"No government can run businesses and create wealth. What governments can do is create the best possible conditions for wealth creation.

So I believe the next Conservative government should set itself a simple economic objective: to make Britain the best place in the world to do business.

There are five great dangers which stand in the way.

We must attack these barriers to wealth creation as vigorously as we attacked the scourges of inflation and union domination in the 1980s.

FISCAL IRRESPONSIBILITY

The first great danger is fiscal irresponsibility. Tax and spend. And of particular concern at the moment, pensions.

In monetary policy, an independent Bank of England setting interest rates with reference to a fixed inflation target is the right policy and has worked well.

But from a fiscal perspective, I believe that the Chancellor has been devastatingly irresponsible…

…public spending up 37 per cent between 1999 and 2004…

…planned to increase by 86 per cent between 1999 and 2009…

…and with much of this money wasted: for example, the NHS itself admitting that 73 per cent of the extra spending has been eaten up by cost pressures.

Government borrowing was £35 billion last year, when we should have been in surplus, at that stage in the economic cycle…

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