If you’ve turned on a TV, picked up a newspaper or tuned into the radio in recent weeks, you will have seen or heard a government minister touting how our economy is ‘turning a corner’. That is not what I am seeing, and nor is it what I am hearing when I talk to people in Devon.

Times are tough, and the rose-tinted image doesn’t marry up to people’s day-to-day experience. Rents and mortgages are still high, the weekly shop gets more expensive, and filling up your car continues to cost a small fortune.

At the same time, we’ve seen our public services continue to limp along, as the Conservative Government pushes ahead with ever more desperate tax cuts, to try in vain to salvage their flagging poll ratings. We saw this at the recent Spring Budget. The Government prioritised a cut to National Insurance instead of raising the personal tax allowance. This will leave older people who are in receipt of even a very small private pension pushed into paying tax.

When I am out speaking to people across our towns and villages, they tell me that they are fed up of the cliches and empty platitudes. During the last financial year, this Conservative Government spent more of our money on paying the interest on its debts than it did on education! People just want honesty about our public finances.

The truth is, if we want to support our public services, then we need sensible management of our economy, as well as finding new sources of revenue. There are several very good options on the table to do this, which this Conservative Government is choosing to ignore.

For starters, they could reverse their cuts to the Bank Surcharge and Bank Levy, paid for by the big banks. This alone would raise £17.8 billion to 2028 - a sizeable sum - which could be used to support our ailing NHS and support frontline services.

Putting a proper windfall tax on oil and gas companies, which continue to rake in eye-watering profits, would raise up to £15 billion, and putting a tax on share buybacks by some of the biggest FTSE 100 companies would help stem greed and raise a further £2 billion per year.

Liberal Democrats are committed to investing in the NHS and our communities in a sustainable way, instead of lumping us all with higher bills for worse services. This is the Lib Dem approach that you’ll have the chance to vote for at the next General Election - whenever the Prime Minister musters the courage to call it.