Tory shadow chancellor George Osborne has refused to rule out tax increases for the already hard-pressed British taxpayer as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has announced its most serious warning yet of a debt-caused fiscal meltdown.

Speaking on a BBC show, Mr Osborne smugly announced that if the Conservatives won the next election, British people could look forward to massive cuts in public spending, which would mean drastically reduced services across the board.

He specifically refused to rule out tax increases as a way of “making the books balance” and instead said that a Tory Government would look to “private firms and charities” to start “providing education and welfare services. The cupboard is bare and endless money would not be poured into the public sector.”

Mr Osborne failed to mention that just one day earlier, his party had promised to increase foreign aid way above even what Labour has promised. Why any sane party would want to increase spending on other nations while cutting spending for its own people at home is a mystery, explicable only by the treasonous nature of the old gang parties.

At the same time, the International Monetary Fund has delivered its sharpest rebuke yet on what it has called a “dramatic deterioration” in Britain’s public finances.

In a sharply worded statement, the Washington-based fund warned that Britain is “testing the limit of the market’s confidence” by pushing our national debt towards 100 percent of gross domestic product. This translates to £1.5 trillion.

“If Britain does not do more to tackle public spending, faith in the Government’s solvency could be damaged,” the IMF said. That in turn would have major economic repercussions which would include a collapse in the value of the pound and massive investor withdrawal on the stock exchange.

Although Mr Brown has long been obvious to the financial chaos his amateurish bungling has caused, more shocking was the Tory spokesman commitment to continue with some of the more obvious errors the Labour government has made.

For example, Mr Osborne said that a Tory administration would increase commitment to the illegal war in Afghanistan, which, by official Ministry of Defence figures, has already cost well over £2.6 billion. The new figures mean that the total cost so far of Britain’s military engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001 — not including civil aid money, which also runs into billions of pounds — is now about £14 billion.

Clearly, the only solution is to end British involvement in that disaster as quickly as possible — but not according to the Conservative would-be chancellor, who wants to spend even more British taxpayers’ money there.

At the same time, Mr Osborne said there were “difficult decisions” to be made about major public spending projects such as the replacement for the Trident nuclear deterrent and the £5 billion aircraft carrier programme.

Bearing in mind that the Conservatives have, in their green paper on foreign aid released last week, already committed to spending at least £14 billion in foreign aid, one might have thought that a trifling £5 billion for an aircraft carrier for the Royal Navy would be in order — but then one might also be wrong.