Soaring borrowing shows gloomy times ahead
Try to imagine £14.6 billion. Not easy, is it?
Maybe it helps to envisage £14,600. And multiply it by a million. Once you have grasped the size of that sum, you will have an understanding of the mess our public finances are in at the moment.
Because £14.6 billion - about £450 for every taxpayer in the country - is the amount that Government spending has exceeded its own forecast over the past 12 months.
In the financial year to March, government borrowing reached £151.9 billion, an increase of £20.7 billion on the previous year, and the third-highest figure since records began. To put this in context, the Government is now borrowing more money than it did during the height of the coronavirus pandemic, or in the aftermath of the global financial downturn in 2010.
The politicians, of course, will trade claim and counter-claim of who is to blame. The opposition will blame the Government, saying the deficit has ballooned on its watch, while the Chancellor will accuse her predecessors of leaving a 'black hole' in its spending plans.
For most people, the argument about who is to blame is largely academic. Most people are far more concerned about how it is going to affect them, and how the present government is going to manage it. And it looks like the Chancellor's options are limited, to say the least.
We can't see beyond an extended period of austerity, with rising taxes and further cuts to public spending. It's going to be painful, but the debacle of Liz Truss's brief time in office shows that the alternative - allowing borrowing to spiral out of control - is very much worse.