Word of the week, and who knows, perhaps the century to come is, undoubtedly, Keynesian. Seven days ago newsdesks were ordering four hundred words from in-house historians on the moustachioed wizard whose unconventional sex life didn't stop him coming up with the answer to unemployment following the 1929 crash. Only to be met with the answer, which wizard?

Because the gospel according to Keynes attracted some very odd apostles. From David Lloyd George to Oswald Mosley, Adolf Hitler to Josef Stalin, men with finely groomed facial hair rushed to argue that the economic problems of the Thirties required a Big State solution.

Seventy years on moustaches are about as fashionable for politicians as field-grey uniforms with trousers cut jodhpur-style and a jaunty peaked cap. But other aspects of Keynesianism are making a comeback. The Chancellor of the Exchequer argues that the way out of our malaise is to stimulate the economy with state spending. I will leave better men than me to debate the merits of this strategy for the nation. I just want to observe its limitations as far as the school run goes.

For much of the last week I had to ferry a variety of small children to and from school. And as I drove back and forth down the Queen's highway I was struck by how much of it was fenced off. Ostensibly to permit holes to be dug.

Those of you au fait with classical Keynesianism will permit yourselves a wry smile of recognition. Was it not the master's contention that the role of government in a slump was to provide work for the otherwise underemployed, to ensure that there was money flowing in the economy? And did he not argue that it was better to employ men to dig holes, and then fill them in, than let them stand idle? And is not all this activity a welcome sign that the authorities are doing everything to ameliorate the crash - isn't this the economic equivalent of the oxygen masks falling from the airplane ceiling on cue? Well, not quite. Because while huge fences are being thrown up around what may yet be holes in the ground, there is very little evidence that anyone anywhere near these traffic-halting phenomena is actually gainfully employed. Let alone economically active. Or even possessed of a pulse.

As I drive past these fenced-off stretches of road just before nine in the morning I see idle JCBs and perhaps, if I am lucky, a lone figure on the mobile, like a single curlew on a stretch of empty fenland calling forlornly for its mate. As I drive past again at 3.15 the excavation area is eerily empty. More devoid of life than Bikini Atoll in February 1954. Quieter even than the most secluded spot on the dark side of Pluto. All I can see, like the sign at the entrance to a cemetery, is a mournful placard saying Laing O'Rourke. Perhaps Mr O'Rourke is a Hibernian grandee who has been buried in this place and all labour has ceased for miles around for weeks to come as tribute to this Great Man.

Or maybe someone's having a laugh.

Who, I wonder, is allowing so many streets in our country to be fenced off for months at a time and then allowing the people allegedly improving our infrastructure to work days so incredibly short you wonder if they think we live in the Arctic circle? And do they mind making every journey twice the length it should be, with twice the carbon emissions? This isn't Keynesian, it's criminal. Why can't we construct a scheme that compels those paid to dig our roads to put in a little bit more effort to the task than the energy billionaires put into mixing their own cocktails?

Original sin

Not content with proclaiming the return of Keynesianism, several bright buttons in the media haberdashery counter have been trumpeting the vindication of Marxism this week. Apparently human folly and greed were all spotted by Karl Marx first and things like the Doctrine of Original Sin in the Bible or the Pardoner's Tale in Chaucer were mere apprentice efforts at capturing human nature, superceded in profundity and insight by Das Kapital.

To those who think Marx stands vindicated by recent events I have a few simple questions. Why it that free markets have given more people more choice, more material comfort and better health in the past two decades than any centrally planned economy ever delivered in history? And when Marxism is praised, does anyone ever explain why it is that every Marxist state has relied on torture, a brutal secret police, purges, concentration camps and murder to survive? Oh, and why did most of them also inflict either famines that killed millions, grotesque environmental degradation or spectacular poverty on their people during their existence?

Our greatest living apologist

And can we please have an end to fawning interviews with the unrepentant Moscow-liner Eric Hobsbawm? He is not, as the BBC argued this week, perhaps our greatest living historian. He's an apologist for totalitarianism and when I think of the millions who were killed and tortured in Marxism's name, from the Polish officers shot in Katyn forest to those brave dissidents who endured the gulag, I am convinced that only when Hobsbawm weeps hot tears for a life spent serving an ideology of wickedness will he ever be worth listening to.

Michael Gove is Conservative MP for Surrey Heath

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