You (every UK household) will pay £2,128 in taxes this year just to cover interest debt repayments!
That’s not to pay off the debt, that’s just to cover the interest. That is Labour’s legacy.
The worst part is this amount is set to increase as the national debt continues to soar thanks to the estimated £146billion budget deficit this year (and that’s after the cuts)!
In 1997 Labour inherited a budget that was in balance and set to move into surplus. That is a budget deficit of £0. With the budget deficit moving to a surplus the Labour government wasted a valuable opportunity to pay off some of the UK’s debt.
It’s so infuriating that that £2128 in taxes we’re all paying today to cover interest debt repayments need not exist at all.
What the previous Labour government actually did was go on a massive spending spree with borrowed money. Government spending soared from £309billion in 1997 (40% of GDP) to £647 billion in 2010 (52% of GDP). The Labour government mortgaged Britain’s future to achieve political success in the short term. Ultimately their actions were profoundly irresponsible and selfish. ‘Weak politicians have bribed voters with endless amounts of borrowed cash’
The UK now owes over £31,000 for every person in employment!
See the debt bomb for an idea of the scale of the debt and how fast the debt it is increasing http://www.debtbombshell.com/
No one wants these cuts. But we need to except that we can’t spend more money than we have. If so much money wasn’t going on interest re-payments there would be no need for cuts. But the fact is Labour has created this debt and we can’t just ignore it.
Quite frankly it was sickening to watch Ed Milliband giving a speech to anti-cuts protestors, when it was his party who got us in this situation in the first place.
His attempts to link the anti-cuts protests to the anti-apartheid movement and the suffragettes were ridiculous if not offensive.
Let us not forget the lessons this has taught us. We all need to take a longer term view. Politicians but us voters as well. And there needs to be more transparency. Personally I found George Osborne’s recent budget much easier to follow than the old Brown ones.
The fact is the previous government spent money it didn’t have and now you have to pay it off. Let’s learn the lessons. Don’t let any government do it again.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/7495214/Budget-2010-Relentless-march-of-state-spending.html
http://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/downchart_ukgs.php?year=1990_2011&state=UK&view=1&expand=&units=b&fy=2008&chart=F0-total&bar=1&stack=1&size=l&color=c&title=Overall%20Public%20Spending%20Chart
http://www.debtbombshell.com/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12830224
http://cluaran.free.fr/debt.html