Re: I doubt she'll ever be Home Secretary, but...
@ken - you is you and me too, one was not forced to raise ones buttocks from the comfort of one's chair to answer the siren call of the donations bucket as we raised a few trillion from a whip round - was the point I was making.
Austerity is a political choice, the "contribution" as you put it began during the 2010 con-dem regime, and was not needed, has damaged our economy and has been jettisoned every time it was useful to the .gov to do so. Austerity and the 2008 Fiscal Crash, are not related.
Its a good story, and it's just seems nice and neat, we paid a lot of money, so we "have to balance the books", but We print our own money, bluntly the lies are not true.
Hint "we paid the money already" so we clearly didn't need to raise it in tax *before* spending it.
So balancing the books clearly not that precise an art, as in real life you'd need a creditor, but we don't have one, as we printed the <bob-geldof>f-gg money</bob-geldof>, hence paying it back by slash and burn = poltical con-trick - clue is the name "Con"...
If you will accept my work and provide an exchangeable token for doing so, we have a fungible asset.
If you add a nation state backing the issued token, and a central bank to authorising issuing these token, you can print as much as you like, that's really as barmy as that.
It works provided you don't poke at it, because your happy with the work, I'm happy with the beer token, the publican is happy with the token, and so forth.
You cannot cut your way out of a crisis, you pay people lots of money, so they spend lots of money, so you tax them lots of money. Cutting people's wages, support, or benefits is counter-productive.
We have made a profit on the bank bailout, now The dividend is worth £240m and the Treasury will receive £149m as RBS is still 62%-owned by the government. "https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/aug/03/rbs-to-pay-its-first-dividend-since-2008-bailout"
We are paying the cost of voting Tory.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
