The cost of public sector borrowing in the UK

Just in case you weren't already convinced about how stupid the current system is, take a look at a report called "Government borrowing, debt and debt interest payments : historical statistics and forecasts" that was published on the 13th March by the Economics Policy and Statistics Section of the Houses of Parliament.

I'd already found one graph showing how UK taxpayers had been handing over 3.5% of GDP to the banks in the form of interest payments on government debt for most of the 60s and 70s - see my piece called "How long has this been going on?"

But in this short document, you not only get a more up to date graph, they also give you all the numbers. Here's the graph, which is actually a bit different from the previous version, but it still shows how the UK taxpayer has been saddled with massive interest payments for borrowing all of my life.

And here's the table with the real numbers (the document actually provides some numbers as far back as 1946-7.

It's already impressive, and you can see that the % of GDP that is wasted on paying the banking sector interest for creating money out of thin air and then lending it to the government is currently 3.1% and is set to increase to 3.5% in the next few years. But, as you can see from the footnote, "borrowing and debt figures exclude effect of financial sector interventions".

The Guardian has a complete set of data, including the financial interventions, that shows that while the level of debt is 73.5% of GDP if you exclude financial interventions, it increases to 137.6% of GDP if you include them. So we can increase the full debt level to something like £2066 billion.

Now here's a £64 billion question. Did the government borrow the money for the bank bailout? If so, how much is being paid in interest? If not, and the Bank of England provided £1 trillion of funding interest free to bail out the banks, why the hell can't it provide the same sum to bail out the UK government?

By the way, I'm desperately trying to get an equivalent set of figures for other countries including France. Unfortunately, numbers on the % of GDP used to pay the interest on government debt are mysteriously missing from the datasets at the INSEE - I've asked them to provide the numbers, but only figures from 1995 seem to be available. Oh well....