Dead Money: Why We Pay Bankers Before Doctors.

In which we discover that £100 billion buys a lot of priorities.

Here’s a fun question for your next dinner party, assuming you still attend dinner parties in this economy: How is it that train drivers earn more than junior doctors?

Not a trick question. Not a setup. Just a straightforward observation about a country that has apparently lost the ability to value things coherently.

A train driver - who moves people from A to B - pulls in £60,000 to £65,000. More with overtime. A junior doctor - who stops people from dying - starts at £32,000 after six years of medical school. Even a registrar, nearly a decade into their career and making life-or-death decisions while you sleep, might hit £55,000 if they’re lucky.

One job requires you to follow a track that’s already been laid. The other requires you to diagnose a condition you’ve never seen before at 3 am while the patient’s family watches. Guess which one pays better.

The explanation is simple enough: train drivers have a union with teeth. ASLEF says jump, the rail operators ask how high, because you can’t replace a striking driver with an agency worker and a YouTube tutorial. Junior doctors, by contrast, spent decades being professionally guilt-tripped into accepting whatever they were given. Think of the patients. And they did. They thought of the patients while their real-term pay dropped 26% since 2008.

Twenty-six per cent. If your salary had been cut by a quarter over fifteen years, you’d have noticed.

But here’s where it gets properly obscene.

The Hundred Billion Pound Question.

The UK government currently spends over £100 billion per year servicing the national debt. That’s not paying it off, mind you. That’s just the interest. The minimum payment on the national credit card.

To put that in perspective: it’s more than the entire defence budget. More than we spend on education. It is, in the most literal sense, dead money - paying for decisions already made, services already consumed, crises already mismanaged.

And where does it go? To bondholders. A substantial chunk of them overseas investors who will never use the NHS, never send their kids to a British school, never particularly care whether your local council can afford to fill the potholes.

This isn’t a conspiracy. It’s just arithmetic. We borrowed money, we owe interest on it, we pay. The question is why we pretend there are no choices involved.

The Austerity Paradox.

Remember austerity? That decade-long project to cut public spending, freeze wages, and let infrastructure rot - all in the name of Getting The Deficit Down? The entire political justification was that we needed to reduce borrowing to bring down debt servicing costs.

Reader, the debt servicing costs have doubled.

Partly this is inflation. About a quarter of UK government debt is index-linked, which seemed terribly clever when inflation was bumping along at 2%. Less clever when it hit double digits, and the government suddenly owed billions more than planned.

Partly it’s interest rates. When the Bank of England jacked up rates to combat inflation, it simultaneously increased the cost of government borrowing. Fighting one fire by pouring petrol on another. Elegant stuff.

But mostly it’s the simple fact that austerity didn’t work. We degraded public services, suppressed wages, watched productivity flatline, and ended up with higher debt anyway. The one thing it was supposed to achieve - the only justification for a decade of managed decline - didn’t happen.

So now we have crumbling schools AND £100 billion in debt interest. Understaffed hospitals AND £100 billion in debt interest. Junior doctors earning less than train drivers, AND £100 billion in debt interest.

The Money Exists.

This is the part that should make you angry, if you’re still capable of anger after years of this.

When junior doctors went on strike, we were told there was no money. When nurses asked for a pay rise that kept pace with inflation, we were told there was no money. When councils collapsed under the weight of social care obligations, we were told - you’re ahead of me here - there was no money.

But there’s £100 billion for bondholders. Every year. Automatically. No debates in Parliament. No hand-wringing editorials about affordability. No suggestions that perhaps the creditors should “show restraint” or “think about the national interest.”

The money exists. It has always existed. The argument is only ever about who gets it.

When a government tells you it “can’t afford” public sector pay rises, what it means is that it has chosen to prioritise other things. Debt interest. Tax cuts. Whatever the current ideological fashion demands. The framing of scarcity is a political choice dressed up as economic necessity.

What Does This Country Actually Value?

We say we value the NHS. We clapped for it, once, standing on doorsteps like participants in some collective nervous breakdown. We say we value education, doctors, nurses, the whole edifice of public service that separates a functioning society from a collection of individuals who happen to share a postcode.

But values are revealed by actions, not words. And our actions say: we value bondholders more than junior doctors. We value index-linked gilt payments more than school buildings that aren’t held up with steel props. We value the abstract confidence of international capital markets more than the concrete reality of a GP appointment within the same calendar month.

The train driver comparison isn’t really about train drivers. Good luck to them - they organised, they fought, they won. But the fact that navigating a predetermined route pays better than keeping a human being alive tells you everything about what this country actually values. Junior doctors are only now learning that lesson, years too late, while politicians tut about “militant unions” as if wanting to be paid fairly for saving lives is somehow unreasonable.

Meanwhile, the creditors get paid first. Always. Automatically. Without anyone ever having to justify it.

That’s not economics. It’s theology.

The Almighty Gob writes about Bristol politics, national absurdity, and the gap between what institutions say and what they do. If you enjoyed this, consider subscribing - it’s free, and unlike government debt, comes with no interest payments.