So what does Gordon Brown’s debt crisis actually look like? Cast your eyes to the right-hand side of the Coffee House homepage and you’ll be able to find out. We’ve added a new “debt counter” to the site, which reveals the UK’s spiralling national debt and the burden it places on each family. It started at £609.1billion on 5 April 2009, and it’s going up, up, up by around £5,700 per second.
Hopefully, this counter will shine a light on what is not only a fiscal crisis but a moral one too. Future taxpayers will be left picking up the tab for the £billions and – perhaps, one day – £trillions that compose the black hole in our public finances. As I write, the overall figure stands around £619.42 billion, which equates to £24,783 per family. It will be years before we see those numbers going down again. In the meatime, brace yourselves for worse.
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