Given that the UK also has elections coming up in the next couple of months, I thought it would be useful to use the recently updated EuroStat Figures on Public Sector Debt and Interest Payments to have a look at just how catastrophic the current system has been for UK taxpayers.
First, here's a graph of how UK Public Sector debt has gone trhought the roof in the last decade.
From 1995 to 2000, debt was fairly stable at around £400 billion. But then its started climbing gradually, and then shot up with the arrival of Cameron's Conservative Party in 2009 and George Osborne as Chancellor. It has now reached a very impressive £1,731,402 million - call it roughly £1.7 trillion.
The following table provides the gory details.
First, debt has increased by £1,253,157 million since 1996. But that debt has increased most in the period 2008-2011. In 1998, 2000 and 2001, debt levels actually decreased!
At the same time, the UK government has been generously paying out tens of billions every year in interest payments on that debt. The total over the period was £747,343 million - and average of very nearly £34 billion a year. Last year, depite the claims of the Conservative Govenment that it was trying to get levels of debt down, debt actually increased by over £65 billion, and UK taxpayers handed out nearly £48 billion in interest charges.
The right hand column show the effective interest rate on Public sector debt has tended to drop and currently stands at 2.76%. But the average interest over the entire period has been 4.91%.
As a percentage of GDP, those interest payments account for 2.5% (both in 2016, and as an average over the period 1995-2016), which corresponds to about 10% of the total UK tax take (25.4% of GDP according to the WorldBank).
The bottom line is thus that 10% of UK Taxpayers money has gone to feed the parasitic tapeworm that came up with the wonderful scheme that allows Commercial banks to lend non-existent money to gullible (or complicit) governments, and then sit back and either get the interest, or flog the bonds that they have bought to third parties such as the US and Canadian Pension funds. Effectively, UK taxpayers are paying for pensions in the US. How generous.
How about Labour or the Lib Dems challenging this insane system that, thanks to the policies of Cameron and Osborne have put UK citizens massively in debt, through no fault of their own?
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