Financial education needs to start with this Government

Ed Balls announced on Monday that from the age of five, all children in the UK will be taught about managing finance. By the time they reach secondary school, students will learn about how to manage bank accounts and also be taught about debt. However if anybody needs education about debt and finance, it's Mr Balls himself and the rest of this sorry government.

On a serious note though, financial education in school does sound like a good plan if it's delivered correctly. It should not go down the route that current provision of political education in schools has gone down, being patchy and poorly delivered on the whole.

But yesterday we saw yet another example of this government's complete inability to deal with the nation's economic problems. Parliament debated the grandly titled 'Fiscal Responsibility Bill' which will make it a legal requirement for the government to halve the public deficit by 2013/2014. A laudable aim indeed, but one which we don't need a 'Fiscal Responsibility Bill' to achieve and one which we will never achieve under this Labour government. The fact is that Alistair Darling and his gang are completely blind to the need to sort out the deficit now. The Fiscal Responsibility Bill was unveiled in the Queen's Speech in November and heralded by Gordon Brown as this great Bill that will restore stability to the public purse. Then a few weeks later, the Chancellor delivers his Pre-Budget Report and there's not a single announcement about how this government is going to sort out our debt crisis, indeed he announced public spending would rise still further.

The Fiscal Responsibility Bill just typifies Labour's obsession with legislating for pointless reasons.