'The state is out of touch with the balance sheet and it's out of touch with reality,' says Mark Dolan

We're running a deficit which means that more income goes out than comes in for day-to-day spending.

The national debt is well north of £2trillion. Ten million Brits of working age are not active in the economy, 10 million? Are they all ill and depressed?

And the cost of interest on our debt alone is £100billion a year, which is almost double the defence budget.

So how did we get here? Well, notwithstanding years of anaemic growth with low GDP and low productivity being a British disease that goes back not just years but decades, there is the small matter of our two-and-a-half-year failed attempt to stop a seasonal respiratory virus called COVID-19.

Now yes, it was a nasty bug which took too many from us, but one non fatal to the vast majority of the population.

Remember the ad campaign? Act like you've got it? A disease so bad you had to pretend you had it.

A disease for which a third of the population had no symptoms at all. And for that, we closed schools. We mothballed our health service. We created a mental health tsunami.

We borrowed half a trillion pounds. We paid perfectly healthy people to stay at home and bake banana bread, watch Netflix and start a wine collection.

We closed down thousands of once-viable businesses. It was mad. If we'd taken the approach of Sweden, which didn't bother with lockdowns or mask mandates or vaccine tyranny, we wouldn't have the debt.

We would have a thriving economy and there wouldn't be eight million people waiting for NHS treatment or a generation of damaged kids.

With post-pandemic excess deaths through the roof, lockdowns have got to be the most failed, so-called public health policy in history. When excess deaths were high during the pandemic, we had to destroy the country to tackle it.

Now that they're still high, no one gives a toss or even wants to ask why. Well, it's not just Covid. There's another big thing. Britain lives beyond its means.

You've been lied to by successive governments about just how much the state can do for you, whether it's the provision of welfare, the scope of the NHS and the wider public sector footprint. Now, I believe in all of these things, including welfare, but the cost and scale of the state? It's out of touch with the balance sheet and it's out of touch with reality.

In the last two decades, we've only evaded this truth with money printing and the accumulation of debt. This is dishonest and gravely immoral. Why? Because the buck will eventually stop with future generations, British kids who haven't even been born yet, who will pick up the bill and inherit a country which is no longer financially solvent. Solvent. We're already nearly there. Or because politicians couldn't be honest with you about how much governments can do and how much needs to be personal responsibility, for example, we should all look after our health better rather than burdening the NHS to the extent that we do.

But when it's free, who cares, right? But that is simply not sustainable. The state has been wiping our backside expensively for years now and the result is that Britain is on the skids now. To be fair to Sunak and Hunt, they have steadied the ship. The problem is that ship is the Titanic and at the moment it's at a very awkward angle in the sea and the deck chairs have long since washed away.