National debt - No one is owed any money.

As far as the UK is concerned,

the £400bn cost of covid this year

has been "paid for" already

by quantitative easing

- the Bank of England

has bought back roughly

that amount of Gilts/bonds

from the financial institutions

with newly created money,

and this effectively

cancels £400bn of government debt.

None of the gilts

bought by the BoE

since QE began in 2009

have ever been sold back to financial markets.

Such is the scale

of likely deficits in the future

it is wholly unrealistic

to think that they ever will be.

But the government does not agree.

They say they could be resold.

They do this to pretend the debt still exists.

They are included in

national debt calculations

although no one is owed any money.

And the interest on them

is still treated

as a cost to the gov’t,

which it isn’t.

There is only one

possible explanation

for this pretence,

which is that this maintains

the austerity narrative.

The pretence

that there is a debt to repay,

and an interest cost to settle,

is used as an excuse

to cut government spending

even though no such excuse exists.

Full reasoning here:
https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2020/11/22/the-history-and-significance-of-qe-in-the-uk/comment-page-1/#comment-868953