One of the most irritating media trends is the increasing use of hyperbole. An easy example is the climate 'emergency'. In an emergency you don’t eat, you don’t do anything else except deal with the emergency and you might jump out of a window knowing you will probably break your leg. We do not have a climate change emergency.

Climate change is a hugely important issue which requires cool heads and firm action over a sustained period - not running around legislating like headless chickens in response to a manufactured emergency which makes people confuse activity with progress.

Similarly, and almost as frequently used, is 'black hole'. Leave aside that in reality black holes only exist in space. In sensible earthbound parlance a black hole is a huge issue which is of indeterminate size, so big that you cannot see how big it is but it will certainly have a very large, potentially catastrophic, impact.

Which is why it is rather puzzling that having now looked at the books - which have been available to read for some time - the Labour Government has found a £22bn black hole in the UK’s finances.

Climate change campaignersClimate change campaigners (Image: free)

The size of the UK economy this year will be over £2.5 trillion. This is well over 100 times the size of this allegedly disastrous deficit. Far from being a black hole this problem is, in economic terms, a pothole. We can see it quite clearly, it is in fact a mostly spurious number designed to provide a shield behind which to impose tax increases and it can fairly easily be dealt with. There is no black hole.

There is however a gap and that gap must be filled. If it is not addressed by more tax or less spending then borrowing will rise and the one thing the UK Government must do is get borrowing on a downward path as soon as possible, the end of this parliament is far too slow.

The gap could be reduced by spending cuts but a quick look around all aspects of our public realm and services would suggest that as well as reform to boost efficiency more money rather than less is required.

In the longer run the way out of the bind is faster growth in the economy which enables better public services to be funded without excessive borrowing or taxation. This is the holy grail and the Labour Government is right to pursue it with vigour but will find it a hard task. They make things harder for themselves by some of their plans for the labour market and by increasing public sector wages without tackling public sector pensions. The unfunded liabilities of the latter are many, many times the size of the deficit Labour is wailing about now but they do nothing about it.

So, in the real world of here and now if the Labour Government want to avoid extra borrowing they must increase taxes. The key is to do so in a way which doesn’t slow the productive economy.

Some of their taxation plans are just noise. Extending VAT to private education, for example, will raise a great deal less than they claim once extra expenditure which will arise as a consequence in taken into account.

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Others, if they are to raise significant sums, would only do so through gross unfairness. An example is Capital Gains Tax. If an increase in the rate of CGT is applied fairly, no longer seeking to tax increases in values below inflation, it would be reasonable. Increasing the rate of tax but also continuing to tax gains which only reflect inflation - which are not really gains at all - would raise more but would be dishonest as well as causing large and economically damaging behavioural change.

A bit of imagination though could bridge the gap quite easily.

Put stamp duty on sales and well as purchases of property. Stamp duty on property raised £12bn last year so you would be well on the way to closing the gap as well as taxing one of the most crazily undertaxed sources of unworked for wealth in the nation, the baby boomer generation’s houses.

What about Council Tax, which is estimated to raise only a little short of £50bn this year? An annual tax of half a per cent of the market value of your house would raise roughly the same amount and would be a lot fairer and simpler. Increase that half per cent to three-quarters of a per cent and all the money needed to plug the gap is there in one go.

Is anybody worried about our high streets being hollowed out by Amazon & Co? Then how about a tax on all deliveries including food. There must be 5 million deliveries a day at least. A £2.50 tax on each delivery would raise £4.5bn a year.

The Labour Government promised to be more honest and open than the last Government. Why not start by using both imagination and honesty to deal with the gap they should have known about and which they have largely created themselves.