Hmm... Now what else happened in the forty intervening years? Oh yeah, forty freaking years!
It wasn't miss-sold, nobody in 1975 knew what 2016 or even 1992 was going to bring and how much the world would change.
To a certain extent, since 2016 it's become more evident that a least a part of the Tory party has always wished to blame their problems in someone else.
Until then the EU was always there and easy to blame. Too much red tape, that's down to the EU. Too many people coming here, that's the EU. The reality is that actually a lot of the rules people didn't like didn't actually impact them, and actually made it easier to be a consumer across the EU.
For example, much as older people didn't like changing from pounds and ounces to kgs, it did mean that when they went away they had a better understanding of how much of something they were getting. Likewise the Euro meant that it was easier to understand where was cheaper to be on holiday.
However since 2020 it's been much harder for the "it's the EU" to be the one at "fault" (much of the intermediate time there was still a lot of cases when the EU at fault could be used, but generally declining).
Now it's more likely to be those coming here in boats (even though for every one who does so there's about 4 international students not replacing international students leaving the UK and about 7 others coming here who aren't replacing others leaving, with the gross numbers of each being higher than that - which would be much easier for the government to deal with if they so wished).
The reality is that whatever is happening is much more complex than "extra people is all bad", as clearly more people means more customers for businesses. However, it's also true that too many people without providing services for them is also bad - for example making cuts to budgets to those who provide many of the local services (for example cutting the local government grant, even if that's not increasing it to keep up with inflation) so that librarys, household waste centres, children's centres and the like are closed down whilst the numbers locally to such services are increasing.
There's a good chance that such cuts will actually cost us more than the extra taxes we otherwise might have had to pay.
A classic example, there was a road improvement scheme locally 8 years ago, it introduced a roundabout at one part of a staggered cross roads, the other part had a lot of works done to it to make in left in left out with traffic using the new roundabout and an existing roundabout about 200m to the other side to allow all movements to be made. They are now coming back and realigning the road which was left in left out so it now joins the newer of the two roundabouts.
Not only had that resulted in a lot of wasted construction works for the road which is now being moved, but also typically 15% of the construction budget is basically the cost to get a contractor on site (i.e. their non construction related costs, such as site officers, project management, etc.) so that's another load of money. In addition inflation will have meant that the current works are more costly than they would have been before.
Let's say that the original construction was £100,000 or £150,000 if everything was built in one go, it wouldn't be surprising if the extra works would now be costing closer to another £100,000. In "saving" £50,000 8 years ago it's actually going to cost the highway authority more than if it was all done in one go. Before anyone asks, no there's been no major development nearby and no the junction isn't a cause of significant congestion.
It's then no surprise that government debt has grown from £0.77 trillion when Cameron came to power in 2010 to nearly £2 trillion more at £2.68 trillion in December 2023.
Before anyone says it's all down to COVID and the war in Ukraine in December 2019 it stood at £1.89 trillion, so at most those two events added £0.79 trillion to the debt (which would mean that between 2019 and now we would have seen zero increase in government debt if it wasn't for those events - which given the post trends would have been unlikely), so what accounts for the other at least £1.12 trillion?
Sometimes big numbers are hard for some to get their head around, basically the government has been running up a debt of about £3.30 per day per person. If you were running a deficit of at least £100 per month after 13 years you'd be in a world of trouble, regardless of if your boiler and car had needed replacing or not.
If you thought there was no money left after Gordon Brown, what state are we in now?
Looking again at the small boats, to see if that's the cause of where all that money is going, allowing for £8 million a day on housing asylum seekers for every day of the time the Tories had been in power (and it was no where near that much at the beginning), that cost only accountes for at most £0.04 trillion of that at least £1.12 trillion (or about £3.70 per month of the £100 per month deficit). As such, whilst a part of it, (and if the funding of the decision making process was good, those costs wouldn't have got to that level in the first place) there's a lot more going elsewhere.