When a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund tells you there is a 50:50 chance of a British debt crisis by 2030, you do not shrug and look away. Ken Rogoff is not a tub-thumping populist. He is exactly the kind of cautious, establishment economist who normally spends his time talking everyone down from the ledge. And he is warning that Britain is now genuinely on it.
The numbers behind the warning are sobering. Our national debt is on course to hit £3 trillion this September and to march towards 100% of GDP. We are borrowing to pay the interest on what we already borrowed. That is not a strategy. That is the financial behaviour of a household one bad month away from the wall.
Spending We Can't Afford
Here is what makes it worse. Even the modest growth we are getting isn't coming from a thriving private sector. The OECD nudged its UK forecast up to 0.9% for the year, but admitted the improvement is driven by government spending, not real economic strength. Private consumption is forecast to crawl ahead by 0.4%. Business investment is expected to flatline. We are propping up the figures with borrowed money and calling it recovery.
Meanwhile inflation is forecast at 3.7% and unemployment could climb to 5.5%, the highest in eleven years. So the squeeze on families continues, the dole queue lengthens, and the debt keeps rising. Every pound of interest we pay to our creditors is a pound not spent on Lancashire's roads, its hospitals or its police.
The Markets Don't Bluff
Politicians love to pretend the bond markets are an abstraction. They are not. We watched in recent years how quickly confidence can evaporate and how brutally borrowing costs can spike when investors decide a country has lost control of its finances. A debt crisis is not a theory in a textbook. It is mortgage rates, frozen budgets and emergency tax rises landing on ordinary people who did nothing wrong. Rogoff is telling us the warning lights are flashing. Labour's answer is to keep its foot on the spending pedal.
What Reform UK Would Do
Reform UK would treat the public finances the way a serious family treats its own. That means a relentless war on waste — the consultancy bills, the quango sprawl, the billions lost to fraud and error. It means scrapping vanity projects and ideological commitments the country cannot afford. And it means growing the private economy through lower, simpler taxes so the tax base expands rather than the borrowing.
You do not fix a debt problem by borrowing more and hoping. You fix it by spending less, wasting less and growing more. The grown-up in the room just told Britain the odds. The least this government could do is listen.