6 days ago
The mountainous public debts we are running up will crush our children's futures
In 1928 the banker Gaspard Farrer anonymously established The National Fund, a charity dedicated to paying off the national debt.
In 2025, Britain finally smashed open the piggy bank, with £586 million in funds put to use buying up Government bonds. It offset a little less than a day's borrowing.
June may have been a particularly poor month to choose, with Chancellor Rachel Reeves overseeing £20.7 billion of public sector net borrowing – the second highest level for the month since records began in 1993, with only the chaos of 2020's pandemic exceeding it – but it is still a potent illustration of the sheer scale of Britain's indebtedness.
Despite repeated warnings from the Institute for Fiscal Studies and rising signs of alarm in the bond markets, the Government appears set to continue in its path of high taxes and even higher spending, crushing the life out of the economy even as it piles up debts to be repaid.
The obsession with meeting the Government's short-run fiscal rules notwithstanding, there is no seeming attention paid to the long term position of this country, and no appetite for the sort of changes needed to rein in current spending: reforming benefits or reshaping the NHS.
It is hard to think of a better illustration than the cavalier treatment of Mr Farrer's bequest: consuming the inheritances given to us by our ancestors in order to fund lifestyles we will not always be able to afford. And with each month of staggeringly high borrowing, the end of the track creeps nearer. If nothing else, this is a poor way to treat our descendents, who will find themselves footing the bill.
