Erase debt

Repayment of moneyb orrowed during Covid should not concern the Chancellor. Our National Debt, the sum of all deficits – to which this borrowing has been added – has grown relentlessly from £350 billion in 1997, to £2 trillion by the start of Covid in 2020. So the Covid extra is really academic, as the National Debt was already way beyond any kind of repayment. In fact the only target for spending reduction by government, has been to try to reduce the annual deficit. Indeed, pre - Covid, the Conservatives were boasting of having reduced the deficit by a third, so the ND just keeps rising anyway.

The ND is of course not real. It is merely computer keystrokes by which the banking system creates money from thin air. They are not lending people’s savings or their own investor’s money. Nobody has been deprived of the use of the money they have lent to government.

But of course, that money bears interest payable to the banks, and at the moment, we pay about £55bn a year to the banking system as interest on their magic money. The sensible thing would be to nationalise the banks, or simply tell them to write that sum off as a bad debt, ie. totally unrepayable, just as those banks were indeed forced to do for many African countries in the 1980s.

In the view of many, the National Debt (£31,000 per UK head) should be disregarded as it is obviously unrepayable; the banks who have provided that fake money over the years did so knowing that it could never be repaid, but would of course earn interest. MALCOLM PARKIN

Gamekeepers Road Kinnesswood, Kinross