No, the reason governments don’t write off their debts is that their money printing is handled by the ECB and not by their own central bank, and that QE hadn’t been put into practice before.

QE is a central bank effectively printing money for itself by buying its own assets much as you could if you were able to write yourself a cheque for your own car while keeping your car.

This is why the argument about economies being like a fixed sized cake with not enough to go round are just daft and made for a particular political point.

QE isn't exactly free stuff, it's a *swap* of short term liabilities for longer term liabilities, you still pay the short term interest

Although private education and OXford have produced a series of lemons for politicians I'm not convinced we should be trusting people who leave school without any O levels and wreck the country by talking garbage about Brexit either, but it's a nice earner once you're into Westminster no matter how mediocre your intellect:




I guess like the Labour MPs who took Taylor Swift tickets "for the kids" they have families who need trust funds or holiday homes.

I suspect the 'free clothes, glasses, concert tickets and football boxes' thing, so nicely synchronised with the withdrawal of pensioners' winter fuel allowance, is going to cause our new high-living overlords more trouble than they think it is, and for longer, because it's so clearly hypocritical and so easily remembered and joke-worthy. It doesn't even matter if the overlords switch to other and less checkable back-channel methods to subsidise their lifestyles, because everyone will assume that's what they're doing anyway.

You might think that no one under sixty would know what 'Meet the new boss, same as the old boss' means, but apparently younger people have very catholic across-the-decades musical tastes and they probably do know.

The lack of forward planning over the last 40 years -- for the power grid, for housing, for transport, you name it -- probably has quite a lot to do with it. The French may be crazily bureaucratic, but they do do a bit of planning, and they do take the business of government seriously, which I'm not sure that our governing class, with their eyes ever fixed on future private directorships, really do.

And in theory they should be hurt by this moer than if the same happened to tories, because of how labor chooses to position itself with the electorate