Gary Stevenson
speaker
5,834 appearances
16 recordings
3 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 26 Jul
Gary Stevenson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 16 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 6.
Appearances
But the problem with that is quite simply this graph, which you've used a number of times.
We'll flash it up maybe here.
And this graph, which I've used a number of times on the channel, is a graph of UK and various other countries' government wealth over time.
So a big thing which we are really keen to educate on this channel is that wealth exists.
It is important.
It's important who owns it.
It is real.
It's not just money in the bank.
It's about who owns real resources.
And back in the...
50s, 60s, 70s, up until the early 80s, Western governments were big owners of wealth.
Governments owned huge amounts of wealth.
And since the 80s, since the sort of changes in the way we talk about, think about economics, largely pushed by Ronald Reagan in the States, Margaret Thatcher here, there has been a change in the way we treat government wealth, the way we think about government wealth.
And that has led to a decision over the long term to significantly decrease
the share of the real wealth in the economy owned by governments.
And in the UK, since the 80s, the share of the UK economy, UK wealth owned by government has gone from plus 100% of GDP, so the UK government owning lots of stuff, not being massively in debt, to negative 100% of GDP, which is the UK government not really owning anything and being massively in debt.
And alongside that, we can show you this graph now, which is UK government debt as a percentage of GDP.
And you will see that that has been like statistically, structurally growing over a long period of time.
This is the reason why when people on the left, well, not just on the left, but this sentiment does tend to come from the left, say like the bond markets, we don't need to worry about them, we can do whatever we want.
That is quite naive.
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