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Maybe. Tax code could possibly be simplified, but doesn't need to be more regressive.

* All public sector "civil" servants, quangocrats, NHS staff et al earning over £50,000 per annum to take a mandatory 10% pay cut.

No. Sacking 10% of people might be a better idea, or pressuring the budget, but blanket restrictions like this are just daft: all the incompetents will stay while the clever people start job-hunting.

* Cut all foreign aid.  Yes, all foreign aid.

No. Immoral, plus foreign aid is a trivial amount anyway, and mostly used to pursue British interests internationally.

* Postpone Trident.

No. Postponing large projects raises the overall price, as you moth-ball, suspend, fire and rehire. Either cancel it or keep going. More importantly, we're entering recession and need an economic boost now. Postponing spending to a boom period in the future, where it will cause the boom to everheat further, is a really bad idea. (Pro-cylical rather than counter-cyclical)

* Scrap ID cards, mothball NHS IT SPINE and halt any non-essential IT projects.

Yes.

* Raise the threshold of income tax allowance so that those who lost their WTC's are better off.  And actually do proper accounting sums to make sure that this is the case, not like the back-of-a-fag-packet 10p tax cut debacle.

Maybe. The problem is you need to be really careful about benefit traps when simplifying a system, since simple systems usually mean sharp thresholds.

* Abandon "low cost" initiatives like the anti-obesity campaign that do not provide immediate, essential services.

The anti-obesity campaign should be stopped because of poor evidence that it will work. Initiatives with good evidence behind them should remain.

* Freeze council tax for 2009, and into 2010 if things aren't picking up by then

No. We already have massively over-centralized government: this should be a local issue.

* Government owned banks should be offering BoE interest rate + 1% tracker mortgages for 5 years, on mortgages of no higher than 90% of the property value, for first time buyers planning on actually living in the house they have just bought.

Yes (though possibly not with those numbers), I've been pushing similar ideas for a while.

* Stamp duty holiday for any property bought for less than £0.5MM.

No. Evidence is that stamp duty holidays are not effective: with overall property prices likely to drop 20% to 40%, stamp duty makes little difference.

* MPs to take a 10% cut in salary (not that this'll help public finances but at least we know the MPs share our pain).

No. MPs and ministers are substantially underpaid for their level of responsibility: they need to be less bribable, not more.

* All quangos to take an immediate 10% cut in budget.  No one earning <£30K per annum can be affected in any way however.

No. Either shut them down individually or don't, applying arbitrary top-down restrictions like this is just bizarre.

* Civil servants to take an immediate 5% cut in budget.

No. See above

* Social housing to be built in a great public works initiative.  Companies wishing to tender must have all board level executives registered to pay tax in the UK, and must source British materials where available.  Employees working on these projects must have a UK passport (likely to run into EU opposition on this one, could weasel it as a "security measure").  Companies must have an accredited apprenticeship program, and a reasonable percentage of apprentices on the books.

Maybe. Could do with more housing, but the bottleneck is the planning system, and the restrictions look pointless.

* Begin overhauling the canal system, again contracting firms subject to limitations above.

Maybe. If it's practical to automate the lock system and use barge-trains it might be feasible, but it might not.

* All governmental departments to settle their accounts with suppliers within 10 working days, not 30 or 100.

No.

* Windfall tax on profiteering energy companies.

No. Too late for that with prices falling.

* (Added after original post as I forgot it) - start building clean coalfired power stations, owned by the state, and never to be sold to private industry (same restrictions on building contractors as before).  Restart the UKian mining industry.

No. Too polluting, both with CO2 and old-fashioned smog: "clean coal" is a very relative term. More nukes please.

Overall, seems like a pretty poor plan.

First, running a goverment isn't like running a household because of the need for a counter-cyclical fiscal policy. In a recession, you want to spend more to boost the economy. In a boom, you want to spend less to avoid overheating the economy.

Your plans seem to involve cutting spending right now as we're entering a recession, and spending money when we exit the recession. That's pro-cyclical: exactly the wrong thing to do.

The exception may be the house-building programme. But even that will take time to ramp up: you've got to acquire the land, draw up the plans, hire the people... it's not going to be an immediate boost. The average recession lasts 11 months: I doubt you're going to be pouring much concrete in the first months... maybe not in the first years.

Secondly, it seems to involve central government imposing draconian, rigid, arbitrary top-down budget constraints, with no thought to whether the departments will be able to work effectively or not. Seems like a terrible management strategy to me.

So on the whole, seems a bit silly.

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