As a person without any debts, and four bank accounts coloured black, I awoke yesterday morning to find the country’s National Debt at £2 trillion ($3tr) and more. That represents more than £60,000 ($86,000) and rising per household. It dwarfs Britain’s annual national income of £1.4 trillion, and doesn’t include other off-balance-sheet liabilities.

Since I am a genuine citizen of the United Kingdom, I am liable for that sum, and probably more from people who can’t or won’t pay, and from more recent arrivistes who decide to desert the heavily listing vessel.

I won’t get an invoice in the post: “For gross mismangement of the economy by Gordon Brown”. That would be too candid and straightforward.

Instead, I’ll find almost every public and private bill will rise, while any receipts will fall and services diminish. Prices in the shops will also start to balloon in a year or two and will remain high for decades to come.

Thus, this debt-free individual, who earns his own living, with savings in the bank and other less liquid assets, will suffer the consequences of others’ malpractice through substantial impoverishment.

Almost everyone in the country will be on a similar path, except those with institutional parachutes to comfort, like politicians, top bankers, and the upper reaches of the Civil Service who caused the problem at source. In modern Britain the buck only stops when it nestles in the pockets of the guilty.

The principal culprit, as almost everyone now realizes despite his increasingly-pathetic attempts at shovelling it off onto others, is Gordon Brown, the man who ran the Treasury with an iron fist from 1997 to 2008 and has been British Prime Minister since then.

In France, within almost living memory, he would have faced the guillotine. In Britain, more likely disgraced and forced into a humbling exile. Even now, he can be impeached by a much-abused nation. Why is this not being discussed?

The other big number this week is 219. Not so significant, you might imagine until you add “billion” on the end. £219 billion ($311bn) is Brown’s yearly overspending in real terms, i.e. above inflation. (From Bankrupt Britain by City fund manager, Malcolm Offord.)

It’s not good economics, but multiply that figure by 10 and you get a rough approximation of the new National Debt.

The pity of it is, the money was wasted. Almost no improvements are discernible in public services over the period while most have gone downhill, the result of politburo-style management and misuse of public funds at every level, much of it from incompetence, the rest from jobs-for-the-tribe. Snouts in the trough doesn’t begin to cover it.

Once again a Labour Government will leave office having wrecked the country.

* In 1929 we had the British version of the Great Depression to look forward to.
* In the late 1940s it was by restricting markets from operating at all while Germany and Japan freed up their workforces and built the foundations for their current strength.
* In the 1970s, Britain was placed at the mercy of the IMF, followed by the Winter of Discontent.
* This time, the nation has been hollowed out, its vital wealth-creating engine crushed. A decade of its earnings simply squandered on a whimsical mountain of public services that struggle to operate on any level.

It didn’t help that this time Labour was given three Parliaments to wreak its usual havoc. How did that happen? By guile, neglecting the truth, cooking the books, making false claims about almost everything … and getting away with it thanks to friends in the media who complacently turned blind eyes to the accumulating shambles.

Will Brown be impeached, do you suppose?

Do elephants ski?

John Evans

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