 So obviously we're more than a year now into COVID, a great deal of money's been spent by the government, debts, deficits, paying it down, austerity, taxes, that's the debate we're having, of course, it's so reminiscent of what was going on before the 2010 general election just after the global financial crisis. There is less than a minute of TV broadcast on BBC News with the BBC economics correspondent Andy Verity. It's the most important minute of television that we broadcast on BBC News this year telling you the truth about government borrowing. And why actually the public debt, particularly the money that's been borrowed this year, is not a problem. So let's look. This isn't like household debt. This isn't like running an overdraft. Just how important is it that we pay this off? That's a really important point. We've been talking like it is like household debt for a very long time. But when you're a homeowner, what you worry about with debt is what's going to happen if you can't pay it. The bailiffs might come around. You might have a repossession, but it's not like that for the government, not least because of who they're borrowing it from. And if you look at that, who do we actually owe this money to? Well, of the money borrowed since the pandemic, actually 92% of it is owed to the Bank of England. Now, that's really ultimately another branch of government. So if you're borrowing from yourself as you are with government finances, you have a much more patient creditor who's not going to be banging on your door too soon. There's a lot to unpack there for less than a minute. Firstly, 92% of the money the government borrowed for furlough schemes, for public investment, for infrastructure projects, for test and trace didn't need to be that much, but it was more than 30 billion in the end. 92% of that came from the Bank of England, what's called quantitative easing. How does that work? How does the government borrow money from itself? The Bank of England is an arm of government. They effectively print money and they're buying government debt, guilts from the government in exchange for this money, which is basically created out of nothing. Now, I don't want to go into an argument about how sustainable that is. That's what they're doing. That's what they did after 2008. It hasn't led to rampant inflation actually as a way of combating inequality. It's highly ineffective, but in terms of the short-term response to COVID, it's what the government is now proceeding to do. 92%. It's important to say a great deal of money has been borrowed this year. About 350 billion pounds is the size of the British deficit, which is to say how much money is being spent over how much money is being brought in, how much more. The surplus being spent. If you're on a surplus, you're bringing more money in than you're spending. If it's a deficit, you're spending more money than you're bringing in. 350 is the figure. 350 billion pounds. Now, cast your mind back to before the 2010 general election, George Osborne and David Cameron said, we're going to have to have budget cuts because Britain is on the verge of bankruptcy. We are going to ensure, like every solvent household in the country, that what we buy, we can afford, that the bills we incur, we have the income to meet, and that we do not saddle our children with the interest on the interest on the interest of the debts that we were not prepared ourselves to pay. And the deficit then was half the size it is now. And one of the wonders and marvels of this video, as he says within the first 20 seconds, the national budget is not like a credit card. Oops, somebody better tell George Osborne too late because he screwed the country up for 10 years with austerity, which was never necessary, according to the BBC economics correspondent. We've been talking like it is like household debt for a very long time, but when you're a homeowner, what you worry about with debt is what's going to happen if you can't pay it. The bailiffs might come around. You might have a repossession, but it's not like that for the government, not least because of who they're borrowing it from. Austerity after 2010 wasn't necessary. There's the second point. Most of the money this time around is being printed by the Bank of England. You know what that means? We have found the magic money tree. But there isn't a magic money tree that we can shake that suddenly provides for everything that people want. The whole debate around the 2019 general elections. Labour can't afford to do X, Y, Z. It was a couple of hundred billion pounds, by the way. The spending commitments weren't that big by the standards of COVID. And every single journalist, BBC, ITV, Sky News, Channel 4, Guardian, Daily Mirror, Daily Mail, Express, Telegraph Times. So watching that less than one minute clip from BBC News, what two lessons do we draw from it? Well, for me, they both relate to two separate general elections nine years apart. The first is 2010. And of course, it's legacy of austerity. And what Andy Verity is saying on the BBC is actually that didn't need to happen. The kind of metaphors that were used and so common nine years ago, 10 years ago, actually weren't true. So if you think about all the bad things you associate with austerity, EMA cuts, university tuition fees tripling, hospital waiting times going up, ambulance waiting times going up, being unable to see a GP for weeks on end, youth centres closing down, libraries shutting, local government having no money, public sector workers not having a real wage increase for the best part of a decade. All of that was avoidable. You think about the grim, grinding desperation that so many people had to go through for 10 years. Millions of people had crap lives for no reason. It was a political choice. Just think about that for a second. Now, why would the Tories do that? You might think you're saying Aaron's saying this is a political choice. Why would a politician who wants to act in the public interest do things which were necessary and which clearly harmed and damaged so many people? You know, one estimate says that more than 150,000 people died because of austerity. Indirectly. That is, I'm not saying that the government went and murdered them, but you had excess deaths, deaths that wouldn't have happened had those cuts not taken place. Now, why would politicians do that? And the simple reason is that they represent an interest and it's not in the interests of the wealthy, the elite, the 1%, for working people in this country to get cheap, affordable education, housing, transport, energy, water. That's the whole base of privatisation. It's not about getting a good deal. It's that somebody can make some money off you. If those things are cheap and in public ownership, nobody's making a buck. So that's why austerity happened. It was to create new profits for wealthy people and to make generally poorer people pay for it. So that's the first lesson, austerity didn't have to happen. It was a political choice to benefit the 1%. Then the other lesson for me is the 2019 general election. Everybody said to Jeremy Corbyn, this manifesto is ridiculous. It's uncosted. It was costed, by the way, fully costed. And about 250 billion pounds, we can't afford it. Well, excuse me, but if you look at the deficit for this year, it's 350 billion. It's 250 billion for the year after. So we could afford it. And it turns out that it was the Tories who had the magic money tree all along. It's called the Bank of England and quantitative easing. So we're being repeatedly told lies about what is politically possible in relation to government spending, debt, and taxation. And that's not me saying it. It's the BBC's Andy Verity. And so I think that means the next time there's a general election, it shouldn't just be a BBC economics correspondent or Aaron Bustani out of our media saying that debt is not the issue the Tories are making out to be, it should be all the major political parties and it should be all the major media outlets because anything else is inaccurate, pseudoscience. And so the 2019 manifesto labor offered, you know what? I don't just think that they should do that again. It should be more. That was underwhelming. It wasn't ambitious enough. We have the resources. We have the mechanisms and we have the institutions to build housing and utilities and decarbonize pretty much within 10 to 15 years. We can build a very different kind of society. And what's most ironic of all is that the means by which to do that when it comes to financing things was unveiled by the Conservative Party. I said I would do whatever it takes. I have done and I will do so.