Yes, public debt is high, but the way to bring it down is to invest – starting with the government’s social and climate pledges
After all the budget spending announcements Rishi Sunak has made in the run-up to the actual event tomorrow – on children’s services, regional transport, the minimum wage and public pay rises – you could be forgiven for thinking that the chancellor will be explaining the importance of public spending in an economic downturn.
He won’t. Following his speech to the Tory party conference, we can be pretty sure that Sunak will say that what he is actually doing is “fixing the public finances”. By which he will mean, “after the emergency spending of the pandemic, I am reining spending and borrowing back in to reduce the nation’s overall debt”.
