A Labour government will have little economic wiggle room – but what’s new?

There’s a long list of people and global events you can blame for the mess we’re in – but, says Sean O’Grady, whichever party gets in next time, they won’t have a magic bullet to get us out of it

National debt now stands at £2,700bn, around a year’s worth of national income – almost three times the proportion of only 20 years ago (Peter Byrne/PA)

Why are taxes so high? One answer given far too little attention is because our national debt is so high, and the cost of servicing it has gone up so much as interest rates have risen from their ultra-low phase.

And why did our national debt become so outsized? Because of a series of major crises during the past 15 years or so that governments of all three major parties have had to deal with.

In case you’ve forgotten, which people do seem to do all too easily, they were: