Back in 2010 when the Liberal Democrats enabled the Tories back into power the Tories repeatedly promised that their hard-right austerity policies would eliminate the government budget deficit by 2015.
Scroll forward to 2015 and despite all of the austerity, and wage repression, and public service cuts, and slashed local government funding, and unprecedented reductions in infrastructure spending, and destruction of the social security safety net, the Tories were still running a massive budget deficit, entirely unlike their 2010 promise they wouldn't be.
How did they deal with the fact that they had failed so badly to deliver what they'd promised? Well they deleted their 2010 promises off the Internet, and set about reframing their failure as a success with an incredibly brass-necked "we've cut the deficit by a third" narrative (we've failed our own measure of sucess by 2/3 so vote for us!)
Had Labour not allowed idiots like Chris Leslie and Ed Balls to dictate their economic stance they could have countered this nonsense, but instead they were too busy chasing away millions of natural Labour voters with their vapid and strategically inept austerity-lite agenda.
Labour completely dropped the ball thanks to the vapid "centrists", but obviously nobody in the mainstream media even bothered to call the Tories out on this extraordinary "Failure is Success" Orwellian bullshit either.
Scroll forward another four years to the present and the Tories still haven't eliminated the deficit like they said they were going to by 2015, and they're still dressing their abject economic failure up as some kind of brilliant validation of their crazed approach to economics, and they're even bragging about it on Twitter!
The lesson from all of this is obvious. That hard-right policies like austerity, wage repression, public service cuts, and deliberate under-investment in infrastructure spending are an absolutely rubbish approach to reducing government borrowing, in fact they're so bad that they've resulted in the slowest post-crisis recovery in Centuries, and left UK workers earning less in real terms than they were an entire decade ago!
But then we're left with the question of why reducing government borrowing was turned into such a desperate priority that it over-ruled all other measures of success, from collapsing workers' wages to deteriorating public services, from record low infrastructure investment to slashed education spending, from soaring violent crime rates to rising inequality levels, from exponential increases in food bank dependency to unsustainable rises in private debt.
The answer of course is that government borrowing should never have been presented as such an overarching priority that debt-fixation resulted in the trashing of workers' wages, vandalism of public services, destruction of the social safety net, and the ripping off of future generations through deliberate under-investment in things that generate future-prosperity like education, affordable housing, and infrastructure projects.
The reason austerity "failed" is that it never really had anything to do with reducing the deficit. Debt fear-mongering was always just a smokescreen to hide their true agenda behind.
Collapsing workers' wages, under-funding of local government and public services, increased privatisation mania, and vandalism of the social security safety net weren't unfortunate by-products of this Tory agenda, they were the actual objective.
The whole thing was a giant wealth transfer fraud of monumental proportions designed to load the debts of the bankers' insolvency crisis onto the general public while transferring as much wealth as possible from the poor and ordinary to the mega-rich establishment elitists.
Amazingly some people still haven't clocked that the whole thing was a con, even when the Tories are so blatantly dressing their glaring failure to do as they promised, even after 9 years, as some kind of wonderful economic success story!
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