Britain is addicted to spending beyond its means

Imagine what the government could do with an extra £9.1 billion a month. It could build HS2 in its entirety within the space of a year. Or better still, it could double the defence budget and still have some money left over to build the 40 new hospitals which the Conservatives promised – as well as a few schools, too.

 That sum – £9.1 billion – is what the government paid in debt interest in October alone, according to the figures on public finances released by the Office for National Statistics this morning. Overall, it was forced to borrow £17.4 billion over the course of the month – only just shy of the £18.2 billion in had to borrow in October 2020, in the depths of the pandemic. That, we were led to believe, was a one-off, once-in-a-century expansion of the state required to head-off a crisis. Yet borrowing on this scale is becoming normal.