Business Comment: UK faces harder choices than this game of musical chairs allows

THE game is almost up. The music will stop and there will be a mad scramble for seats. By Friday morning we will know who'll be governing Britain for the next five years, although a hung parliament could herald another election by the autumn.

The markets won't like it, because business finds it unsettling to have a divided executive. Minority government might work in Scotland where the stakes are lower. But Westminster is umbilically linked to the financial markets and is core to the fiscal regime. It needs certainty.

The election campaign has been unique in delivering three leaders' debates which, notwithstanding the occasional diversion, have dominated proceedings. They worked, to a point, but we've had a presidential face-off rather than a general election campaign. It has been less about Labour, Tory and Lib Dem (and even about the other parties) and more about whether we want Gordon, Dave or Nick.

The campaign has been turned into a personality contest, a political Blind Date. And weren't the lads such a lorra, lorra laughs?

Well, they threw plenty of insults at each other in order to win the hand of the voters, but it'll be hard to choose between the posh boy, the young pretender and that grizzled Scottish bloke who looks like he's been chewing a wasp.

Do they really differ that much in their policies? No. And that's why voters are so evenly split.

All three leaders have been condemned for their failure to spell out how they would cut the deficit in the public finances. The reason they've not provided answers is almost certainly because they're too frightened to reveal them, or they simply haven't got any.

At least they're getting some hints about the scale of the problem. The latest research from the National Institute for Economic and Social Research says that restoring full fiscal health would mean the equivalent of raising income tax by 6p in the pound.

No government will do that, though it might spread the load across all forms of taxation – VAT, further hikes in national insurance, capital gains, stamp duty, etc. But that's for the day after Thursday. In the meantime we get more head-in-the-sand promises about having no plans to raise taxes (apart from Labour's NI increase).

Businesses are understandably nervous about the lack of direction and want to see public-sector cuts rather than tax rises. The CBI is not alone in calling for the politicians to get real over those ring-fenced services that they regard as election dynamite. Cuts to police operations, the health service and local authorities send Brown's lot in particular into a cold sweat, but they have to face facts.

The trouble with all the mainstream politicians is that they run scared of the voters instead of trying to win them over. They're trapped in the political correctness and cotton-wool comfort zones we've created over the past 20 to 30 years so that bold political thinking has given way to on-message blandness.

We need new ideas, but we also need to face some hard truths, for instance, on tackling unemployment and creating a modern workforce. Just throwing more youngsters into colleges that are already bursting at the seams is not the answer. Business needs properly targeted graduates, not an army of unwilling students, many of whom drop out or end up studying unsuitable courses.

As for those not in education or work, why do we allow someone to pick up 12,000 a year unemployment benefit when they could be fixing the holes in the roads, or clearing up graffiti and litter?

Why is there so much sneering when anyone mentions work-for-dole schemes or David Cameron's national citizen service?

It's because the politicians are in thrall to the money-for-nothing culture and in individuals' "rights" over their responsibilities.

And why, despite the proliferation of committees committed to ridding us of bureaucracy, do companies still complain they're overburdened with government paperwork?

It's because we've had a government that has created too much legislation that is costly to implement and, in many cases, wasn't even necessary. We also have an over-complicated tax regime that even accountants can't understand.

Yet are any of the parties committed to simplifying the cost and effort of running a business?

I fear that tackling the dreaded deficit will have exactly the opposite effect with newer taxes and more regulation placed on companies as business is punished to compensate for a lack of political imagination in how to wean us off our public sector dependency. Here's to the next five years of fiddling while Rome burns.