Britain is drowning in debt - so why won't Sunak and Starmer discuss £3trillion timebomb?

Yet there’s one word Conservative Party leader Rishi Sunak and Labour leader Keir Starmer would rather not mention at all. They should, though, because unless they do something about it, it's going to sink the country.

I'm not exaggerating here.

The word that must not be named only has four letters in it, but it comes with an awful lot of zeros at the end.

It spells a huge amount of trouble for whoever takes power after July 4, and that's why neither Sunak nor Starmer want to discuss it publicly.

In fact, I'm not sure they're discussing it privately. Politicians of every political stripe have blanked it from their minds, as people are prone to do when something scares the hell out of them.

So I’ll name it for them.

That word is D-E-B-T.

Which is only four letters but adds up to a staggering £3 trillion at time of writing.

I'll write that down in full, so we know what we’re talking about here. Right now, the UK's national debt stands at £3,005,852,886,983.

That’s how many pounds the UK owes to its debtors, and the number increases by £5,170 every single second.

You can watch it grow in real time here, if you’ve got the stomach for it.

No wonder our politicians don't talk about it. If they started – and took the subject seriously for once – they’d never stop.

I'm amazed how rarely people talk about the UK's national debt. There was a flurry of concern after the financial crisis, when we realised how much the country owed.

At that point, debt totalled a mere £1trillion. At the time, that was equal to around 40 per cent of our gross domestic product (GDP), which measures the total size of our economic output each year.

Today, it's equal to 100 per cent of our annual GDP.

In the most recent financial year, we added another £121.4billion to the debt pile.

Currently, the UK is running a budget deficit of 5.8 per cent a year.

National debt now looks set to hit around 120 per cent by 2030, at which point it will be too late. The debt will float off like a child's helium balloon and the country will go bust.

Which will make ‘Calamity’ Liz Truss’s mini-Budget meltdown on September 2022 look like a walk in the park.

Yet Sunak and Starmer are keeping quiet.

When Sunak and chancellor Jeremy Hunt took over from Truss, they couldn't stop talking about debt. They used it as an excuse to bring in a heap of taxes.

As the election loomed, the talk suddenly stopped.

Suddenly, Hunt found the spare cash to serve up some tax cuts, while pretending he had the "fiscal headroom" to fund them.

I see no headroom. Not with the UK borrowing £120billion a year.

Sunak doesn't want to talk about the debt, because then people might ask who he can afford to spend billions recruiting under 18-year-olds for national service, and fund his flagship triple-lock-plus plan to secure the pensioner vote.

Starmer doesn't want to talk about debt, either. Labour supporters want him to spend billions to reverse what they see as 14 years of Tory austerity.

They'll hate him if he admitted the truth. There's no money.

So we get this conspiracy of silence, where neither party wants to admit that its election promises are based on money we simply don’t have.

I don't entirely blame politicians. Voters don't want to hear the D-word, either.

When I mention it to friends, on either side of the political fence, they look completely shocked, then clam up. Usually I can't stop them ranting on about Tory cuts or Labour lies.

That £3trillion figure is too big for our small brains. The implications too terrifying. So we block it out.

Once the election is over – whichever party wins – we won't be able to ignore it any longer. Suddenly, we'll all be talking about it, and it won't be fun. Debt is set to dominate our lives.