Britain is broke. We have been living beyond our means for decades, piling up debt year after year. It is now costing the British taxpayer well over £100 billion a year just to pay the interest on our borrowings – more than we spend on either education or defence. Sooner rather than later, Britain’s debt problems will be impossible to ignore.

In Britain is Bust, Ross Clark argues that a major rationalisation of public spending is inevitable, and likely to have profound impacts on the country’s political landscape. Cuts that might seem unpopular now will soon be inescapable if we want to avoid the kind of debt crisis that afflicted Greece in 2010. Our only choice is between taking the lead on those cuts now, or being forced by the bond markets into much deeper ones in the near future.

This clear-headed, engaging and carefully argued book demonstrates that we really can’t afford to carry on as we are, and offers a set of solutions to avoid the worst.