In 2025 UK National Debt stood at 96% of GDP. [1] In 2023/24 the UK defence budget was £53.9 billion and projected to be £56.9 billion. [2] The Office for Budgetary Responsibility (UK semi autonomous government financial agency) projects debt interest repayments in 25/26 to be £111.2 billion or 8.3% of total government spending.
In short, the UK is spending nearly twice as much on debt servicing as on defence. Next time, Starmer stands up and makes a big declaration about military spending think about that.
Strangely, while these facts are, obviously not hidden in any way, they get very little coverage at an editorial level in the media.
Where did all this money go? Two of the ‘culprits’ are i. the splurge in money laundering during Covid; vast sums on the negligibly relevant ‘Track and Trace’ system and on corrupt non functional PPE contracts, all of which was just the usual transfer of public money to private business interests on a even more grandiose than usual scale, and ii. an increase in prices of natural gas resulting from the Ukraine war, caused, of course, by the West.
In any event, the modern model of government in the UK is to contract everything to profit-making private businesses. When this model was adopted, during the 1980s, people were told that private businesses are more ‘efficient’ than state owned businesses. In reality the shift to having services delivered by private companies rather than by state owned businesses has not, in general, led to better services, more ‘choice’, or, it seems, lower government spending. The shift simply seems to have been to make sure that a much larger slice of public money, raised by taxation, (and thus not a matter of choice at all), goes to private businesses. Much of this money in the UK now flows directly to the coffers of US private equity firms, and, foreign-owned trusts, in general. A nice (in the sense of good depiction), example of this is the private equity takeover of Britain’s “care” homes for children. [5] No better results, not cheaper, and no “choice”. I’ve just started reading a book about the US equity take-over of Britain. It is a little disorganised but the facts seem well-researched and the reality it presents, undeniable. [6]
Professor John Mearsheimer argues that states act rationally most of the time and that their primary concern is survival. Policy makers try to adopt policies which will see the survival of their state. In a dog eat dog world this sometimes means they have to bite before they are bitten. I almost entirely accept Mearsheimer’s theory of offensive realism, but one point on which I diverge is this. He thinks that policy makers will always, or almost always, act in the interests of state survival. He states that state survival is the highest priority for policy makers. I think he misses one alternative; policy makers allow another state to take over and they do this because of greed. In other words, in my model, policy makers, political leaders, can, surreptitiously, sell the state to another one, or, simply, to the highest bidder, who need not even be a state. This is what has happened in the UK. The political backlash of the Reform party is a chaotic response to this. Chaotic because it is based on a kind of instinct rather than rational analysis, but a ‘true’ instinct nonetheless. (But, because it is chaotic it can easily go off in a negative direction, and is unlikely to be successful to bring down the elite).
Notes
- https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn02812/
- https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-8175/
- https://obr.uk/forecasts-in-depth/tax-by-tax-spend-by-spend/debt-interest-central-government-net/
- https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9714/
- https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15063255/billionaires-Arab-sheikhs-profits-misery-Britains-childrens-homes-IAN-BIRRELL.html
- Vassal State. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Vassal-State-America-Runs-Britain/dp/1800753888 How America runs Britain. Angus Hanton. Swift.