25th March 2015

I guess that it is little more than a commonplace to note in passing that generally the Labour Party is for public ownership and the Tory Party prefers to privatise stuff.

So with Railways as with the NHS, with Water and Gas and other Utilities and Technology and the Post Office all, under this Tory led, co-alition Government shifted from the public to the private sector.

The East Coast Railway, a victim of its own success after the failures of the previous private sector franchisee and having been run successfully as a public company, the company has gone back into private ownership.

Little enough is said about the costs of privatisation, the public funds invested to allow BT to compete with Sky in bidding wars to show premiership football on TV.

And why not allow Mr Branson his  very own life size railway set to play with, I don't imagine that his private Island has one, so hey!

It's OK come and play with ours, why don't you?

But hidden in the pages of the Newspapers last week there was a story about another privatisation.

After five years of austerity, during which the national debt has barely shrunk at all, the Con-Dems appear to have come up with a cracking new plan.

Privatise the debt.

So, instead of each and everyone of us taking the strain of the cost of maintaining a fairer society in which rich and poor share the burden proportionately the latest wheeze is for each of us to carry our own debt as best we can.

This at least it seems to me, thinking aloud as I often do with only the indoor critic to notice my muttering, is the plan for the years after the election to come.

Apparently according to my Newspaper, the average UK household is likely to be £10, 000 in debt by the end of 2016, not including their Mortgage, if indeed they are lucky enough, or not, to have one.

I'm not entirely sure that there is a coherent logic to this thinking and whether I am comparing like with like or whether I am comparing Pears with Oranges?

But if the National Debt costs everyone of us in interest payments and is held by the Chancellor to be a bad thing is it a better thing for private debt to be costing each of those in debt over £2500 a year in interest payments?

I suppose if you happen to be one of the lucky few who are not in debt then, well .......!

But if debt is the method by which we have each managed to survive the last five years of austerity.

And if we have exchanged inflation for deflation during the process.

And if it is at all true that we have halved the deficit as Mr Cameron likes to claim.

Or indeed that the plan is working as Mr Osborne claims.

Why is it that household debt, excluding mortgages, over the period has risen by 10%?

And why also is it that much of that borrowing appears to be, not for luxury high price-tag items, but that people are increasingly depending on credit, both credit cards, personal and pay day loans, to afford essential items.

Or are borrowing simply to make ends meet?

The inevitable bump in the road ahead will be felt, and felt pretty dramatically, when interest rates start to rise.

If loans are affordable with interest rates at 0.5% will they remain affordable when rates increase?

Privatising the public debt is the logical conclusion of privatising everything else but the corollary of this strategy is the growing evidence (published by The Bank of England) that whilst people borrow to spend, thereby providing some support to consumption within the UK and helping GDP.

The increase in private debt has contributed to the depth of the downturn in the economy and a much slower return to growth.