OUR successive governments’ bad ideas over the past 40 years include, obviously, our continued membership of the evolving federal Europe without first ensuring we understood and wished for it.

EU bad ideas are too numerous to mention but include the free movement of people into a country without the free provision of jobs, health, education, police and housing needed to support them, allowing Spanish bottom dredging fishing nets into the North Sea and paying farmers not to farm their land.

However, British governmental mistakes included cashing in our gold reserves; not bothering to prepare for the predicted American credit crunch; causing house prices to shoot up by allowing banks to get involved in mortgage provision and the Private Finance Initiative which means we must effectively pay for the NHS twice.

Successive governments have overspent to impress us numpties, thereby causing horrendous national debts and last but not least they alone believed in weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos the feeling is that the popular disillusionment with political establishments is because many are feeling left behind by globalisation. No.

In Britain’s case, anyway, it's just because they’ve done such an extremely bad job.

Charlotte Bull, Darlington Ukip