The Conservatives promised they’d get the national debt under control. Instead, they increased it every single year they were in power. According to the ONS, they added £1.6 trillion to the national debt before leaving office.
Now the UK is paying £106 billion a year just in interest. That’s public money swallowed up by debt payments — money that could be going into the NHS, schools, housing, or properly funding our armed forces.
And it wasn’t an unavoidable mistake. Time and again, announcements of “tough choices” and spending cuts were paired with tax cuts that mainly benefited those already doing well: cuts to capital gains and shareholder taxes, breaks for homebuyers, and other giveaways. The biggest handout went to big business, a near 10% cut in corporation tax, while wages were held down, prices rose, and avoidance remained business as usual.
Put it all together and a clear pattern emerges: public services were squeezed to fund tax breaks at the top, while the bill, in debt, crumbling infrastructure, and weaker institutions, was dumped on the rest of the country and on future generations.
If it sounds familiar, it’s because it mirrors the Thames Water scandal: borrow billions, pay out billions in dividends, and leave everyone else to pick up the tab.
Conservative figures still try to blame the 2008 banking crisis and the Covid pandemic. Both were huge shocks, but even then, choices were made: post-crisis restrictions were loosened, and the pandemic contracting spree funnelled billions to well-connected friends and allies.
The political consequences are already visible. The Conservatives have lost hundreds of MPs and thousands of councillors, and even sections of the corporate press that once backed them are drifting towards Reform.
But the economic damage remains. The national debt now stands at £2.9 trillion, the highest in UK history, and all signs suggest it will keep climbing for years.
This debt burden isn’t just a number on a balance sheet. Because so much UK debt is held by overseas institutions and traded on global markets, the interest rate can shift quickly and when it rises, the cost lands here at home.
That means sudden jumps in interest payments force governments to scramble for money, and it’s the services we rely on that get squeezed first. Years of Conservative underfunding have already left core public services stretched to breaking point, and carrying a huge, unstable debt load makes long-term investment and planning even harder.
It all feeds into the same feeling people have across the country: that nothing gets better, living standards keep falling, and we’re expected to accept decline as normal.