On Friday afternoon, I’ll be heading to Warminster for this week’s edition of BBC Radio 4’s “Any Questions?”

Although – exactly as advertised – the panellists are unaware of the questions they will face, the BBC likes to know the sort of arguments we will put forward around the major news stories of the week. To that end, on the day before the show airs we receive a call from the production team asking our thoughts on some specific questions.

My phone conversation with the chap from the BBC on Thursday left me in despair. Not because the chat was anything less than convivial, but because it reinforced in my mind exactly what a mess Britain is in.

The problems facing our country require the targeted use of a bazooka. Instead, we are getting the misuse of a scalpel.

Over the summer, there will be a tax break on visiting zoos and amusement parks. Children between the ages of 5 and 15 will be able to travel for free on buses. I’m not steadfastly against these policies – but they are absurdly trivial.

One additional gimmick which thankfully appears not to have made it off the drawing board is the effective Sovietisation of our supermarkets. Reports suggest that the plan involved reducing some of the more burdensome regulations on grocery stores in return for allowing the government to fix the price of staple goods such as bread, milk and eggs. The impact obviously would have been disastrous. Goods which have to be sold at below-market prices fly off the shelves either because consumers snap them up or because suppliers lose interest in stocking them or both.

Rachel Reeves went to the forecourt of a petrol station to make an announcement about fuel duty. Predictably, she was heckled by a man in a white van. Most of the media coverage focused on whether an ordinary bloke barracking – and even swearing at – a leading politician was unacceptable behaviour or even un-British. The fact that we were supposed to celebrate a tax being frozen (it’s not being reduced) became something of a side plot.

But this week’s news hasn’t all been about short-term, rather desperate “quick fix” announcements from the government. If you are one of those people who feel politicians should focus on the long-term, you might want to look at the disaster story of HS2 before voicing such an opinion.

This ambitious plan – to link up Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds and London with state-of-the-art high-speed trains – was initially proposed by Labour in 2009 and greenlit by the Conservatives in 2012. The initial budget was a little over £32bn and has now ballooned to north of £100bn. The funding may have trebled, but the plan has been radically scaled back – we will now only be linking up Birmingham and London, two cities already blessed with excellent rail links. The first passengers will not be boarding until 2036 at the earliest, will not be able to travel all the way to or from London Euston (the trains will begin and end at Old Oak Common in west London until the 2040s) and the speed of the trains has been reduced by 25 mph.

The total cost of this insane project now exceeds that of the NASA Artemis missions. The Americans are spending $100bn getting to the moon. We are spending £100bn failing to get to Birmingham. The chief executive of HS2 is Mark Wild who is the highest-paid public servant in the whole of the UK with a salary of over £600,000 a year.

If you are disillusioned by the idiotic, headline posturing of our politicians’ short-term policies, wait until you let them loose on a long-term plan – you get a full-blown disaster.

All of this nonsense is in the context of an almost zero-growth economy, ballooning welfare bills, huge budget deficits and eye-watering unsustainability in our long-run public finances.

The challenges are big enough – but the catastrophe is that our political class seem to have almost no clue about how to tackle them.

The opposition parties have got good at pointing out Labour’s failures but are still some way away from the big picture thinking we need. The Conservatives have found some meaningful welfare savings which will allow them to dramatically cut stamp duty. Reform will exclude foreign nationals from claiming most welfare benefits but admit that they haven’t yet found sufficient savings to allow big tax cuts.

We need to cut government spending dramatically in the short to medium term and by more over the long-term. Swathes of regulation need to be incinerated not merely tweaked. A vast amount of fiscal headroom needs to be created to allow taxes to fall.

My sense is that the great British public are open to – even supportive of - such an ambitious national recovery programme but too many of our politicians are still playing around with that scalpel rather than reaching for the loaded bazooka.

Keep the flag of freedom flying!