The Liberal Democrats can never be trusted with the economy again. Cable once uttered in Parliament with almost delusion of grandeur that it didn’t matter where the economic recession came from. Probably having choked on his coffee that morning, he could not contemplate the concept of a global recession?

The left wing continually warned that if you strangle the economy manufacturing output will fall, benefit payments will go up, tax receipts will go down, and GDP will go down. We now have the issue of the UK doing extremely badly, with extremely poor growth. If you add to this the Eurozone crisis and the debt ceiling, and the marked falls in stock prices, you see a situation where the bankers need to be bailed out again. The challenge for George Osborne is not make the deficit explode, now that he now has generated poor growth. The challenge for the Liberal Democrats is to ensure that they do not totally implode come the next election, having voted for the Conservatives’ policy throughout this term so far.