John Healey won't say it but the triple lock will have to end eventually

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Popular Conservatives’ director Mark Littlewood says politicians are too scared to tackle the pension triple lock – leaving Britain’s young to face the bill when the reckoning comes

Britain has been living well beyond its means for a quarter of a century.

You have to go all the way back to 2001 to find a government of any stripe that put forward a balanced budget. Official national debt now stands at a little over £3trillion – about the same as the UK’s total national output across a full year.

The profligacy and fiscal incontinence of recent governments becomes apparent when you look at the speed at which we are plunging ourselves into the red.

If you break down that £3trillion of debt and look at how and when we accumulated it, the numbers are stark.

It took us more than three centuries, from 1694 to 2010, to accrue the first trillion.

We piled a second trillion on top in just a decade, from 2010 to 2020.

The third trillion has been racked up in just six years, from 2020 to 2026.

Don’t try to pretend there has been any “austerity” in recent years.

We have been living through a period of obscene and reckless largesse.

All of this meant that the new Chancellor, John Healey, was batting on a very sticky wicket today when he gave his first major speech in his new role.

He mouthed all the right platitudes – we need to practise fiscal discipline, we need to bring back economic growth and so on – but couldn’t answer any of the difficult questions.

Pressed by GB News on the state pension triple lock, he demurred.

The strong implication was that it was untouchable – at least this side of the next general election.

In consequence, the ultra-protected pension will continue to chew away at the Government’s disastrous balance sheet.

The idea is that each year pensions get a hike in line with inflation, wage growth or 2.5 per cent – whichever is highest.

Eventually, if you extrapolate far enough into the future, this means the state pension will consume more than 100 per cent of all national income.

When the coalition Government brought in this baked-in uplift, the idea was that salary increases, price rises and the arbitrary figure of 2.5 per cent would all be clustered together.

In practice, this simply hasn’t happened. This means we are compounding annual rises in the pension to infinity and beyond.

The British Chambers of Commerce has suggested that we simply index-link the pension – meaning it would buy you the same basket of goods and services each year – and use the savings to reduce National Insurance, thereby encouraging the hiring of more young workers.

It seems an eminently reasonable suggestion, albeit one that will only make a tiny dent in Britain’s yawning debt mountain.

But politically, it will just prove too difficult. The Government is caught by its own explicit manifesto pledge to keep the triple lock in place.

This means that the fantasy world of continuing to pay for things we cannot afford is set to continue. At least for the time being.

The size of the financial hole we face is now so vast that even if we scrapped the entire state pension tomorrow – literally reducing it to zero – we wouldn’t balance the books in this financial year or the next.

Eventually, though, things that aren’t sustainable cannot be sustained.

The longer we pretend that we aren’t in a terrible mess, the harder and more painful it will be to clean up that mess when we are finally forced to.

For the next few weeks or months, it is easier simply to issue warm words about growth and discipline without doing any of the heavy lifting required to bring them about.

This just means that when the day of reckoning finally arrives, it will be much more brutal than it needed to have been.