Richard, debt and Commonwealth are totally unrelated.
That is, of you are referring to the Commonwealth Club which sees the head of heads seated in front of 1,000 microphones once every few years pretending to be the Empress of a long defunct British Empire.
If, however, you refer to the idea of an English, and later British, Commonwealth, as envisaged by reformists in the 16th and 17th centuries, it never happened. Be it Henry VIII or Oliver Cromwell, they all gave in to the aristocracy and to politicians in the end.
Apart from that, the sovereign debt in Britain is over £1 trillion, private debt is over £3 trillion.
Both these debts are forecast to rise exponentially over the years and decades.
The same or similar applies to all western European countries, perhaps with very few non-EU exceptions (Norway, Switzerland, Russia).
These debts can NEVER be paid off, they will only rise.
Until one day they are simply cancelled and we start from zero debts. There is no other way.
The longer we mess about kidding ourselves into believing that the present system with its politicians will sort itself out, and that the debts "will go away", the more we are just wasting our time.
The only semblance of life in the British economy is an impulse caused by a periodic injection of digital money from the Bank of England, called Quantitative Easing.
The next injection is due soon. Each time it's tens of billions of digital pounds.
In reality, our economic system is dead. It is just attached to machines. Q.E., however, brings with it each time tens of billions more sovereign debt to be paid off, and will eventually trigger off mass inflation.
Once the mummified economy has been completely embalmed, further Q.E will become useless, as the pound stirling won't be worth a farthing, This may take a few months to a further few years, but the impulses will stop, more or less in conjunction with a 0% turnout at the next elections.
The Greek economy is already a mummy that doesn't stand up in its coffin anymore, and perhaps the introduction of a political jokes page may be the only way to take away the bitter reality of a dead economy run by useless politicians.
