Re: I doubt she'll ever be Home Secretary, but...
"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."
I call bollocks on that one. The reason we didn't *start* paying back until 2010 was because Gordon didn't want to. He was, in fact, the first example of a politician jettisoning austerity because it was politically useful to do so. It didn't mean the money wasn't due.
On the so-called profit, I would ask what was the opportunity cost of investing umpteen squillion in a bank, only to get umpteen squillion and one back a decade later. I would also ask whether the UK banking sector has had a good decade. Yes, they've bought back their shares (at the government's chosen price) but they've clearly not invested a dime in their IT systems in the last decade and one or two of them might now fail simply because they don't appear to be able to function 24/7.
On the wider point of printing your own money, this *might* be true if we were the only country in the whole world. We aren't. The amount you can buy with a fiat currency depends just as much on how much other nations value it, unless you are 90+% self-sufficient in everything. Hardly any countries can make that claim nowadays, and the ones that can (Hello, Mr Kim) aren't worth living in.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
