Borrowing Brown's A Crying Shame

Eye-watering public debt and a dire economy disappearing down a black hole. Borrowing Brown banging on about climate change, leaving behind a mighty mess. The Deluded One is taking the country down the road to rack and ruin. It's enough to bring tears to your eye.

The public is getting punch drunk with failure fatigue and numb from eye-watering economic incompetence.

Borrowing Brown's well on course for a place in the record book of shame. He's managed to pull a mangy rabbit out of the hat, more than doubling state borrowing in the first half of this year to a record £77.3 billion high. One hell of a record.

Figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show government borrowing has ballooned by £14.8 billion in September, hitting the highest level since the country was left on its knees in the 1946 war wreckage.

Over the first six months of last year, borrowing was a mere drop in the ocean of debt - a piddling £34 billion, nearly half of today’s total. How we gasped then.

Yet for all the grand talk of belt-tightening, there’s little sign of it. As reckless Brown struggles to cook the books, the disreputable gimmick was a fire sale of the last few public assets set to raise peanuts.

But it's worst than that. The total net debt now stands at £824.8 billion - around 59 per cent of the UK's entire economic output. Quite a few green shoots will be needed to turn that around, on top of billions spent on greenwash.

We're all doomed. The economy is running away with itself to pay for a decade of failure. Spending is running well ahead of tax revenues, with tax receipts for the month at just £35.4 billion compared with spending of £45.7 billion over the month.

Just to meet interest payments on its disgusting debt pile, the government shelled out £5.9 billion - 43 per cent more than the same month last year and the highest monthly payout on record.

This should sound a warning bell. If debt continues to mount at that rate, borrowing for the year would surge past the £200 billion mark - far ahead of desperate Darling's £175 billion forecast which is already saddling a whole generation to come with government-inflicted debt.

That opens the door to the dreaded double-wammy, with the IMF laying down the public spending law and the country in danger of losing it's 'triple A' rating. International money men will drop UK investment like a ton of bricks.

The discredited government is clinging on with its last card, playing the politics of false hope and optimism as it limps along to the general election. But voters are fed up being fed so many lies with a daily diet of pork pie politics. Honest Osbourne saw off that sham, winning plaudits on both sides of the Atlantic.

Grand economic theories hold no sway with voters. What they see is a government which has discredited the once laudable centre-left agenda with squandered public spending, wasteful public 'development' agencies and an off-balance sheet PFI sham.

Short of banging a few heads together or indicting Bunkered Brown for economic war crimes, the only solution is one the Orange Party has called for before - a massive US style debt ticker - opposite parliament - to drive the shameful message home.