Opinion, Watford Observer, 19 October 2025: Watford Conservatives: national finances out of control | Watford Observer
The UK government owes something like £3 trillion. That is roughly £43,000 per head of the British population, and so about £4 billion for the population of Watford.
As a result, the Government will pay something like £111.2 billion in interest payments alone this year (whilst only spending £62.2 billion on our national defence, for example).
Much of this debt was built up to save the economy from the financial crisis of 2007 and the Covid pandemic of 2020-22. That was vital to avoid an economic collapse and considerable hardship across the country.
But we can’t carry on ignoring these debts. At the moment, we are saying to our children and grandchildren they must pay in the future for our spending today. It’s not fair.
And yet the Labour government staggers forward desperately trying to think up ways to increase our taxes further so they can increase the welfare bill and hand out absurd pay rises to the small number of workers represented by their trade union masters.
The Lib Dems continue to be the ‘all things to all people’ party: just tax and spend. And now we have a second ‘all things to all people’ party: Reform UK. The significance of their support for removing the two-child cap shows they too are just another ‘tax and spend’ party. Locally, councils that were taken over by Reform UK earlier this year are already saying they will increase council taxes by five per cent next year.
Only the Conservative Party gets it: lower taxes to get the economy growing, control of public expenditure to reduce the debt burden.
Or do we really want to see the debt burden on the people of Watford go higher than £4 billion?
Stephen Woodard
Chairman, Watford Conservatives
