DAILY POST YOUR VOICE IN WALES: Time to fix those holes in the road.

SO the once-celebrated, recently derided economic doctrines of John Maynard Keynes - devised in part to help lift the US out of The Great Depression - are again being dug out and dusted down as a possible solution to our own precarious economic situation. Who'd ever have thought it?

Keynes' advice to Governments in times of recession was to spend money on public works, borrowing it if necessary, and not be too fussy what the work entailed. You pay one gang of men to dig a hole in the road and then pay another to come along and fill it up again.

Hopefully we can do better than that - but the principle remains: rather than pay people to be idle you get them working and paying tax and spending on goods and services. This in turn stimulates the economy and the whole thing snowballs. Public funds replace private investments. You also need low interest rates-making borrowing cheaper - so that new businesses can take seed, for example.

It is the very opposite of the monetarist, non-interventionist policies so beloved of modern Western Governments, and it is not ideal because the last thing any of us really need is more Government borrowing which will one day have to be repaid through taxes. But Keynes was disliked most because he argued in favour of taxing the fat cats and cutting back on Government spending in times of plenty-precisely what this Government has not done.

His ideas also smack of State control of both the economy and the individual: huge public work programs like building dams and motorways, State-sponsored art, and so on.

Nevertheless the theories do work as people are kept economically active, promoting business and industry. The danger for UK pic is that the Chancellor will forget the economies of the devolved nations.

The Welsh Assembly Government on its own does not have the wherewithal or borrowing ability (since it lacks the taxing ability) to fund such works which might otherwise see tidal barrages mushrooming and a six-lane highway built from Llandudno to Cardiff.

England may have its Olympics and Crossrail projects, but our taxes go to Whitehall too. Let's make sure the building does not stop at the border.