During the past 48 hours, the British Government’s cost of borrowing – already the most expensive among the G7 richest countries – has reached the highest levels seen this century.
This is not some abstract matter: it has visceral real-world impact.
By adding billions to the Government’s balance sheet, the surging cost of borrowing means that the Labour Party, already mired in chaos, finds it ever more expensive to meet its profligate spending commitments, leading in time to rampant inflation and the destruction of wealth.
In 2022, during Liz Truss’s brief, benighted tenure as Prime Minister, the ‘yield’ on 30-year gilts – essentially the annual return investors demand to lend the Government money for that period – soared to just under 5.1 per cent. Keir Starmer, in opposition, declared: ‘Liz Truss lost control of the economy. I am not prepared to let a Labour government ever do that to working people.’
Well, now the yield has soared to 5.8 per cent. What does he have to say about that?
Every Labour government in history has either ended in or been severely undermined by a financial crisis: in 1929, 1931, 1949, 1967, 1976 and, as everyone remembers, 2008. This one will be no different.
The fear among City insiders is that whoever takes over when Starmer inevitably goes, the Labour nationalisation drive will explode, writes Alex Brummer
In the long run, as Mrs Thatcher said: ‘The trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.’
And what we are watching now unfold is an economic crisis just as much as a political one. The interest on Britain’s debt mountain is now costing us taxpayers more than £100billion per year – dwarfing the entire defence budget at just £60 billion. You can be all but certain it’s about to get worse.
I’ve been reporting on the British public finances for more than half a century – and the risk of a 1970s-style debt crunch, when markets lose confidence in Britain’s willingness to control borrowing and spending, is hauntingly familiar.
Predictably, as he clings to the very door of No 10, the flailing Starmer has now reached for an old-school statist favourite to appease his bloodthirsty Left-wingers: full-scale nationalisation. Nothing stirs the faithful quite like the phrase ‘public ownership’.
Starmer and his incompetent Chancellor Rachel Reeves had already planned to bring every one of England’s major railway lines under the cold hand of the state by the end of 2027 – a measure that few who remember the bad old days of British Rail will welcome.
This week the Prime Minister said legislation would be brought forward to give the Government powers to take ‘full ownership of British Steel’. He thus commenced a lunatic race to reassert state control over swathes of the British economy – a move that would surely accelerate under any successor.
The markets will hate all this. The fear among City insiders is that whoever takes over when Starmer inevitably goes – be it self-styled King Of The North Andy Burnham, tax-avoider Angela Rayner, Net Zero zealot Ed Miliband or ultra-ambitious Health Secretary Wes Streeting, the Labour nationalisation drive will explode.
In plain terms, this will transfer private liabilities and debt onto the public balance sheet – and ours is already groaning thanks to Labour’s utter failure to get a grip on spending.
Business after business now screams that she and Keir Starmer are crushing investment, worsening our growing unemployment crisis
It says much about our dismal predicament that, despite all the above, the bond vigilantes of the global markets now see our hapless Chancellor as the least worst option.
Her tenure at the Treasury has been littered with blunders, starting with her first month in office when she tried and failed to remove the winter fuel allowance for elderly Britons and sued for peace with the union barons by shovelling gargantuan payments at public sector workers without any corresponding requirements to improve productivity.
She followed up this incoherent programme with, among other things, £75billion of debilitating tax increases on everything from capital gains (which has predictably seen Treasury receipts fall, inheritance taxes, VAT increases on independent schools and, soon, a wealth tax in all but name on expensive properties.
Business after business now screams that she and Starmer are crushing investment, worsening our growing unemployment crisis and accelerating the ‘brain drain’ of talented people abroad, while her new penalties for pensions-saving are robbing young people of their future to pay for Labour profligacy today.
It’s an appalling record – but, as I say, traders still tend to hold their noses when it comes to Reeves, seeing her as likely to be better than whatever far-Left regime one day succeeds her at No 11.
I have never felt more depressed as a financial commentator. Whoever is in charge, Labour appears intent on doubling down on every classic, wealth-destroying socialist mistake. When the inevitable financial crisis lands, it will hurt ordinary working people the most – the very men and women the party claims to represent.
