The staggering total of Britain’s national debt was laid bare yesterday - at least £2trillion.
That represents £33,000 for every man, woman and child in the country.
Bank bailouts will send debt ‘off the Richter scale’ at a staggering 147 per cent of national income, the worst figure since 1954 and one of the highest in the developed world.
The figures came from the independent Office of National Statistics, which said it was adding giant liabilities from two part-nationalised banks - estimated at between £1trillion and £1.5trillion - to existing debts.
The decision is a shattering blow to Labour’s reputation for economic competence and is likely to anger ministers, who argue taxpayers are never likely to have to pay back such sums.
Official debt figures had already shown public borrowing spiralling to a new record, reaching £67.2billion between last April and January. The deepening recession also led to a £7billion fall in the amount of tax paid by individuals and businesses last month, compared to January 2008, leaving a yawning black hole in Government finances.
The shattering calculations came as the Bank of England’s deputy governor said there was a ’serious risk’ of a decade-long downward spiral of the kind that crippled Japan in the 1990s.
Sir John Gieve, who leaves the Bank at the end of the month, said the way the authorities handled the collapse of Northern Rock ‘may have owed more to John Sergeant than Fred Astaire’.
Gordon Brown, meanwhile, admitted the country had been ‘brought low’ by an ‘economic hurricane’ affecting the whole world.
Opposition MPs accused the Prime Minister of driving Britain towards bankruptcy and called for emergency reductions in Government spending.
Britain’s leading business organisation, the CBI, launched an extraordinary attack on the Government’s recovery plans, saying there was ‘little sense of a coherent strategy’.
It said: ‘The Government appears to have been fighting a series of forest fires rather than building a platform for economic recovery.’
