Andrew Griffith is the Shadow Secretary of State for Business & Trade, MP for Arundel & South Downs and a former FTSE100 Finance Director & COO.

Roughly 130 miles south of Burma, in the Bay of Bengal, lies a small splotch of land just 5 miles long and 4 miles wide.

This is North Sentinel Island, home of the indigenous Sentinelese people.

The Sentinelese don’t know about AI, nor about the war in Iran.  They don’t concern themselves with economic growth, taxes, or even test cricket.  That’s because the Sentinelese are for all intents and purposes uncontacted and thus untroubled.  Britain has its own Sentinelese: the many Labour MPs walking untroubled and intransigent into a gilt market disaster.

Every hour of every day, Britain relies on the kindness of strangers.  Unbeknownst to most on the Government benches, our national debt now stands at close to £2.9 trillion, equivalent to over 93 per cent of our GDP and nearly three times the Government’s annual tax take.  ONS figures yesterday confirmed another increase in March.

If you think that sounds like an awful lot, you would be right.

Just as ignorance would not protect the Sentinelese from a nuclear blast or a rogue asteroid, pretending that Britain is not increasingly in the grips of a slow-motion gilt crisis won’t protect this Government from disaster.  The investor-strangers whose kindness the state relies on have to be willing to pick up the tab.  And they are increasingly signalling that their appetite is diminishing.

This is where gilt yields come in.  Unlike the interest rates homeowners pay the bank in exchange for a mortgage, gilt yields are set by an open market.  In simple terms, they’re a measure of how much in interest payments investors will demand in return for the government’s promise to pay back.  That’s why gilt yields going up is a bad thing – it indicates that the price the market will pay to take on Treasury debt is going down.  And since Labour took office that price has gone down by a lot.

Andy Burnham, long talked up as a potential replacement for embattled Sir Keir makes a good candidate for tribal chief of the Sentinelese.  Speaking last year, he said that “we’ve got to get beyond this thing of being in hock to the bond market” and promptly set out plans for £40 billion worth of additional borrowing.  But who would buy that debt?

If Mr Burnham took a day trip down from his Manchester fiefdom to the little-known Debt Management Office (DMO) which would end up issuing that staggering amount, he would find that it’s now having to offer the highest interest rates (or coupons) in decades in order to sell government bonds. That’s because in the last year the DMO already planned to issue over £300 billion worth of debt – more than a billion every single working day.  As a treasury minister formerly responsible for oversight of the Debt Management Office, that constant need to depend upon the markets support was one of many things to worry about.

At present the Government spends £110 billion a year just paying the interest on the debt we have already issued.  By way of comparison, that’s more than we spend on defence and transport combined and almost as much as we spend on education.

The Chancellor will try to claim that the UK is just a victim of global economic circumstance, but she knows this isn’t true.  It’s easy to compare UK Gilt yields to those of the rest of the G7: ours are by far the highest.  Equally, it’s plain to see that UK yields have risen faster than those of other nations since Labour took office.  We are paying a premium on our debt because the UK is now more fragile as a result of having the wrong energy policy, driving talent and wealth offshore, and attacks on business weakening growth.

Reeves’s latest wheeze is reportedly to issue ‘war bonds’.

This shows just how little she has learned from her escapades so far.  While raising defence spending is an imperative – reportedly hampered mostly by her own department – rebranding more debt a ‘war bond’ won’t magically unlock a new borrowing market.

Whether they’re named ‘war bonds’, ‘Rachel’s roubles’ or something else, the market simply sees more borrowing. The result will be the same: higher yields and higher borrowing costs.

So, what can be done?

Like an overconfident missionary approaching Sentinel Island, any future Labour PM trying to preach fiscal responsibility will be forced into a swift U-turn, back to the safety of profligate welfare spending and public sector pay rises. And that assumes he or she would even try.

The solution has to be a Conservative one.  It must be built on confronting the hard truth that no government – Conservative, coalition or outright socialist – has balanced the nation’s books for a full 25 years.

Shadow Welfare Secretary Helen Whately has already set out a clear plan for some of the changes we would make to fund defence.  We’ve also set out all manner of Whitehall spending which we would slash.  Most importantly: we have pledged that for every pound of spending we cut; half will be spent on paying down our existing debt.  That’s the Conservative golden fiscal rule. It’s the equivalent of a calorie deficit diet and over time it can work.

All of this will require tough choices and teamwork. It is hugely encouraging that under Kemi Badenoch’s leadership, we Conservatives finally look like a united team again.

Conservatives will bring down debt, borrowing costs, and the burden that would otherwise be passed on to our children and grandchildren.

This is as much a moral mission as it is an economic one.

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