Let's comb out a few strands here, shall we. First, it was the Labour Party (with Harold Wilson) which introduced the rather un-British idea of a referendum into the UK in the first place in 1975, for reasons I explained in some detail earlier in this thread. Now you are surprised to discover that the Labour Party under some circumstances can see validity in referendums, and you explain this to me. Well, well. Second, as you have yourself shown, the various proposals and commitments to hold referendums about introducing an EU Constitution all became moot when the constitution was abandoned (I blame Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, for making such a bollocks of drafting it). There was a lot of subsequent waffle, drama and posturing, all of it irrelevant. You suggest that perhaps my view is 'in a minority'. What view would that be, then? I have already said very clearly that I would love to see a system in which referendums were held in the UK on defined categories of important matters, following a defined constitutional process provided for in the law - and I also said that that view is probably in a minority, given that the majority of people seem to be far less in favour of referendums than I am. If that's what you mean, you are probably right.
And as I mantioned before there is such a thing as good debt and bad debt. Debt that is taken on to invest in real wealth creation, debt that is used to fund current spending and debt that has no real prospect of ever being repaid. If you are suggesting that all debt is equal and has corresponding assets then perhaps you might think it through again. Incidentally debt is real whilst asset values are a matter of opinion and the value of money changes. It is all ultimately smoke and mirrors.
Let's say the British government owes a particular bit of debt, let's say it's £1 billion. To whom is that debt owed? Debt doesn't exist in a vacuum, it is owed to somebody namely a creditor. To the creditor, that debt constitutes an asset of £1 billion. Every £1 of debt is also an asset in itself - quite apart from the possibility that the money may have been invested in buying something which constitutes another asset. I really love your last sentence - " ... debt is real ... the value of money changes ... all smoke and mirrors ...". Priceless!
Well, sure. It all depends if you are looking at the thing from the point of view of a world balance sheet, in which case, no, you don't really care: one country's debt is another country's asset. But if you consider a country to be like a company (which is quite a reasonable way of looking at it) then you don't care that your debt is some other country's asset. If your company is heavily in debt, and has no way of paying it off, what do you care that it's marked down as some bank's asset? It is irrelevant to you. In the case of the UK, we are (well, you are) all shareholders. It's your company and you want to see it do as well as possible. You want the debt to have been invested in R&D and not unsustainable salaries. You want UK plc to prosper. So who gives a toss if our debt is an asset in an oil-rich Gulf state? As an investor, you are interested in the companies that you have invested in, not the competition. Residents of the UK are invested in UK plc - not some global economy. This seems pretty obvious to me.
Pete, lend me £10 million, then in 10 years time come and ask for it back. Or better still pass the asset on to your kids, if you have any, and in 50 years time they can ask for it back.
Following devaluation Harold Wilson said "The pound in your pocket is still worth a pound", and he was right a pound is always worth a pound, but what it could buy changed overnight. So is a pound always really worth a pound and are all pounds the same ?
First read that when I was 12. Completely bypassed the curriculum from then on, but as a result, I mussed out on the Brontes
Wuthering Heights is a good read. I may have been inspired to read that by Kate Bush when I was about 17...
But all this gets rather messy when you consider Quantitative Easing: BBC News - What is quantitative easing? I think we have now reached the point where the Bank of England now owns around 1/3 of the debt issued by HM Treasury, having purchased it with non-existent money! One staggering aspect of this is that the interest earned by the BoE on the hundreds of £billions of UK debt that it now "owns" is itself a figure of more than £30 billion a year which it then gives back to the Treasury! I have to say that I fear that a rather large proportion of the UK's debt has NOT been used to purchase "assets" but has been blown one way or another, for instance on paying the massive amounts of interest due on the debt itself.
Dont get over excited Fin. After a yes vote they will send the bailiffs in to reclaim the debt in whisky. You will be dry for a generation.
Finm, don't forget the Bank of Scotland and Royal Bank of Scotland that the rest of the country had to bail out!
If Scotland votes out of the 'UK', who picks up the tab for these banks is just one of the questions that remain to be answered. Did most of the debt pile up in London, or does the location of the head offices of these banks affect the ownership of the debt? Interesting to see the SNP guys reiterating their view that an independent Scotland will continue to use the pound and the Bank of England as the lender of last resort. Was it 68% of the population of England and Wales that said 'No' to that plan?
68% of the population said no. feck em. best i can do right noo got a tech of on holiday so a bit busy the noo. och eye.
