The next government of the United Kingdom will have to depart wildly from its manifesto commitments in order to rebuild the nation’s finances. In the closing stages of the election campaign, the media began to highlight the yawning gap between the three main parties’ modest proposals on public spending cuts and the ballooning deficit. But the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat parties stuck to their guns – and continued to argue over trimming a few billion here and there, rather than outlining a radical overhaul of our whole approach to public spending.