We wrote on CentreRight a couple of weeks ago about the launch of our Debt Clock campaign. 1,500 miles and £6,698,630,137
of new national debt later, we’ve completed our full-scale tour of the UK.
To recap swiftly, the clock is the world’s largest of its type: a seven metre long digital clock that counts up the national debt, mounted on a 14 metre lorry. With the British Government borrowing an alarming amount this year, the clock is ticking up by £5,169 per second.
From the launch in Westminster, via Oxford, Bristol, Cardiff, Ludlow, Birmingham, Manchester, Edinburgh, Alnwick, Newcastle, Hull, Peterborough and Harlow, the clock made a big impression wherever it went.
Almost everyone I spoke to had two stages to their reaction. First, they would ask if it was a real number, amazed that the Government could really be borrowing £446m a day. Once we’d assured them that it was the case, their jaws would drop.
This was what motivated us to do the Debt Clock campaign in the first place. So often we hear politicians talking about millions, billions and trillions – indeed I’m sure we’ll hear more of that in the final Leaders’ Debate tonight – but until you actually see these amounts spelled out it is hard to imagine how large they really are.
As well as a lot of members of the public expressing their support, we were fortunate to be joined at several of our stops by PPCs. As a non-partisan campaign, we invited the candidates from all the main parties to each event, and a good number took some time out of their campaigning to join the Debt Clock tour. They included Conservatives David Davis (above), Chloe Smith, Rob Halfon, Iain McGill, Anne Marie Trevelyan, Nicola Blackwood, Gagan Mohindra and Philip Dunne, as well as Lib Dem and UKIP candidates in several areas. A full photo gallery of each stop on the Debt Clock tour is now available here.
The media response was very good. Presented with a strong visual image, and an opportunity to discuss this massive issue with a local angle, local papers and regional TV and radio picked the clock up, as did several national papers, the BBC, Reuters, Bloomberg and even ITV’s Tonight programme for their National Debt special.
To put the debt into perspective, our researchers have produced a few facts to illustrate just how large it is:
- The Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol cost £9.6m in today’s money. The national debt could build a new version of the Clifton Suspension Bridge 33,490,874 km long.
- The Government currently borrows enough to build a new Welsh Assembly (£67m) every three and a half hours.
- Old Trafford has more than 68,000 seats. If you were to pack the place to capacity, each spectator could become a millionaire with just five and a half months of new debt. Manchester United’s huge debt, run up by the Glazers, is now £716.6m – an amount which the Government currently borrows every 1 day, 14 hours and 30 minutes.
- You could build an Angel of the North made of silver (£97m) in just 5 hours, 12 minutes of new Government borrowing.
The debt truck itself is now in storage, ready to reappear come the next emergency budget or spending review, but if you’d like a debt clock widget to embed on your own website or blog, you can get one here.
