What the market economy is really about is the power of incentives. This is precisely what Labour does not seem to accept, or wants to repress. At the lower end of the income scale, people are clearly responding to the shift in the incentive to work created by the cap on welfare payments (which Labour opposed) and the Coalition’s tax policy. There is still more progress to be made here.

At the upper end, the key issue concerns rates of personal taxation. It is pretty clear that in all those parts of the economy where people can vary the intensity of their effort – entrepreneurs, the self-employed, those with small businesses, professionals and skilled workers – at some rate of tax people will simply not work so hard.

It is striking that politicians now refer continually to our NHS. (Interestingly, it is still the deficit.)

Labour appears also to think that your income is “ours”. But you can be allowed to keep a “fair” proportion. The success of an economy is down to the people in it. Penalising, alienating and then perhaps driving out your hardest working, most talented and most successful people is really not the way forward.

This country has suffered, more or less simultaneously, from the effects of three major adverse forces: the financial crisis which resulted in recession across the industrial world and left banks everywhere reeling; the ramp-up in oil prices that squeezed living standards; and a significant fiscal tightening to stabilise public finances.

Although we are not through all of these yet, we are well on the way. Yes, there is more austerity to be undergone to fulfil the Conservatives’ plans for the deficit, but this is likely to take place against the backdrop of a growing economy and, at last, rising real incomes and living standards. Having been through all this, and now with good times finally within sight, it is bizarre to be contemplating a return to policies that nearly brought us to our knees in the 1970s.

David Fuller's view

Good economic governance is the key to GDP growth in a diversified economy.  Labour is redistributive but this will never help their core supporters for long because there will soon be less to distribute and more debt to service.