The Labour party's most senior figures, in defiance of their education and intelligence, keep claiming that Chancellor Osborne's actions are "driven by ideology, rather than necessity". This is absurd. Anyone who argues that rapidly addressing the fiscal catastrophe Labour left behind is anything other than absolutely crucial either knows nothing about global bond markets, or is so blindly ambitious, so determined to close their eyes to the facts, as to be unfit for public office.
The UK's fiscal crisis is of monumental historic importance. The future of the free world may not be at stake as it was in Churchill's day. What is in the balance, though, is the prosperity of the British people for at least the next few decades and our status as a top-ranking nation.
Just before the Budget, we learnt that government borrowing jumped to £11.8bn in February 2011, up from £9.5bn during the same month the year before. This was the highest February borrowing total on record, double consensus estimates. As a result, official public sector debt now stands at £876bn, compared with £729bn at the same time in 2010.
Over the last 12 months, then, this country's "on-balance-sheet" liabilities have risen by £147bn. That's roughly what we spent on the NHS and defence combined in 2010 – and that was merely, during this last year of "austerity", the incremental increase in what Britain has put "on tick".
That's the point – and we should keep making it until it fully enters the public discourse. It is the total debt numbers that Osborne, the Tories and our politicians in general should focus on, not the size of the annual deficit.
The deficit is merely the yearly rise in the borrowing total that we need to service. By 2015, when the deficit is supposed to drop to zero, it doesn't mean that all outstanding debt will have gone away. It means, on the contrary, that total debt will have peaked.
What matters to the finances of any household is the size of the outstanding mortgage, the on-going costs of financing that mortgage, and the prospects of paying it off. Only an economically illiterate fool would claim the family finances will soon be "under-control" because sacrifices will be made and lifestyles reined-in to such an extent that, hopefully, if everything goes to plan, having re-mortgaged every year between now and 2015, that family will then enjoy a single year in which it won't need to re-mortgage.
In 2009, the UK spent £31bn – around 6pc of total tax receipts – on debt interest payments. That's money down the drain. By 2015, we won't have reached, in Churchill's words, some "broad sunlit upland". After four more years of deficits, debt services costs, according to last week's Budget, will by then be £67bn a year – or almost 10pc of total tax receipts. These shocking numbers are also likely to be under-estimates, given the UK's massive "off-balance-sheet" liabilities and the Treasury's benign assumption of future gilt rates.
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