Budget for the people

Governments spend billions on things nobody wants

- DAVID KURTEN

A RESPONSIBLE government will look after the nation's finances, but for the last 25 years or more, we have suffered the effects of gross financial mismanagement and irresponsibility by successive governments.

The disastrous Starmer regime speaks of a £22 billion black hole left by the fake-Conservatives, who had five Prime Ministers in their 14 years of misrule.

The truth is, however, the UK has a £2,500bn (£2.5 trillion) black hole which is our national debt, and it is growing at £120bn per year, which is our annual budget deficit.

Of this, a whopping £89bn per year goes just on the interest payments to service our ever-growing national debt, before we even get around to buying any useful stuff for the people.

Not that we do. Most of us expect the government to spend our money wisely to fund roads, schools, hospitals, doctors and nurses, etc. Vast sums of money, however, are wasted on ideological profligacy - see box on right.

Scrapping these items (and there are many more) would save £121bn from the national budget without having to put up taxes or cut pensioners' Winter Fuel Allowance, which totals just £1.5bn per year - half of what the Starmer regime is sending to prolong the disastrous and unnecessary war going between Ukraine and Russia.

Of course, our national finances were not helped by the disaster of lockdown. The Johnson regime ran up extra debt of £400bn, which was added to our national financial black hole. This inevitably fed through into inflation, so that real consumer prices (not the vastly low-balled official figures) have increased by about 100 per cent per year over the last four years.

The very first principle of any budget is that we should not spend more than we earn or receive. The government only has two sources of finance: taxation and borrowing.