The FT has reported that:

The International Monetary Fund's internal watchdog has criticised the fund's call for austerity in 2010. The move reopens a heated debate among policy makers about the merit of raising taxes and cutting public spending after the financial crisis.

In a review of the IMF's response , the independent evaluation office praised the fund's international lending role but attacked the policy advice it gave in 2010 for governments to start cutting their budget deficits.

This is hardly the first time the IMF has got economic policy seriously wrong, and invariably it has been in the same direction, so perhaps no one should be surprised that it backed the wrong policy in 2010, as some of us said it had at the time.

But, people and organisations make mistakes and when they recognise it the right thing to do is accept it and move on. The IMF could do that if it fully backed this finding it published in September:

Those three bullet points set out the basis for the economic policy the UK requires right now, and that many countries need at present, and explain that this is a self financing activity because the growth that investment stimulates raises enough tax to pay for the investment as a result of increased tax yields.

It's a policy the Green New Deal group and I have been promoting since 2008 - before the crash happened - and it's long overdue for implementation.

The question is, are the UK's politicians listening?