The UK's economic situation is dire, largely because of unproductive overspending on welfare and a failure of leadership to address these fundamental problems.

“Britain has a gigantic problem with overspending. And until we deal with that, we will not recover.”

The UK is in a precarious economic position due to high taxes and excessive welfare spending, and the public must accept that rebalancing the economy will be painful.

“The British public have to take responsibility and say we have allowed ourselves to be deceived. The reality is we cannot afford what we are now doing and we are going to have to rebalance our economy and part of that means getting welfare down to a manageable level which will be very very painful.”