Flying Free (35 page)

Profitable, practical and socially valuable skills, however – although they command generally higher prices on the market than academic skills – command considerably less attention, prestige and government assistance. Perhaps this merely reflects professional politicians’ self-esteem, since most of them have degrees but few of them have actually done a job in their lives.

The size of the state
will
decline, not only because the swollen, autocratic head has rendered the limbs shrivelled and uncoordinated but because we
simply can no longer afford this vast, inefficient, privileged and intrusive central government.

We must gear ourselves to free trade with the entire world, remembering that the engine of a successful economy is small, not big, business. Recent governments have ceaselessly cosied up to big businesses, but 99.3 per cent of the nation’s businesses are small. They provide 47 per cent of employment.

They are much more versatile than their larger brethren and they get far more offspring in the form of new enterprises. They also generate wealth in every corner of the nation. They need the breaks. If each of these could employ just one extra person full-time, part-time or as a trainee, the employment figures would look a great deal healthier and the spirit of enterprise would once more thrive.

We should foster strong links with the Commonwealth and make full use of the worldwide predominance of the English language and of the undoubted attractions of freedom and of strong, independent government.

Citizen democracy will happen. There is an overwhelming demand for it throughout the civilised world. The sheer level of popular participation and empowerment is going to change the face of western politics.

In their cowardice, our politicians, in league with their mutually dependent banks, have sustained their positions only by spending our children’s money. They have bought allies by increasing the power and size of the state until it has proved unsustainable.

The economic mess in which now we find ourselves is far worse than anyone has publicly admitted. Recovery will take a long time, during which we will depend on staples, on industry – and on community. We will need politicians with real courage and the resilience of communities ready to work and to fight for their own…

UKIP is not the point. Freedom is. If I can make my contribution to that freedom – which is participation – I will count all the sacrifices and disappointments, the injuries and the tedium, worthwhile.

Decidedly weary, I will grumble a bit, order another pint and gaze wistfully across the channel to the graveyard of bureaucrats’ dreams.

I will smugly reflect that I played some small part in their demise and in the rise of modern, twenty-first-century democracy.

I will then return to my corner seat in the snug to bore people with the story of how once I appeared on
Test Match Special
with Geoffrey Boycott.