Congratulations, dear reader! As of this morning, you have racked up an extra £539 in debt. No, you havent just bought a new wardrobe. You havent made a deposit on a winter break. And its not because of that heavy eBay session where you overbid for a signed Bulgarian copy of Wet Wet Wets first LP.
Nor are you alone. Im another 539 quid in the red too as are each of the other 63 million Britons. Put all those sums together and the entire country has just lost £34bn. How did we manage that? The short answer is that some statisticians made it so. The Office for National Statistics has decided that, under new accounting rules, Network Rail can no longer be called a private company. It was always borrowing on the states behalf, and if anything went wrong with Network Rail, it was always going to be taxpayers who would be on the hook. So as of this week it goes on the public balance sheet, its £34bn of debt now indelibly inked next to our names.
Continue reading...