Brown pawns the country for electoral expediency

This is no longer just a question of disagreeable tax-rises or an overweening state. Gordon Brown's borrowing threatens our country's place in the world.

Two years from now, the Prime Minister will have borrowed more than Winston Churchill did to win World War Two. But we’re not fighting World War Two; we're simply paying the bills racked up over a decade which saw an unprecedented engorgement of the public sector.

Since the beneficiaries of that engorgement are Labour's electoral base, spending cuts are not an option. Nor, with an election likely next year, are tax rises. And so the Broon must pawn the country to sustain his short-term support.

To grasp the long-term consequences, look at what happened after 1945. On VE Day, Britain had a debt equivalent to 350 per cent of GNP. Although few realised it at the time, we were far worse off than the Continental states that had superficially suffered more during the fighting.

During the 1960s and 70s, British commentators and politicians gawped wonderingly at the success of their European neighbours, variously attributing it to social democracy, Rhineland capitalism, collaborative trade unions or proportional representation. But there was a far simpler explanation: they had started with a clean slate.

This explanation was not obvious to contemporary voters. They saw, as it were, two neighbouring houses, one apparently sturdy, the other with a partially collapsed roof. They watched incomprehending as the comfortable house fell into disrepair, while the damaged one was renovated.

Britain joined the EEC as the European post-war economic boom endedWhat no one had explained to them was that the undamaged house was in negative equity to the tune of 350 per cent, while the dilapidated one was owned with no mortgage.

The consequences of this disparity became painfully clear as the years went by: while Britain went through Suez, decolonisation, retrenchment, trade deficits, sterling crises, inflation and, in the end, an IMF bail-out, Europe enjoyed steady growth.

In 1945, we had been one of the world's three great powers. By the 1970s, we were so wretchedly pessimistic that we joined the European Economic Community - choosing, with spectacularly bad timing, the very moment when the continental states' post-war economic boom was coming to an end.

During the 1980s, with our debts largely redeemed and a Prime Minister who talked constantly of "living within our means", we resumed something approximating our former position: by 1992, we were the fifth largest economy in the world.

Now, once again, we are throwing it all away; and, once again, we may take decades to recover. There are still Conservatives out there who are secretly hoping that Gordon Brown will play things long, miss his moment again, and - once the full effects of the recession are felt - go down to a spectacular defeat in 2010.

But there are more important things than the size of the next Tory majority. We are set on a course that will dishonour and impoverish our country, a course not charted in any of the 2004 election manifestos. The sooner we have a general election, the better. ·