There is a growing sense that Britain’s fiscal position is unsustainable. We’re spending more than we’re raising in tax, our debt is growing faster than the economy, and bond market scepticism about the government’s ability to fix any of this is driving up our interest payments.

We may be heading for a crisis that will make Liz Truss’s mini-budget debacle look like a minor wobble. It would cause a lot of economic harm. It could also force us to rethink our priorities, as happened in the wake of the IMF bailout crisis in 1976. In order to think about what a crisis would look like and what its effects might be, I invited Helen Thompson on to the podcast.

Helen is professor of political economy at Cambridge University. She is an expert on political and economic history, with a specialism in the geopolitics of energy production. Helen will be well known to many of you from her podcasting and journalism. In recent years she’s become a widely influential thinker and writer beyond the academy, renowned for the depth and seriousness of her analysis. I can’t think of a better person to ask about Britain’s next crisis.

This episode is a two-parter. In part one, which is free for all (Search ‘The Ruffian’ on all the usual podcast platforms), Helen talks about the forces pushing us towards crisis point, why she thinks the reckoning could come very soon, and why the current government’s attempts to head it off are doomed to fail. We discuss whether and how a crisis might lead to a reset of our political priorities, with reference to past crises.

In part two, which will be for paid subscribers only, we talk about what a crisis would mean for our Net Zero target. We also ask whether Nigel Farage’s Reform has peaked too early. While it’s not very cheery, I found this a fascinating and eye-opening conversation. I hope you will too.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.ian-leslie.com/subscribe