Tory economics: Save £6,000 in benefit payments at a cost of only £65,000

Jan Davies suffers from multiple sclerosis but she has a job working for HMRC in East Kilbride which she commutes to four days a week. In March 2017 the DWP informed her that she was being stripped of her disability benefits after a snap reassessment of her benefits claim had found that she does not need her motability car in order to live independently.

After taking advice from her local MP Jan turned to the DWP's Access to Work scheme, which subsequently awarded her £65,133.71 over the course of three years in order to pay for taxis to and from work!

In order to save the £6,000 it would have cost to let Jan keep her motability car the Tory administered DWP are willing to shell out over ten times the amount on paying taxis to chauffeur her to and from work!

This is astounding stuff from the Tories. They love to dress themselves up as "the party of economic competence", but this case makes it look like their campaign of confiscating an average of 800 motability cars a week is motivated more by malice than any intention to actually save money.

The ridiculous decision to snatch Jan's motability car to save less than £6,000 and then stump up over £65,000 for taxis also makes a mockery of the Tories absurd "making work pay" rhetoric too. The only people this farce seems to be making work pay for are the taxi companies of Ayrshire.

This farcical situation is far from the only example of Tories creating ridiculous false economies. Back in 2010 the Tory environment minister Caroline Spelman decided to save money by slashing flood defence spending, despite the evidence showing that every £1 spent on flood defences saves £8 in future economic damage. Over the next few years various parts of the UK to be hit by huge floods, including places that had their flood defence renewal schemes cancelled by Spelman's bonkers austerity cuts. In August 2016 she was rewarded for this lunacy with a DBE!

It's also worth remembering that various other aspects of the Tories' welfare reforms cost way more than they save. The demeaning, dehumanising and discriminatory Work Capacity Assessment regime costs way more in corporate outsourcing fees than it can ever possibly save in reduced benefits payments, and the Tories' savage sanctions regime also costs way more to administer than it saves in reduced welfare payments.

Jan is just one amongst tens of thousands of disabled people who have had their motability cars confiscated by the Tories. Given their outrageous track record of wasting taxpayers money on malicious and misguided schemes it would take wilful ignorance to excuse this case as an isolated case of incompetence, and a great deal of gullibility to continue believing in the myth of Tory economic competence.

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OR

A DBE for flood defence slasher Caroline Spelman!

When the Lib-Dems enabled the Tories back into power in 2010 Caroline Spelman was one of the 23 millionaires David Cameron appointed to his cabinet. He ignored the obvious conflict of interest of her ownership of a lobbying company for the food and biotech industries and put her in charge of the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

David Cameron and George Osborne made it clear to all of their cabinet members that they were expected to ruthlessly slash their departmental budgets in line with the economically illiterate "let's cut our way to growth" austerity dogma they were pushing.

Spelman was keen as mustard. Not only did she set about gleefully slashing DEFRA spending, in order to score brownie points with Cameron and Osborne she ensured that her department suffered the deepest cuts of any department outside of the treasury. 

In order to make herself look like the most loyal of all of Cameron and Osborne's slashers she decided to ignore the expert advice and inflict massive cuts to flood defence spending.

The expert advice said that cutting flood defence spending to make short-term savings is an incredibly self-defeating example of creating false economies. This is because for every £1 spent on building or maintaining flood defences, £8 is saved in avoided economic damage. Thus for every £1 in spending cuts Spelman inflicted on flood defence spending in order to impress Cameron and Osborne, the cost to the country would be £8 further down the line.

Unfortunately for Spelman "further down the line" happened to occur very quickly indeed with appalling flooding in Cumbria in the summer of 2012. particularly badly hit was the town of Kendal which, thanks to Spalman's flood defence cuts, had had their flood defence improvement scheme cancelled.

It's unlikely that the people in Kendal who had had their homes and businesses ruined by flooding thought that their misery was a worthwhile sacrifice to help Spelman win brownie points with Cameron and Osborne, but Spelman obviously did.

For a while it all worked out swimmingly for Spelman. She didn't see the floods in Kendal as a reason to resign and stubbornly held onto her job. The problem for Spelman was that Cameron and Osborne needed a scapegoat to deflect public attention away from the fact that the economically inept flood defence spending cuts had been driven by their economically inept ideological austerity agenda. In September 2012 Spelman was sacked as DEFRA minister, apparently for the crime of being too loyal to Cameron and Osborne's ludicrous "Let's cut our way to growth" agenda

Despite the appearance that Spelman had been sacked for following Cameron and Osborne's instructions too enthusiastically, she never spoke out or criticised them for throwing her under the bus to deflect attention away from their own culpability in the flood defence debacle. Even after more massive floods hit in Somerset in 2013-14 and the massive floods that hit Cumbria and southern Scotland in 2015-16 she kept her lipm firmly buttoned.

After his reckless Brexit gamble failed in 2016 David Cameron handed Spelman the reward that she had been waiting for: In return for loyally keeping her gob shut about the austerity-flood defence cuts debacle Spelman was handed a DBE in Cameron's resignation honours list.

Of course Spelman's gong was far from the most controversial of Cameron's handouts. Cameron showered peerages, knighthoods and assorted other gongs on his cronies like confetti. Millionaire Tory donors, loads of other Tory MPs, millionaire bankrollers and inept strategists for the failed Remain campaign, loads of Tory advisers, George Osborne, George Osborne's image consultant, even Samantha Cameron's personal stylist ... but Caroline Spelman's DBE really is indicative of the hopelessly out-of-touch bubble of wealth and privilege that Cameron exists in that he could actually have thought that it would be a good idea.

Just think about all of the misery suffered by the thousands of people who have had their homes, businesses and property ruined by flooding in the last five years that could have been prevented or mitigated had Spelman not inflicted such savage ideologically driven cuts on flood defence spending.

Just think about how these people must feel seeing Cameron handing out a gong to Spelman for "political and public service", and another gong for "political and public service" to George Osborne, who was the architect of the economically illiterate austerity agenda that drove Spelman to make such idiotically counter-productive cuts in the first place.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

2012 review

I realise that the fourth week of January 2013 is probably a little late to publish a review of  2012, however it is probably better late than never.

From a personal point of view 2012 was a reasonable year. The economic insanity of austerity has plunged tens of millions of families into desperate poverty across the European Union, however my family have been fortunate in that my wonderfully supportive wife maintained full-time work throughout 2012 and I had some part time work too. 2012 was hardly a prosperous year for us, but in comparison to the suffering of others, we have much to be thankful for.

2012 was a great year for the Another Angry Voice blog. The year started the year with fewer than 50 followers on the AAV Facebook page and average monthly traffic of just a few thousand hits on the blog. I finished the year with almost 4,000 Facebook followers and more than 30,000 hits in the month of November.

In my view, the single biggest story of 2012 was not the "Savile was a predatory paedophile" revelation or the London Olympics, it was the sheer scale of financial sector fraud. HSBC were fined £1.2 billion for laundering money for drug traffickers and international terrorist organisations, Standard Chartered were fined £327 million for deliberately bypassing sanctions on Iran but the most shocking revelations related to the Libor rigging scandal that involved several British banks Barclays, RBS and HBOS.

Few people even understand the implications of the Libor fraud (because it just sounds like complicated financial word stuff to the layman). To put it simply, manipulating the interbank lending rate results in the manipulation of virtually every financial transaction in the western world because the value of so many of the world's major currencies (US dollar, Japanese yen, the euro, British pound, Australian, Canadian and New Zealand dollars, Swiss frank, Swedish and Danish krone) are all fixed by the Libor rate. Thus if a trader at a financial institution fraudulently manipulates the Libor rate up or down, they manipulate all financial transactions carried out in any of the aforementioned currencies. Andrew Lo of MIT described the Libor fraud by saying:

"this dwarfs by orders of magnitude any financial scam in the history of markets"

If it wasn't completely obvious that the global financial system is hopelessly corrupt before 2012, it most certainly is now. Now that there is conclusive evidence that financial institutions have fraudulently undermined the value of the US dollar and the GB pound, it is obvious that the whole financial system is clearly unfit for purpose. The problem of course is that establishment interests have far too much riding on the current neoliberalised financial system to ever consider fundamental reform. In fact it is much worse than that. The most senior banker at Barclays to be implicated in the Libor scandal (which cost the bank £290 million in fines) Jerry del Missier didn't face prosecution, he got to walk away with an £8.75 million payoff! This wasn't just a reward for failure, it was a reward for outright criminality.

2012 also featured more Quantitative Easing from the Bank of England, who pumped another £50 billion into the UK bond market, driving bond yields to historic 300 year lows, giving George Osborne and the Tories yet another economic soundbyte to weave into their absurd, misleading and downright dishonest economic justification narrative. The Bank of England went ahead with another tranche of QE despite their own research telling them that the wealthiest 5% of families received 40% of the benefit of their newly invented money, whilst ordinary people like savers, pensioners and workers suffered the adverse effects of currency devaluation. The Federal Reserve went even further than the Bank of England launching "QE to infinity" to magic up $40 billion a month to buy up toxic assets from the debt riddled US financial sector.

Despite another £50 billion in "magic money" from the Bank of England and several events that were spun as dead cert monet spinners (the Olympics, the Jubilee, the Royal Wedding) the UK economy slumped back into recession in 2012. When the Tories came to power in 2010, George Osborne's OBR predicted a 2.5% growth rate for the UK economy for 2012, in reality the economy stagnated and shrank by 0.1%. The disparity was hard to explain, Osborne and the OBR tried with a litany of excuses (the cold winter, extra bank holidays, the Japanese Tsunami, the Eurozone crisis, the wet weather...) however the truth was revealed in the The Office for Budget Responsibility2012 Forecast Evaluation Report in October 2012 which stated:

"The average multiplier over the two years would have needed to be 1.3 – more than double our estimate – to fully explain the weak level of GDP in 2011-12"

This means that for austerity to have been entirely responsible for the double-dip recession the fiscal multiplier would have to have been around 1.3 instead of the 0.5 figure they had been assuming. Days later the IMF released a report which admitted that:

"[We previously claimed] that fiscal multipliers used in the forecasting process are about 0.5. Our results indicate that multipliers have actually been in the 0.9 to 1.7 range since the Great Recession. This finding is consistent with research suggesting that in today’s environment of substantial economic slack, monetary policy constrained by the zero lower bound, and synchronized fiscal adjustment across numerous economies, multipliers may be well above 1." 

1.3 happens to be slap bang in the middle of the IMF's revised fiscal multiplier figures. If the mainstream media had've been paying attention in October, "Fiscal Multiplier" would now be a commonly known term throughout the UK and Osborne's ideological "cut now, think later" austerity agenda would have been holed beneath the water line yet again. However, the mainstream media weren't just not paying attention, they were deliberately avoiding discussion of the economic evidence of George Osborne's economic illiteracy. I'm not sure why, they were either too stupid to understand the evidence, working under the assumption that the public are too stupid to understand the evidence or they simply didn't want to abandon the mainstream media fantasy that austerity is necessary. Whatever the case, they refused to report it and left it to independent bloggers like me to explain it.

The clearest demonstration of Tory economic incompetence came in the guise of George Osborne's 2012 "Millionaires budget" which included several measures that were abandoned (Pasty tax, philanthropy tax, static caravan tax), but several other measures made it through the storm of public criticism including cutting the top tax rate to 45p (a gift of £50,000+ a year to anyone with a salary above one million) and several new tax loopholes to reward tax-dodging British companies, including a loophole to allow British based companies to siphon wealth out of 3rd World countries into tax havens. After all of their rhetoric about being "in it together", the Tories lavished even more wealth upon the richest individuals.

Another clear example of Tory economic illiteracy was revealed by the wet weather and extensive flooding in 2012. Several of the most badly effected areas had had their flood defence schemes cancelled by DEFRA minister Caroline Spelman, who had enthusiastically slashed flood defence spending in order to meet George Osborne's across-the-board spending cuts. The problem of course is that spending on flood defences has an astonishingly high multiplier. For every £1 spent on flood defences, £8 are saved in avoided economic damage. Slashing flood defence spending is a perfect example of short-termist false economies. Instead of taking responsibility for the disastrous consequences of their barmy "cut now, think later" policies, Cameron and Osborne simply used Spelman as a human shield, sacking her as DEFRA minister and restoring £120 million of flood defense spending, a tiny fraction of the estimated £860 million Spelman slashed from the 2011-2015 spending period at their behest.

I asked people on the AAV Facebook page for their biggest story of the year. The overwhelming response from my right-leaning followers was the Andrew Mitchell plebgate scandal, where it seems that the police fabricated evidence to stitch him up and get him sacked. The problem is that it is hard to see Mitchell as the poor victim in the situation given that he:

A. Admitted swearing at the police

B. Was forced out of his job by members of his own party. 

In my view the Andrew Mitchell Gate-gate issue was not even the most important example of police corruption exposed in 2012. After 23 years of battling for the truth, the families of the 96 Liverpool FC fans that died at Hillsborough were finally given access to the wealth of evidence that the South Yorkshire police and Margaret Thatcher's government had conspired to cover up police culpability for the tragedy and to smear Liverpool fans as the guilty parties. The fact that Tories would consider falsified police evidence that led to one unpleasant man losing his job as a more important story than the falsified police evidence and a 23 year long Tory party orchestrated cover-up relating to the deaths of 96 innocent people clearly illustrates their mentality. In the Tory mind, police corruption is fine if it is used to smear people like football fans, miners, lefties etc, but it suddenly becomes the most important story of the year if the police falsify evidence to smear a foul mouthed Tory MP that is so obnoxious he is despised by members of his own political party.

There were a number of noteworthy elections in 2012. The French elected a socialist President for the first time in decades and the American public re-elected Obama which came as a relief to the vast majority of the global population, given that his opponent Mitt Romney was a foaming at the mouth vulture capitalist who made "Tricky Dicky" Nixon look like a man of profound integrity, Ronald Reagan look like a man of towering intellect and George W. Bush look like a man of great competence.

Possibly the most significant elections of 2012 were the Greek elections, in which the Greek electorate voted for anti-austerity parties despite numerous overt threats from the Germans, the EU, the ECB and even David Cameron, but thanks to their unrepresentative electoral system the pro-austerity parties managed to form a majority coalition.

In contrast, probably the least significant elections in 2012 were the farcical Tory devised PCC elections in November in which fewer in one in five of the electorate even bothered to vote and several candidates won with less than 5% of the eligible vote in their constituencies; all of which exposed Tory MP Priti Patel's comments on trade union ballots (see image to right) as the disgustingly partisan nonsense they were. It is quite remarkable that the Tories wasted £100 million on these farcical ballots, whilst simultaneously slashing the number of front line police.

In education, Michael Gove's school privatisation bonanza steamrollered on, with Tory party donors like Lord "Carpetright" Harris bagging more free public infrastructure and taxpayer subsidies for his education pseudo-charity. It also became much clearer that Gove's school sell off was allowing schools to exempt themselves from all kinds of legislation, from health standards in school meals to minimum outdoor play space requirements. Not only that, Gove also saw fit to declare war on the wages, working conditions and morale of British state school teachers by threatening to dock their wages for engaging in work-to-rule strike actions. This vindictive attitude clearly illustrates the Tory contempt for education. Gove clearly believes that the UK is best served by ensuring the staff that teach the 93% of British kids that go to state schools are underpaid, overworked and utterly demoralised.

There are a number of highly qualified candidates for political monster of the year, however one Tory politician stands above all the rest. Not only has Iain Duncan Smith's flagship Work Programme cost £500 million in fees to corporate outsourcing profiteers to achieve results that are worse than if the jobseekers had just been left to their own devices, but his disability witch hunt has thrust thousands of severely disabled, bedridden, hospital bound, post-operative and even terminally ill people onto dole queues and into extremely stressful appeals processes. His callousness was perfectly illustrated, in one of the TV moments of the year, when, instead of paying his respects to the dead and their families, he angrily shouted down Owen Jones on Question Time for eves daring to mention the names of his disabled victims.

I've had to wrack my brains to think of anything particularly good the Conservative led coalition managed to achieve in 2012, however if something positive must be identified, the quashing of the extradition orders on Gary McKinnon and Richard O'Dwyer are worth a mention. There is absolutely no way the UK state should be extraditing their own citizens if they are either wacky autistic conspiracy theorist teenagers or people engaging in activities on UK soil, that were not even crimes under UK law. The fact that Theresa May over-ruled both of these extradition orders was one tiny victory for common sense in an ocean of Tory malice and incompetence.

Finally, I'd like to conclude on a high. Despite costing six times as much as the initial projection, the London Olympic Games were a great success. Some of my personal highlights included: Bradley Wiggins annihilating the field in the road race time trial just nine days after becoming the first British man ever to win the Tour de France endurance race. 15 year old Rūta Meilutytė winning the 100m breaststroke final to claim Lithuania's first ever swimming medal. Stunningly high scoring finals in the men's floor, vault and rings in the gymnastics. 36 year old Chris Hoy powering to victory in the Kierin and 19 year old Jade Jones becoming Britain's first ever Taekwondo champion. Jessica Ennis sprinting to win her 800m race in the Heptathlon when she only needed to avoid finishing 18 seconds behind her opponent. David Rudisha winning an incredible 800m race in which practically every competitor beat their national record or personal best time. 19 year old Kirani James winning the 400m, a first ever gold medal for Grenada. The astonishing photo finish after a two hour race in the women's triathlon. Mo Farah winning golds in the 10,000 and 5,000m to become undoubtedly Britain's favourite Muslim immigrant. I don't even like Tennis but Andy Murray claiming Olympic gold to become the first British man to win a major international tournament in over seven decades has to be worth a mention.

One of the most enjoyable aspects was seeing the bigoted Tory MP Aidan Burley (who bitterly criticised "multiculturalism" during the Olympic opening ceremony) proved spectacularly wrong by Britain's multicultural medal winning athletes.

Another enjoyable aspect was the successful role of the public sector. Public sector police and military personnel stepped in at extremely short notice to rescue the private outsourcing company G4S from the abject shambles they had made of their £240 million Olympic security contract. If this isn't a clear case for protecting the efficient public sector against Tory privatisation fantasies, I don't know what is.

Another example of successful public sector influence came with the success of the British team. Many of the successful athletes and teams were recipients of National Lottery cash. Had the state not intervened to ensure that a proportion of national lottery profits went to worthy causes such as sports and the arts, the British team would have been nowhere near as successful. Had the neoliberal adage that "state intervention is always evil" been followed, the lottery profits would have flowed to the owners of the private sector operator Camalot, rather than into British sports. The influence of National Lottery cash in turning British athletics from the laughing stock of 1996 (just one gold medal) to the third most successful team (29 gold medals), behind only the economic super-powers of China and the US is the perfect example of how targeted state intervention can create enormous success in what is a highly competitive area of human endeavour.

This brings us back to the current Tory obsession with "cut now, think later" austerity. The diverse successes of the British Olympic team can be seen as a testament to intelligently targeted investment, however the Tories are taking a completely different approach. One imagines that had they been in charge of Olympic funding decisions, virtually every sport would have had their funding slashed to bits in order to pour millions in extra funding into elitist sports like dressage, yachting and showjumping.

If you think I've missed anything important from 2012 please feel free to mention it in the comments section below.

   

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Caroline Spelman; floods and false economies

Flooding in Kendal, a small price to pay for Caroline Spelman to win
 some brownie points from the Tory grandees with her zealous
slashing of flood defence budgets.

In many ways Caroline Spelman is the perfect example of the modern Tory. From the moment she became environment secretary in the coalition government she set about currying favour from George Osborne and David Cameron by volunteering huge 30% austerity cuts to her own department and drawing up plans to sell off publicly owned forests.

The forests sell-off was one of the first of a litany of PR disasters to hit the coalition government. Under huge public pressure Spelman's plans to sell-off publicly owned forests to the private sector were shelved and then quietly killed off. Such a spectacular misjudgement of public opinion is easy to understand when you consider that the prime motivating force behind the modern day Conservative is to reduce the role of the state at all costs. To an ideologically driven Tory, it is "common sense" that all publicly owned assets must be sold off to the highest bidder as soon as possible.

Spelman's self inflicted 30% budget cuts to the environment department in order to win favour from the cut-now, think-later austerians at the top of the Tory party were even more insane than her plans to sell off the forests but it took a little longer for the disastrous consequences to become clear.

Thanks to Spelman's brutal self-inflicted cuts to her own department more than 300 planed flood defences had to be cancelled because of her £860 million pound cut over the 2010-2015 period. It has been estimated that for every £1 spent on flood defences the country saves £8, an astonishingly high fiscal multiplication effect of 8.00. This means that cuts to flood defence budgets are a spectacularly obvious example of false economies (chucking the baby out with the bathwater). After the huge floods of 2007, the Pitt review concluded that spending on river and coastal flood defences needed to be increased. To their credit Neo-Labour actually did pretty well, boosting spending on flood defences by 33% between 2007 and 2010. Spelman's ideologically driven cuts undid much of their work and ensured that spending fell back again by over 25% in the first year of the new government.

Exceptionally wet weather in the summer of 2012 saw large floods overwhelm thousands of homes and businesses and cause hundreds of millions of pounds worth of damage across the UK. Kendal in Cumbria was one of the locations particularly badly hit and was one of the 300 places to have funding for flood defences cut as part of Spelman's barmy "cost-cutting" exercise. Perhaps the people of Kendal are glad to know that the misery and financial cost of being flooded is simply a consequence of Spelman's attempt to win favour with the Tory grandees, that their lives have been turned upside-down just to serve her personal self-interest.

Spelman should go far in the Tory party, she has all of the traits of the modern Conservative, a noxious blend of incompetence, malice, economic illiteracy and pure unrestrained self-interest.

See also

No new ideas, just more Tory cuts
 

Evidence based policy in UK politics

Austerity and the double-dip

Gideon's Folly

The case for... Evidence based policy in UK politics

"The Case For...." series

Defenders of orthodox neoliberalism often try to defend their favoured socio-economic ideology by pretending that "there is no alternative".
In this series I'm going to explore what some of these alternative economic strategies could be.

After two years of blundering incompetence from the Tory-Liberal coalition government there has been much talk of evidence based policy. The topic has even reached the pages of the Daily Telegraph, which are usually filled with the kind of reactionary sentiments that do so much to undermine evidence based politics. The article by Jonathan Shepherd makes a very strong case for the introduction of evidence based politics, one of the key quotes comes from Jon Baron, president of the US coalition for evidence-based policy, who said: “Distributing social spending the old fashioned way – with maximum regard for political gain and minimum regard for evidence of effectiveness – is a luxury we can no longer afford.”

I'd suggest the first step towards introducing evidence based policy would be to begin by teaching a few economic fundamentals to all elected politicians:

Lesson 1. What is a fiscal multiplier?
Lesson 2. What is an externality?
Lesson 3. What are anti-competitive practices and how do we avoid them? (hint: monopolies, oligopolies, information assymetry, cartels, price fixing, dumping, subsidies are bad)

The next step would to be to introduce routine assessments of the fiscal multiplication effect of government policies (taking externalities such as environmental degredation, use of limited/non-renewable resources, systemic risk, social disorder, health consequences, anti-competitive practicies into account). This kind of analysis would provide useful data on which government services provide good overall (economic, social and environmental) returns and which need to be made more efficient, scaled back or completely abandoned.

An approach like this would also prevent ideologically driven fools like Caroline Spelman from slashing state spending on economically beneficial flood defence projects, against the scientific advice and incurring significantly more economic damage that she saved through her mindless adherence to the failing cut-now think-later ideology of Osbornomics. By slashing spending on worthwhile flood defence projects Spelman was clearly just serving her own political interests. She was simply trying to win brownie points and future promotions from the ideological neoliberals that run the Conservative party by demonstrating that she would gleefully inflict the largest proportional spending cuts on her own department, without any consideration for the obvious false economies she was creating.

The problem of course is that proper analysis of the fiscal multiplier values of government spending would throw up a lot of results that all three of the neoliberal riddled, corporatist Establishment parties would abhor.

Government spending on social housing, public infrastructure projects and welfare projects usually provide good fiscal multiplication values, whilst tax cuts for the extremely rich have provided some of the lowest fiscal multiplication values ever seen. The 2008 Bush tax cut for the super rich resulted in a fiscal multiplication value of just 0.29, meaning that for every Dollar spent (in lost tax revenue) the economic return was just 29 Cents. Compare this to Spelman's flood defence cuts, it has been estimated that for every Pound spent on flood defences the country saves £8, an astonishingly high fiscal multiplication effect of 8.00, or a 27 times more effective use of government funds than cash handouts to the richest people in society (a favoured Tory policy).

Evidence based policy based on the assessment of fiscal multiplication values would create a situation where government would find it almost impossible to give vast tax cuts to their wealthy mates and financial backers and instead find themselves compelled to increase funding for economically beneficial projects such as building flood defences and social housing, providing healthcare, education and welfare, increasing spending on tax enforcement and cutting taxes that disproportionately effect the poor and ordinary working people (such as VAT and council tax). These outcomes are precisely the reasons that evidence based policy is highly unlikely ever to happen in the UK.

More articles from "The Case For......" series

See also

Austerity and the double-dip

What is... Fiscal multiplication?

No new ideas, just more Tory cuts

The inefficient state fallacy

More riches for the rich, recession for the rest