Jeremy Hunt

You've got to have resolve.

You've got to get cracking quickly.

We may have in the next few months a new chancellor and a new prime minister.

And if that happens, they may have a bit of a honeymoon.

And that is the time to crack into these things.

Crack into it and actually...

do the things that could make a longer term difference.

It's true.

And there are lots of different reasons why we have to pay more for our debt.

But let me make a bigger point about debt, because I think this is something that we need to talk about a lot more.

If you look at the £110 billion we pay in debt interest, which is more than we spend on the entire armed forces, it's nearly three times what we spend on the police.

And then you add to it the pensions for civil servants, which we have to also fund as a liability of the state and for retired doctors and nurses and so on.

This comes to about 19 pence on income tax.

those very, very high levels of debt.

That is a drag anchor on growth in the economy.

That's money that doesn't go into building nuclear power stations.

It doesn't go into buying things that cause shops to boom and factories to boom.

And in the end, it's not sustainable.

And I think we have to ask ourselves whether it is morally right to

pass on this kind of level of debt to our children and grandchildren, not least because it is condemning them to the kind of low growth we've got now.