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PAYING off your debt is a good thing, obviously.

It’s sensible to clear the credit card and pay off the mortgage early. Providing you have the means, that is.

While belt tightening is all very well, there are limits. Nobody would expect you to starve your family to meet some magical early repayment date.

Nor is working yourself to exhaustion a good plan.

If you become ill and lose your job, you’ll end up in even more debt and could go bust.

That more or less sums up George Osborne’s deficit reduction strategy.

It’s like a man who destroys his family, his health and his future trying to pay the mortgage in five years just to prove a point.

Let’s be clear, most countries have a deficit – just like people have mortgages and businesses borrow to invest.

Most of the world’s leading economies have been in deficit for more than 30 out of the last 35 years.

It’s how you manage the debt that matters.

If you borrow to invest, you generate more income to pay the debt.

Austerity, by contrast, kills growth. It means more money goes on paying people not to work, less comes in as taxes and the debt grows as a proportion of national income.

So trying to clear the debt too early has the opposite effect of what was intended.

In 2010, the UK Government predicted public sector borrowing of £322 billion between 2011 and 2015–2016. Now it is forecast at £539.4bn – a whopping 68 per cent more than predicted.

With the Chancellor due to cut another £11.5bn from public spending this week, things can only get uglier.

Osborne says the UK is out of intensive care. Technically yes.

But the patient remains very poorly indeed.

And to many people’s horror, Ed Miliband has said a future Labour government will stick with the same failed treatment.

This flies in the face of advice from experts. The Financial Times’ Martin Wolf, considered one of the world’s leading economic commentators, wrote a devastating critique of the UK government’s obsession with austerity.

He pointed out that the UK started the crisis with one of the lowest levels of debt in 300 years.

He said: “When debt is as cheap as it is today, the UK can hardly afford not to borrow.

“It is impossible to believe that the country cannot find public investments — the cautious IMF itself urges more spending on infrastructure — that will generate positive real returns.

“Indeed, with real interest rates negative, borrowing is close to a ‘free lunch’.”

The Scottish Government are not allowed to borrow to invest – our parliament was denied those powers.

But they have taken steps to help the economy by pursuing a no compulsory redundancy policy, investing in health and education and putting more money into family budgets with the council tax freeze. The Team

Scotland focus on attracting inward investment has led to what business experts Ernst and Young call a “sparkling performance”.

So with limited powers, the Scottish government have been able to ensure unemployment is lower than the rest of the UK.

But all this is threatened by Osborne’s austerity obsession – and Labour’s determination to follow suit.

At least now we know the consequences of voting no in 2014.

More cuts, more suffering the UK’s bad medicine.