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An end to austerity in the UK?
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grufty jim
grufty jim
1978 posts

Edited Jun 18, 2017, 21:45
An end to austerity in the UK?
Jun 18, 2017, 21:44
This made me giggle. The UK has not been adhering to a policy of economic austerity under the tories. So claims that such a policy is ending amount to little more than hopeful rhetoric from the Right as a damage-limitation exercise.

Don't get me wrong... UK public spending has been cut. The welfare state, NHS, fire service and a thousand other items have been recklessly and viciously attacked by a tory government gripped by greed and ideology and the ordinary people of Britain are suffering as a consequence.

But it hasn't been "austerity". At least, not if you use the common economic definition of the term.

Austerity is supposed to be an economic policy whereby public services are cut and taxes raised simultaneously so that a nation runs a current account surplus which is then used to pay down the national debt. It's all about debt reduction. Nothing else.

However, a simple glance at the publicly available economic figures demonstrate that UK debt has risen every year the tories have been in power this century.

Why? Because far from cutting services and raising taxes to pay off debt; the tories have cut services and lowered taxes for corporations and the wealthy (and were talking about slashing those taxes again -- long before this talk of "dropping austerity" began).

"Austerity" is not an economic policy I agree with... but I can at least acknowledge there's a coherent argument in its favour when it's used to actually reduce debt. But don't get fooled into thinking that semi-coherent policy bears any relation to what the tories have been doing these last 7 years.

It hasn't been austerity. It's been wealth redistribution.

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