Inspired by a comment by John Warren posted last night:
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Because it covertly weakens the many socio-economically and politically and by stunting deep discussion, democracy, reducing food and housing for the vulnerable plus physically and emotionally debilitating the many by healthcare harming?
And who benefits? The wealthy and their well-rewarded enablers in Parliament and the main stream media!
So thank you for keeping on keeping on!
In 1981 Malcolm Bradbury coined the term sado-monetarism to explain the psychology lurking behind Thatcher’s experiment. Still my preferred term.
He was right
Perhaps the premise of the question includes an error.
Oh, go on then, oh wise one, what are you suggesting?
It’s on the agenda because of “Fake-Badge” newspapers like the Guardian pushing it. Here’s today’s example of monetary illiterate nonsense:-
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/jul/04/how-to-balance-the-uk-books-six-options-open-to-rachel-reeves
If you strangle the money supply, you strangle the people who need it most and control them with fear. That’s what? – 95% of the population?
I wish I knew the answer.
Part of me wonders if the majority of Labour MPs think it’s because austerity hasn’t been harsh enough. So we need more.
The alternatives are that they either very very ignorant or very very stupid or very very bad.
They know that austerity is unpopular with enough voters for them to have to “promise” that there won’t be more of it,
…then they give us more of it.
Because welfare cuts and frozen tax thresholds ARE austerity.
And instead of outrage at that, the MSM discuss the Chancellor’s tears ducts, and tell us blatant lies about PIP and UC health payments.
There are many other people crying tears of pain at the moment, as a direct consequence of her actions, her stubbornness, her inflexibility, her callous disregard of the needs of the vulnerable, her being beholden to those wealthy donors who top up her campaign funds, her private office research budget, and, most disgustingly, her wardrobe and family entertainment budget.
Much to agree with
And sadly austerity often costs, not saves money in the long-term. We have an epidemic of mental health issues in our teenage and young adult population some 15 years after austerity removed Sure Start, youth clubs etc. The Police service that has been starved of money cannot control crime and our health service is dealing with poor health as a result of poverty and deprivation.
I’m 100% behind you. Why the **** is austerity still on the agenda. It clearly doesn’t work.
But the answer you’d get from the hard right, that is Starmer and further right, is that £1 trillion debt was a a catastrophe, and £2.8trillion is much much worse – so we need even more cuts urgently.
This, of course, is utter derp. But it’s the answer most far right politicians (that is, almost all politicians today), and most (sadly ignorant) main stream media commentators would give. I hear it every day. It makes me weep.
The reason they can, sort of, get away with such nonsense is that there is no counterfactual. We have had austerity for 15 years. We have been continually promised that, after a few years of pain, we’ll reach “the sunny uplands”. It’s jam tomorrow. It never happens. Our civic society gets remorselessly worse.
I think people are starting to wise up. I think they voted Labour in despair at the other parties. Even so, Labour got a poor vote despite having won a “landslide”. Now people are in despair with Labour too (and, in their desperation toying with Reform).
I think it is becoming obvious to all that austerity is an utter failure. Previously, with a much smaller economy, we could provide public services in a fair society. We could do it again. But, without a counter factual, it is hard to discredit the austerity narrative.
“the answer you’d get from the hard right, that is Starmer and further right, is that £1 trillion debt was a a catastrophe”.
They grossly exaggerated…. and they use the lie direct. They implied if they didn’t stop it, the debt was unsustainable. And here we are 15 years later, surviving £2.7Trn of debt and austerity that clearly hasn’t worked, and probably caused a significant part of the 170% debt increase. The truth is Osborne tried even tougher austerity 21010-12, but had to stop, before he destroyed what was left of the economy, and to prevent himself and Cameron from being swept abruptly from power. Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak and now Starmer kept trying the same thing, fixing precisely nothing – and producing no improvement of anything anyone can see; except more and more billionaires, offset by general public and private ruin for up to half the population. The argument is always the same, after the event: there was not just enough austerity applied. They then try it again, are profligate in their gross misuse and waste of public money (through their incompetence); inevitably fail disastrously to improve the economy or reduce the debt by austerity, their policies increase the debt (often exponentially), and they always leave Britain in an infinitely worse state than they found it. Recycle this idiocy endlessly.
Ben Clift’s thoughtful book, ‘The Office for Budget Responsibility and the Politics of Technocratic Economic Governance’ (2023), has led to academic economic reflection, for example in a symposium on Clift’s work, in which produced Nick O’Donovan’s paper, ‘The OBR and the unintended economic consequences of Mr Osborne’ (British Politics, 2025; Issue 20: pp.24–32). I draw this illustration from O’Donovan (noting in passing that the OBR was established in 2010 under the Conservative/LibDem coalition), because it seems to me germane: “the OBR has been quick to correct mis-
leading government invocations of its authority, and its own reports refuted George
Osborne’s claim that Labour Party profligacy was responsible for UK debt levels (Clift
2023a, pp. 87, 43). Nevertheless, particularly in its early years, OBR analyses focused
the attention of policy elites and the public alike on questions of public debt and fiscal
rules, as opposed to deeper questions about flaws in the UK’s variety of capitalism. As
Berry and Lavery* (2017) point out, breaking fiscal rules does not lead to the failure of
growth models: rather, fiscal rules are broken when growth models fail.” (p.25).
* Berry, C., and S. Lavery. 2017. ‘Towards a political economy of depoliticization strategies’. In ‘Anti-poli-
tics, depoliticization, and governance’, ed. P. Fawcett, M. Flinders, C. Hay, and M. Wood, pp.245–265.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Thanks
My suggestion…
Because most people are economically illiterate,
and believe the ‘experts’ who say austerity is necessary, a nasty medicine but cure will follow, not understanding the patient is dying as a result of these greedy charlatans.
I was also economically illiterate, but I couldn’t understand the illogic and why the government was closing the cheaper option of preventative services and support to children. Weren’t we about cost savings?
I began a journey of understanding, which led me to political economics and people like Prof Murphy and Monbiot who showed me that neoliberal hegemony is the most powerful organising context of influence, infiltrating every part of our lives across the world, and it’s a deadly toxic lie.
Once the genie is out it doesn’t go back in, so keep going Prof, there will be others like me, with scales still on their eyes, love your posters! 🙂
Thanks
All this emphasis on government debt is a distraction mechanism from the far more serious personal and business debt problem that you discussed recently. But the MSM only ever talk about government spending, debt, and cuts; never about households and businesses
I think if you follow the money you can see quite clearly why we have this insane neoliberal economic idiology imposed on us.
The rich get richer the poor get poorer.
Poverty is a political choice not an accident nor some hapless result of there not being enough money.
The Tory party history of their disdain of the poor or anyone not “like” them or their social class is well documented.
The Labour paty failure to change anything is the great ploitical failure of our time.
Since the Labour party’s insane decision to go the the IMF for a loan in 1970’s it has totally failed to grasp modern economics or understand the true power available to the government of the day.
I cannot understand them can they not read, have they no curiosity at all.
Which brought this to mind.
Questions for an MP
How did UK economy recover after 2nd world war?
Why did we not introduce austerity in 1946 as by todays standards we were technically broke then.
How did UK pay to nationalise UK rail industry?
How did UK pay to set up the NHS?
The NHS was involved in the construction of over 200 new hospitals during the 1950s and 1960s, How did we pay for them?
Im sure you and the readers of this blog could think of many many more.
Thanks
It’s not on the agenda, because it is the agenda.
Discussion in Downing Street, Whitehall and Tufton Streetis is not whether, but how.
Jonathan Pie’s take on the continuation of Tory austerity under Labour https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpJhyyhuJrY
What is austerity good? Absolutely nothing. It doesn’t even do what it promises.
Very few talk about the elephant in the room – Brexit.