about £600m a year (£15,000 per manager) on management consultants to tell these managers how to do their jobs. Meanwhile, over 34,000 people a year die unnecessarily in our NHS hospitals and another 25,000 are unnecessarily permanently disabled.

Billions more spent on the police have given us about 10 per cent more police officers and a 50 per cent increase in the number of administrators. Meanwhile violent crime has more than doubled under this Government from about 500,000 crimes in 1997 to 1,100,000 in 2007. We have more young people who are both unemployed and not looking for a job than anywhere else in Europe. More people are on benefits than ever before.

And our private pensions savings have collapsed so spectacularly that 23 million private-sector workers

pay about £17bn into their pension savings each year while paying over £20bn for the pensions of just a few million retired public-sector workers. Indeed, out of those 23 million private sector workers, less than half are saving for any pensions - which means that about 13 million of those working in the private sector today will have to live on less than £5,000 a year while those in the public sector have assured pension deals.

When we first elected this Government, we were prepared to pay more tax in return for improved public services. We got the increased taxes - it's far from obvious that there has been the slightest improvement in any of our public services.

David Craig is the author of Squandered: How Gordon Brown is wasting over one trillion pounds of our money (Constable).