This £22bn ‘black hole’ is an utter farce though. It sounds huge to us, but annual government expenditure is over £1,500bn, so it’s peanuts in the scheme of things. It’s being used as an excuse to implement unpopular policies when, in reality, they are choices rather than necessities – just as it’s a choice to throw money at certain workforces such as train drivers without any insistence on implementing long overdue modernisation and efficiencies. Sadly we’ve gone from one bunch of incompetents to another, and I fear that it’s going to get even worse.