GAMBLER OF THE EXCHEQUER

My parents knew the true value of thrift. That’s why I’m not cheering the £1trillion...

Britain is borrowing again. Big time. remember the old joke about the american general giving evidence to a congressional committee about spending on armaments? ‘You spend a million here . . . a million there . . . pretty soon you’re talking real money.’

it was funny then because a million really was a lot of money (i said it was an old joke) but then it changed. and the million was replaced with a billion. and now that’s been replaced, too. We’re talking trillions now.

For the first time ever in this country, public spending will break the £1 trillion barrier.

How do we respond to this? the big spender rishi Sunak is getting praised to the rafters for his Budget.

One newspaper had the Chancellor’s red box suspended above a picture of a cheerful Cheltenham Festival-goer. We’re a nation of punters now and he’s everyone’s favourite.

He’s already tipped for number 10 even though nobody had heard of him before last week. and that’s all on the basis of one Budget speech promising to spend and borrow. Or, rather, borrow and spend. the order matters.

Borrowing is suddenly an admirable thing for governments to do.

the economists say it’s fine, because interest rates are so low. Lord knows i’m no economist, but even i know that meeting interest payments does not make the debt go away.

those economists also say that what matters is where you choose to spend the money. When Gordon Brown was Chancellor, he drilled into us that his borrowing was good because it was for investing in things like roads, bridges and factories and that would increase productivity. it didn’t.

But there’s another factor — and even as i venture into this territory i can see the smart money men (almost all men) rolling their eyes.

isn’t there something just a touch morally dubious about borrowing?

Prudence, or self-discipline, is, after all, one of the four cardinal virtues.this may sound a rather oldfashioned thing to say. Clever City types, like Mr Sunak, say they are confident about taking a bet on the future. You must speculate to accumulate.

But i wonder if a borrow-and-spend philosophy really does square with the attitude of many people in this country — older people, mostly — who are deeply uneasy about it. and that’s before this week’s collapsing stock markets sent their pension pots plummeting.

i was a youngster when the phrase ‘ on the never- never’ entered the nation’s vocabulary. it meant people with no money could buy a telly and pay for it by making small regular instalments over quite a long period. it cost a fortune, but you got your telly immediately.

MY PARENTS — like many others — would have nothing to do with it. One of our neighbours borrowed on the never-never to take a holiday. as far as my mother was concerned she might as well have sold her children into slavery.

We had to wait until my father had saved enough before we had luxuries such as a vacuum cleaner and a fridge. the only thing they ever borrowed for was a set of encyclopaedia Britannica volumes. the man came every Saturday morning with a new one until we had the full set. two bob a week, as i recall.

My father made a special book case to house them. Very smart it was: glass doors and a lock. the only problem was he kept the key with him so if we kids actually wanted to make use of it . . . tough. rather defeated the purpose, i always thought. But their attitude had an impact on us. i’ve never borrowed a penny — except, obviously, for the mortgage.

i accept that’s pretty eccentric. almost everyone is a borrower now. the TUC calculates that households owe an average of £15,385 to credit card firms, banks and other lenders. in other words, unsecured debt. it’s the highest it’s ever been.

Of course, this coincides with an age of low interest rates. What’s the point of saving when you get virtually no interest on it? We actually lose money by the time inflation has taken its share.

But it is more than an arithmetical calculation. it’s a way of looking at the world. My parents believed you did not bet on the future, you saved for it. this Government believes the future is on its side.

Older parents who saved for a rainy day are, perhaps, entitled to cast a leery eye at big- spending chancellors — and at their own millennial children who expect their thrifty parents to dig into their life savings to bail them out. the compulsion to delay gratification was so deeply instilled in me that i held off eating the chocolates in my Christmas stocking variety box until they’d gone stale. i have never lost the feeling that reward lies in the future rather than the present.

i heard an echo of that unease in the response of theresa May to the Budget. She said in the Commons: ‘although spending a lot of money may be popular . . . there is, of course, that necessity to have a realistic assessment of the longer term consequences.’ So the nation divides into the reckless and the cautious. the gamblers and the savers. Mrs May is one of the latter. Boris Johnson’s record (in all sorts of ways) suggests he’s a gambler.

economically, it may very well be the smart answer to spend ourselves out of the current crisis, but many of us would secretly rather put our money under our mattresses.

if ever there were a time for financial stockpiling, this may well be it.