By Charlie Elphicke MP.
The left still claims it would be possible to carry on borrowing and spend away. What would that look like? If we carried on with Labour’s borrowing plans, measured by the Office for Budget Responsibility before the Emergency Budget, we would have £144 billion more structural debt by the end of the Parliament. Debt that would cost an extra £7 billion a year to service by 2015-16. To put it in context, £7 billion is more than the entire transport budget.
Worse still, Labour are still in denial on the basic fact they overspent for years and left the books totally unbalanced. If they had been just competent managers, the borrowing due to pure overspending this year alone would be over £109 Bn lower. As it is, it’s going to take most of this Parliament to balance the budget and get rid of this so called structural deficit (see graph below). Even so our national debt will still be £292 billion higher than it ought to be due to Labour’s fiscal incontinence.
Any debt counsellor will tell you, if you don’t stop now, you’ll never get out of it. And the longer you leave it, the worse it gets. What will take 5 years now would take a generation to sort out later. That’s just to balance the books. Dealing with the debt mountain itself is another thing altogether - no doubt the focus of the next Parliament.
> Yesterday's blog from Charlie: The true cost of Labour's economic incompetence
