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One myth which I could never believe and which turned out to be utterly false was that you could be sued for clearing snow and ice off the pavement or road outside your house.

I remember sitting in an early morning business networking meeting in December 2009 saying how stupid I thought people were in my street for not clearing the treacherous packed snow in front of their houses.  I was met by sharp intakes of breath by the believers of this urban myth in the room saying 'Oooh, no. You shouldn't do that. You can be sued by people who walk across your clear patch of pavement and slip on the uncleared areas.' I laughed at the counterintuitive and small minded thinking that was aired. Stuff that. I carried on clearing the snow and ice away from outside my house.

A few days later, an MP in the Houses of Parliament confirmed that it was indeed an urban myth about being sued for clearing the snow and ice outside your house.

I heard something even more shocking this week on a Channel 4 program by Martin Durkin called 'Britain's Trillion Pound Horror Story' in which he came up with his solution to the £4.8 trillion of national debt we have in the UK today. His solution, in a nutshell, was to cut our Public Sector by half to stimulate our economy, in much the same way a British Civil Servant did in Hong Kong decades ago and which turned it from being a shanty town into one of the most prosperous places in the world.

One myth which government's like to band about is that they can save the economy by using government investment to stimulate growth. This is not just a myth, it is one of their greatest oxymoron's. Government's should stay out of business and let business get on with growing the economy.

Shockingly, the Public Sector is now bigger than the Private Sector in the UK today. On the programme was the leader of the Trades Union Congress, Brendan Barber, who seemed to believe that having a big Public Sector was good for the economy without understanding that workers in this sector are 'tax consumers' and not 'tax producers'. This is crushing our economy.

Another myth Martin Durkin's programme showed was the fear that the cuts the government is implementing will hit so-called 'front line services'. The fact is that the doctors, nurses, firemen and women, servicemen and women, and teachers, for example, make up only 2 million of the 7 million employed by the government in the UK.

So, what the hell are all the other 5 million people doing? The UK is in serious trouble unless we cut the Public Sector by half and soon. People will riot in the streets if we cut back the public sector in the short term. But, the reality is that if we don't stamp on this myth that the government will support the country by employing more than half the workforce by sucking the life out of the now smaller Private Sector, we will find ourselves in deep financial trouble for generations to come.

Related articles

• Last night's TV: Britain's Trillion Pound Horror Story and Misfits (guardian.co.uk)


• Britain's £3 trillion horror story (smlxtralarge.com)


• "Britain's Trillion £ Horror Story" should be required viewing for every MP (tfa.net)