a sign that the economy is not “rebalancing”.

I can’t understand where Brown finds the resolve every morning to get out of bed and face the day. I can’t understand why there is so little realisation of how tragic and divisive the last 30 years have been, and what desperately few options are left to us. It’s not just the Government that’s in meltdown. It’s the whole bloody shebang, and it will take another 30 years or so to fix it. Well done, Labour.