Wednesday, April 29, 2015

Austerity is a Con



The Tory austerity narrative is a simple and oft repeated one. It doesn't matter that "we've got to cut our way to growth" is nonsensical from a macroeconomic perspective, it's been repeated so often now that millions of people accept it as fact.

Some people (myself included) have maintained all along that it was always a simple con designed to give the Tories an excuse to continue their agenda of transferring ever more wealth to the tiny super-rich minority under the guise of bringing the national debt under control.

There is bountiful evidence that the austerity narrative is a misleading one, especially the myriad of counter-factual Tory slogans used to support it. They claimed that "we're all in this together" while handing the UK's income millionaires an average £100,000 per year tax cut and trying to defend 200%+ bankers's bonuses from new EU rules. They claimed they were "making work pay" whilst overseeing the longest sustained decline in average earnings since records began, and slashing in-work social security; and they claimed over and again that "Labour bankrupted Britain" when it was George Osborne that lost the UK's AAA credit ratings for the first time since the 1970s.

Now that their government is over we can look at what ideological austerity has actually achieved...


Read more...