Jeremy Hunt

Well, I agree with that.

But I'm really interested that you mentioned debt because this was one of the things in the category of what did I come to understand after I'd finished doing the job rather than when I was in the job.

So when I was doing budgets, if I'm honest, I saw our debt as something that had to be managed.

I had to make sure that all the measures in my budgets didn't provoke the markets into the kind of meltdown that happened with the mini budget.

But I didn't really understand the scale of the problem.

And I now look at it and I realise that actually interest rates shot up after Ukraine.

And I was basically the first chancellor and Rachel Reeves, the second, who's had to deal with high debt and high interest rates together.

And I don't think people understand the impact this is having on growth.

And if you say, why is it that we're so struggling to get out of like 1% growth?

I mean, you know, £110 billion on debt interest sounds like just a number.

But if you add on the amount we have to pay for public sector pensions, which we haven't put aside over the years, it's about 19 pence on income tax that we are having to pay for our debt interest and the pensions of, you know, former doctors and armed forces officers and civil servants and so on.

Now, that 19 pence of income tax, that's not going to things that are going to help to grow the economy.

We're not spending that on new motorways or nuclear power stations.

A lot of it is going to foreigners who are lending us money.

And we have to, if we're going to be a grown-up country, to use Tony Blair's words, we have to have a plan to bring down debt over time.

It's not going to be immediate.

It's like having a huge mortgage on your house.

You can't deal with it instantly.

But I think...

The rule that we should have is that outside emergencies, we should say that public spending won't grow faster than the growth in the economy.