Rather than do this, both sides indulge in a little dressage - grooming the horse, curry-combing its forelock and buffing up its hoofs - and come each budget announcement and election time the horse is rolled out in front of us. But I say "Ca suffit!" It's time that our political culture grew up enough not to depend on the subterfuge of such spurious gift-giving. After all, the suppressed premise on both sides of our increasingly prefabricated party wall is precisely the same. All our problems - as a society, a nation, a culture - can be easily circumvented so long as we feed the horsey the right fodder to ensure its growth. Ah! Growth! Everybody loves growth, don't they? Without growth we'd be back in the dark ages with oxen pulling the plough, wouldn't we? And - if you'll forgive the extended chimerical analogy - an economy is also like a shark, isn't it? Unless it keeps on consuming natural resources and transforming them into the flexible cartilage of technological innovation, it dies, and we die with it.