George Osborne asks David Cameron how he's going to solve the British government's debt problem

Yes, it’s ‘austerity time’ in Britain, as the official ‘adjusted’ UK government debt just rose, as reported by the BBC, to £1,004 billion pounds.

The government’s really doing it’s bit. It only borrowed £13.70 billion pounds in December, which is down from £15.90 billion of borrowing the previous December.

Don’t worry though, David and George.

I’m sure Mervyn will be able to print all of the rest, when the time comes.

What’s actually more interesting, is what the BBC forgot to mention, because the ‘unadjusted’ figure is £2,266.30 billion, or £2.3 trillion pounds, if we include what the government has borrowed to fund its bank purchases of RBS and Lloyds.

Now you would have thought an off-balance-sheet ‘adjustment’ would be something under 10%, rather than a 130% change, but hey ho; who am I to challenge the definitive word of the BBC?

And of course, what’s the debt for the unfunded liabilities, such as unfunded pensions promised to government employees and the rest of us sheeple? Well, pick a number.

Any number.

It’s probably as accurate as anything the British government has, but if you force me to put down a number, I’ll go for about £4 trillion more (£1 trillion for tax-eating UK government employee pensions, £2 trillion more for state pensions for the general tax-paying population, and let’s chuck in £1 trillion more for decommissioning UK nuclear power stations and paying for all of those terrible PFI schemes set up by John Major, Tony Blair, and Gordon Brown, to hide government spending from official BBC-reported balance sheets).

Actually, I’ll make that an extra £5 trillion, because I’ve probably missed something out that Gordon Brown managed to obfuscate into temporary oblivion, to pay for one of the Labour faction’s election wins.

Obviously, the British government could cancel all state pensions, and refuse to pay off its PFI obligations, etc, and endure a revolution as a result, in which it would disappear, or kill us all as we marched on Whitehall with our pitch-forks, but all those figures, using trillions, are still fairly hard for stone-age descended humans to get their heads round.

So to make it more meaningful, let’s put these figures into government debt per British household:

• Ridiculously optimistic £1 trillion pounds of BBC-reported debt, £38,000 pounds of UK government debt per household
• Pragmatic £2.3 trillion pound debt, £87,400 pounds of UK government debt per household
• Probable, revolution-avoiding £6.3 trillion pound debt, £239,400 pounds of UK government debt per household
• Likely debt, given that Gordon Brown will have hidden a trillion, £7.3 trillion pound debt, £277,400 pounds of UK government debt per household

Strangely enough, that last figure of £7.3 trillion is supposedly exactly what the UK, in toto, is supposed to be worth. (Though those figures are official, so I refuse to believe them on principle.)

Will this government debt ever be paid off?

You’ve got to be joking, unless you think a loaf of bread is going to cost a million pounds. Because, here’s all Mervyn King has to do to create £7.3 trillion pounds, from thin air; change a computer register from this:

0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000.0000

To this:

1101010001110101001111010000010100000000000.0000

So is there going to be a paper money collapse, in terms of the pound sterling?

Bank on it.

Unless you and 27 million friends have got £277,400 pounds each, that you don’t need, to pay on top of all your other taxes, for useless government ‘services’ that you would never pay for otherwise, if given a choice.