Sir, – With a passing nod to economic democracy, our Coalition masters are asking the public to suggest ways we can save public money.

The Economic Research Council estimated that between 1945 and 1980, £19bn pounds was made available for public expenditure and tax reduction through the public’s sovereign power to create and sell bank notes to the banking sector.

However, during that period permitting banks to create bookkeeping credit without issuing bank notes meant the public had forgone a further £31bn revenue.

£14bn arose from the increase in bank credit, and £17bn from the interest the public could have earned if the credit had been issued as bank notes.

Effectively a £31bn subsidy for the banking sector.

As the banks’ use of digital money grew, publicly-created bank notes and coins shrank to three per cent of the nation’s money. The historical bailout ballooned so that the majority was created as privatised, digitised, interest-bearing bank credit.

The new Bank of England Act campaign estimates that since 1990, permitting the banks to appropriate sovereign credit cost our democracy £1.6 trillion in lost revenue. That sovereign credit could have been invested in the nation’s human and material infrastructure without the widening inequality, obscene bonus culture, asset bubbles, financial instability and environmental degradation associated with the private creation of money as debt.

Instead, the banks used the public subsidy to create a parasitic debt burden on government, commerce and the public, while government increased the tax burden on commerce and public to support the bean counters’ dependency culture.

In 2009 the public made a mere £2.2bn by selling bank notes, saving the average voter £48. In this light one has to question the motives behind the Coalition’s IMF-style “saving”

plans. If the Coalition intends reducing the supply of national currency to local communities, then communities may be forced, as in the 1930s, to create their own currencies.

A nostalgic return to workhouse economics may be popular among Coalition paymasters, but our democracy’s books will never balance while the bankocracy continue to live beyond our means and appropriate sovereign credit as private, digitised debt.

To paraphrase Churchill ...

never in the field of human conflict have so few owed so much to so many. Instead of complaining that “there is no money”, the Coalition should use the sovereign power of our democracy to make some.

Work for the banks? No thanks.

RICHARD AKERS Topcliffe Road Thirsk