Are people finally waking up to the fact that ideological austerity is a con?

He might be the golden boy of the sociopathic right-wing press barons, but there's no disguising the fact that George Osborne's 2016 budget was a massive failure.

It seems an awful long time ago that George Osborne was booed by the crowd at the 2012 Paralympic Games. Since then he has continued his ideological austerity agenda, merrily slashing away at infrastructure, services and social support to the most vulnerable people in society whilst simultaneously showering corporations the asset rich and high earners with one tax break after another. Even winning a renewed mandate at the 2015 General Election (from 24% of the electorate) to continue doing it.

Austerity is a choice

Over the years many people have tried to point out that ideological austerity is a choice not a necessity, and furthermore, that it's incredibly harmful to the UK economy.

That austerity is a political policy not an economic necessity, and that austerity is harmful to the UK economy are hardly contentious positions to hold, yet the abject refusal of the vast majority of the mainstream press to scrutinise the underlying Tory assumption that austerity is necessary has created a mediascape where those who do speak out against austerity can sound like out-of-touch crackpots, rather than like people who actually understand a few basics in political theory, economic history, and macroeconomics.

George Osborne and the Tories love to play up the level of public borrowing as if it's catastrophically high (it isn't) and they love to pretend the solution to high public borrowing is to slash public spending (it isn't).

When the Tories were enabled into power by the Lib-Dems in May 2010 the level of UK public debt was well below 70% of GDP. To put this into perspective, the average level of public debt for the entire 20th Century was 81% of GDP, and public debt peaked out at a huge 238% of GDP after the chaos of the Second World War.

When Labour were elected after WWII, instead of cutting back public spending and cancelling as much infrastructure investment as they could, they set in motion the most ambitious programme of government spending in history. They founded the NHS, built hundreds of thousands of affordable houses, rebuilt the UK's war-shattered public infrastructure, introduced the welfare state and legal aid, massively improved pensions and nationalised most of the core industries so that they could be used for the public good, not for private profit.

And do you know what? The national debt fell dramatically as a percentage of GDP, and then continued to fall steadily until Margaret Thatcher and her bunch of right-wing fanatics tore up the post-war consensus in 1979.

Expert opinion

The majority of trained economists believe that austerity has harmed the UK economy and only 15% of them are prepared to say that they think it's a good idea, yet the Tories, and a hefty proportion of the public prefer to ignore the expert opinion in favour of the "let's cut our way to growth" austerity narrative.

It's likely that an awful lot of Tory MPs fully understand that austerity is a political strategy that has nothing to do with reducing the scale of public borrowing, and everything to do with ensuring the upwards transfer of wealth from the poor and ordinary to corporations and the extremely wealthy (where the Tory party source the vast majority of the donations), however I hesitate to believe that the majority of people who voted Conservative in 2015 understood that Tory fearmongering about the scale of public borrowing is just a cynical ruse to get people to support a political policy that favours the very rich at the expense of everyone else.

International opinion

International opinion is strongly against ideological austerity. In most countries that have been forced to endure ideological austerity the anti-austerity movement has led to a vibrant resurgence of left-wing and liberal political parties and rapid declines in popularity for the parties that imposed austerity. We could look at Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy or Canada for examples of powerful anti-austerity campaigns, yet the clearest example of all is actually right here in the UK. The SNP set out a very clear and coherent anti-austerity anti-Tory narrative before the 2015 General Election and ended up taking an incredible 56 of the 59 Westminster seats afforded to Scotland.

The English seem to be one of the only peoples to have been made to endure harsh ideological austerity, yet formed practically no resistance to it whatever (before Jeremy Corbyn burst out of nowhere to become Labour Party leader, the biggest opponents to ideological austerity in English politics were the Green Party).

Make do and mend

If the evidence shows that the scale of public borrowing isn't actually that high in a historical context, and that at a previous time when public debt was actually much higher, the government of the day reduced it significantly by investing in infrastructure, housing, jobs and welfare ... And if the majority of trained economists reject ideological austerity as the economically destructive political ideology that it is ... And if ideological austerity is deeply unpopular across the globe ... Why has the "let's cut our way to growth" narrative been so damned popular with the English?

Some might point to the fact that the UK media is the most right-wing biased in Europe; some might point to the fact that the main opposition party decided to commit electoral suicide in 2015 by agreeing with the ridiculous Tory proposition that there is no alternative to "let's cut our way to growth" austerity economics; some might blame our outdated and bizarrely unrepresentative electoral system that locks smaller parties out of the political system; but I have a theory that in England there's still some kind of cultural hangover from the austere "make do and mend" era of the 1940s and 1950s.

Maybe English people buy into the ludicrous, economically illiterate, anti-historical "let's cut our way to growth" narrative because they just like the story of everyone making little sacrifices for the greater good. Maybe they don't like austerity because they're "I'm alright Jack" types who want to see the poor and vulnerable hammered so that the rich can have even more for themselves, maybe they support ideological austerity because they actually believe in the socialistic ideal of everyone making a contribution for "the greater good", but that they just don't realise that under Tory rule "the greater good" we're all sacrificing for is nothing more than the enrichment of the establishment class.

Maybe the English yearn to hand in their pots and pans to be turned into tanks to beat the Nazis just like their forefathers did, but now there are no Nazis, only a massively over-hyped public debt and a bunch of conniving Tory politicians collecting up the sacrifices of the poor and ordinary to be consolidated into obscene payouts for the tiny super-wealthy minority who bankroll their party. 

Are people finally waking up

A February 2016 poll by BMG for the London Evening Standard reveals that public enthusiasm for ideological austerity is on the wane. The number of people who strongly support ideological austerity has dropped to just 7% of the population, while only 28% supported the proposition that austerity is good for the UK economy.

When the results are broken down by party it becomes clear that Tory supporters make up a significant proportion of the pro-austerity camp. 61% of Tories think austerity is good for the economy, compared to just 13% of Labour supporters*. Interestingly ideological austerity is actually more popular with Lib-Dem voters (32%) than it is with UKIP voters (25%). The poll didn't bother to break down the views of Green, SNP or Plaid Cymru supporters, but it would be fair to guess that the response would be pretty close to 0% support from them, given their very strong anti-austerity positions of their parties.

It's worth bearing in mind that this poll was conducted a month before George Osborne's disastrous "budget of failure" and given the political fallout from that it seems likely that public opinion will have shifted further away from austerity.

Conclusion

A hell of a lot of people used to buy into George Osborne's absurd "let's cut our way to growth" austerity narrative, but public opinion seems to be gradually shifting away from it. So the question is this: Were you one of the first people to recognise that ideological austerity is a socially and economically destructive con designed to transfer wealth from the majority of people to the super-rich minority, or are you determined to be one of the last?

 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.

* If ideological austerity is so unpopular with Labour supporters, what on earth could have made the pre-2015 Labour leadership think it was a good idea to run an austerity-lite election campaign? Surely it was obvious that for every soft-Tory vote they won with their ridiculous austerity-lite agenda, they'd end up driving away multiple previously loyal Labour voters?

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What now for Greece? What now for Europe?

On January 25th 2015 Alexis Tsipras led the left-wing party Syriza to power in Greece. It is hardly surprising that the radical left were empowered to electoral victory on an anti-austerity platform in the European country that has suffered the most severe effects of ideological austerity. 

Greek defiance

After five long years of the troika of the IMF, the European Central Bank and the European Commission forcing Greece to borrow vast sums in order to bail out their creditors (mainly the French and German banks that recklessly lent them money in the first place), and enforcing a savage programme of cuts and privatisations, the people of Greece have had enough.The IMF, the EC and the ECB are not the only organisations with strong incentives to make an example of Greece by further destabalising their economy and obstructing their new democratically elected government as much as possible. Other parties with interests in seeing Greece suffer in order to deter similar acts of defiance and ensure the continuation of ideological austerity include the governments of the UK and the US and multinational finance which has benefited enormously from the bailouts, and from the asset stripping of whole national economies under the guise of "there is no alternative" austerity.

The reason the Greeks are so brave is that they know that the EU and the economic right-wing simply cannot allow a left-wing government to be perceived to win the fightback against ideological austerity. The Greek people knew that their act of defiance in electing an anti-austerity government is likely to provoke severe retribution from the troika and other powerful pro-austerity forces, but they have chosen defiance instead of subservience anyway. The political landscape of Europe has been changed because enough Greeks have decided that it's better to risk dying on their feet than to continue living on their knees. 

European politics

Spain and Ireland have also suffered the appalling effects of ideological austerity more than most of their EU neighbours, and there too the parties with the biggest increases in popularity are anti-austerity left-wingers too (Podemos and Sinn Féin). The victory of an anti-austerity party in Greece is bound to act as an inspiration to Podemos and Sinn Féin, as well as many other smaller anti-austerity parties such as the various Green parties across Europe and the German radical left party Die Linke.

Even though the independence referendum was lost, Scotland is another country with a popular anti-austerity movement. The anti-austerity SNP hold majority control of the Scottish parliament, they're riding high in the polls and they look set to inflict an unprecedented electoral bloodbath on the Labour Party in the May 2015 general election.

While many people have reservations about the SNP, it is impossible to deny that they have formed an anti-austerity alliance with Plaid Cymru and the Green Party of England and Wales. It's also impossible to deny that they are part of the anti-austerity Green-European Free Alliance group in the European Parliament.

The SNP are nowhere near as radically left-wing as Syriza, but they are smart enough to see austerity as the dangerous and socially destructive economic ideology that it is, and to publicly oppose it.

The election of a left-wing anti-austerity government within the EU should act as a short-term inspiration to opponents of ideological austerity all over Europe because it's proof that countries can get rid of pro-austerity governments. Whether it acts as a long-term inspiration will depend heavily on how successful Syriza are percieved to be, and how far the powerful pro-austerity forces are prepared to go in punishing Greece in order to deter more acts of civic defiance elsewhere in Europe.

Problems for the pro-austerity forces

The defiance of the Greeks presents two significant problems to the right-wing pro-austerity forces that dominate in Europe.

Firstly the ideological austerity they have already imposed on Greece has caused years of appalling socio-economic chaos (ludicrously high unemployment figures, the degradation and destruction of public services, widespread poverty and vast flows of labour and capital out of the country). The terrible economic policies of the troika have already inflicted so much poverty and destruction in Greece that they would now have to push the levels of suffering beyond the extreme in order to make life under a left-wing government seem distinctively worse than life under troika imposed austerity. Causing even more suffering to an already beleaguered nation could tip Greece from rolling socio-economic chaos into a full scale humanitarian disaster.

The second major problem for the powerful pro-austerity forces is that there is a significant risk that by working to further destabilise Greece, they could force the nation to default on their debts and exit the single European currency experiment, potentially triggering a domino effect of other Eurozone states defaulting on their unpayable debts and quitting the single currency.

The pro-austerity forces may hold most of the levers of power in Europe, but the chaos they have already caused in Greece with their ideological austerity agenda has put them in a complicated bind, where they really need to punish Greece to make anti-austerity defiance look a really bad idea so as to deter more of it, but not so much that they end up bringing down their inherently unstable single currency experiment altogether.
    

The single currency

The fact that Greece is tied into the European single currency has exacerbated the ongoing economic crisis that has driven the rise of Syriza in just a few years from a minor coalition of tiny green and radical-left parties to a single unified party that controls the Greek parliament.

Membership of the single currency has prevented the Greek state from using monetary policies or capital controls to alleviate the suffering, and has facilitated the enormous scale of capital flight out of the Greek economy.

An economic system uniting such radically different economies as Greece and Germany, and which allows enormous flows of capital to move unhindered from the weaker economy to the stronger one is inherently unstable. The more developed European nations cannot continue to suck such enormous flows of wealth out of the poorer nations on an indefinite basis without causing severe instability. A more stable and balanced European economy would need capital to flow from the wealthier, more productive economies to the poorer less productive ones, not the other way around.

Either the European Union needs to be radically reformed so that the wealth of the more productive nations is used to improve productivity in the struggling nations via a structural feedback mechanism, or the system is going to become so unequal and inherently unstable that whole countries are left with no choice but to quit the single currency in order to rid themselves of the European economic straight jacket.

There is a third option, which is the development of an orderly exit strategy so that there is a procedure for countries to make orderly withdrawals from the single currency so that the risk of a catastrophic domino effect of disorderly and highly unpredictably exits is reduced.

This third option is very unlikely to be taken because although it would strongly reduce the probability of a chaotic sequence of disorderly exits, it would strongly increase the possibility that numerous countries would choose to abandon the Euro. It seems unlikely that the right-wing dominated institutions that devised the single currency experiment in the first place are suddenly going to decide to build in a legislative escape route so that nations can extricate themselves as painlessly as possible from their failing ideological experiment.
   

Conclusion

It could be easy to get carried away celebrating the electoral success of a left-wing anti-austerity party, but in order to do so it would be necessary to ignore the fact that much more powerful governments and institutions (IMF, EC, ECB, Germany, UK, US, numerous European banks) have vested interests in making sure that Syriza are perceived to fail.

Awareness of the wider perspective allows us to understand that the electoral success of Syriza is a small victory for the underdogs in the ongoing battle between powerful pro-austerity forces, and those who recognise austerity as the socially and economically destructive right-wing economic ideology that it is.

The success of Syriza has catapulted Greece back onto the centre-stage of European politics, and it will be very interesting to see how far their much more powerful pro-austerity opponents will go to punish the Greeks for their defiance, and whether this punishment has the effect of pushing Greece over the tipping point causing a full-scale Eurozone crisis.

 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.

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Corbynomics vs Ideological austerity

The incredible surge in popularity of the Labour leadership candidate Jeremy Corbyn is proof of the fact that a significant proportion of Labour Party supporters are utterly sick of their party refusing to take a stance against Tory ideological austerity.

The mainstream media reaction has been to deride Corbyn's economic plans as some kind of left-wing lunacy, but this is merely an illustration of the fact for five years the mainstream media and the Labour Party have utterly failed to challenge the Tories on their socially and economically harmful ideological agenda, meaning that anything that contradicts it now lies outside the approved spectrum of debate, not that "Corbynomics" doesn't make an awful lot of sense on a macroeconomic level.

It's no surprise that the mainstream media have given the Tories such an easy ride on George Osborne's failing economic ideology, because the media is so heavily dominated by right-wing billionaires like Rupert Murdoch (S*n, Times, Sky TV), Jonathan Harmsworth (Mail, Metro), Richard Desmond (Express, Star) the Barclay Brothers (Telegraph, Spectator). The refusal of the Labour Party to challenge Tory austerity is a lot harder to fathom. Perhaps they thought they just couldn't win the debate against the right-wing dominated media? Or perhaps it was because the Labour Party had become so dominated by right-wingers (Ed Balls, Chuka Umunna, Chris Leslie, John Cruddas ...) over the years that they actually favoured the continuation of an economic ideology that results in a massive transfer of wealth from the poor and ordinary to the super-rich minority?

Whatever the case, at least there is now a movement within the Labour Party to actually stand up and challenge George Osborne's ideological austerity agenda as the socially and economically destructive con job that it is.

In this article I'm going to outline some of the important differences between George Osborne's ideological austerity agenda and the Jeremy Corbyn's stimulus and investment policies.

How ideological austerity has failed

In the absence of any coherent criticism of ideological austerity from the Labour leadership, it was left to a few backbenchers, left-wing journalists, trained economists and independent bloggers to make the case against Tory ideological austerity over the last five years. I've written a lot of articles on the subject, so instead of detailing the case all over again, I'll provide bullet points with links to corroborating evidence.

• In 2010 George Osborne promised that ideological austerity would have eliminated the budget deficit by 2015, in reality he didn't even manage to halve it.

• Ideological austerity resulted in the slowest post-crisis economic recovery in British history, meaning the UK's GDP per capita still hasn't recovered to pre-crisis levels.

• Ideological austerity coincided with the longest sustained decline in UK average wages since records began.

• Ideological austerity resulted in George Osborne creating more new public debt than every single Labour government in history combined.

• The majority of trained economists agree with the proposition that George Osborne's post-crisis austerity agenda damaged the UK economy.

• Ideological austerity has resulted in a massive transference of wealth from the majority to the tiny super rich minority.

How New Labour failed to challenge ideological austerity

One of the most spectacular failures of Ed Miliband's Labour Party was their abject unwillingness to articulate an alternative to George Osborne's ideological austerity con. In fact Labour were so inept that they even whipped their MPs into voting in favour of ideological austerity in January 2015, less than four months before the General Election.

Given the absolute wealth of evidence that ideological austerity failed to achieve any of the economic projections George Osborne promised back in 2010, it's astonishing that Miliband's Labour Party refused to criticise austerity, preferring to offer the public a bizarrely unappealing prescription of austerity-lite, in the vain hope that "more of the same but not quite as evil about it" would inspire people to flock to the Labour party in droves (which it absolutely didn't).

Offering exactly the same economic ideology as the Tories (but just slightly less harsh about it) was strategically inept, not just because there is so much evidence that ideological austerity is a terrible policy, but also because it commits the fundamental error of accepting their opponents' lunatic proposition, that "cut our way to growth" is the best/only economic strategy.

Labour's failure to counter the failing "cut our way to growth" ideology was bad for them because it cost them a very winnable General Election, but what is worse is that it has created the impression that there is a strong consensus in favour of ideological austerity (outside of Scotland at least) when there really shouldn't be.

Even though there is a strong consensus amongst economists that ideological austerity is economically destructive, swathes of the electorate now tend to believe that there is no alternative to it, which makes it that much harder for anyone who does try to articulate economically coherent alternatives to ideological austerity.

How "Corbynomics" makes sense

As much as the Tories and their allies in the right-wing press will try to fearmonger about "Corbynomics" meaning ever more borrowing, the economic evidence and the historical record is on Jeremy Corbyn's side when he says that public debt can be reduced through intelligent investment in things that stimulate more economic activity than they cost.

From a macroeconomic perspective the policy of using the current ultra-low costs of government borrowing in order to invest in economically beneficial activity like improvements in public infrastructure, housing, education and support for high-tech industries makes sense. Anyone who is familiar with the concept of fiscal multiplication knows that targeted investment makes a lot more sense than severe, target driven funding cuts.

The historical record also supports Jeremy Corbyn's position that large public debts can be reduced through investment. After the Second World War the UK's public debt stood at an enormous 238% of GDP (which is almost four times the public debt inherited by George Osborne in 2010). Even though the debt was so high back then, the post-War Prime Minister Clement Attlee instigated a massive investment programme which included the foundation of the NHS, introduction of Legal Aid, construction of hundreds of thousands of decent houses per year and major improvements to pensions, unemployment benefits and disability allowances. The simplistic worldview that underpins ideological austerity says that such massive investments should have continued to increase the debt, but in reality the debt began to fall dramatically. By the time Attlee left government the debt had fallen by well over 40% of GDP, and by the time the post-war consensus was torn up in 1979 and replaced with the Thatcherite economic ideology, the debt was down to 43% of GDP.

In contrast George Osborne's programme of ideologically driven cuts has seen the public debt continue to soar, resulting in him missing all of the economic projections he made in 2010 and almost doubling the level of public debt in the space of just five years.
               

Levelling up or levelling down

         
When it comes to the differences between ideological austerity and "Corbynomics" there are many. There's the fact that "Corbynomics" makes sense from a macroeconomic perspective and ideological austerity doesn't; there's the fact that the historical record supports "Corbynomics" and it shows that ideological austerity has failed to achieve what Osborne said it would; and there's the fact that "Corbynomics" is a long-term holistic strategy of investments with the objective of improving the health of the economy, while ideological austerity is a short-term strategy aimed at altering just one economic indicator (the debt to GDP ratio) way above all other economic considerations.

In my view the biggest difference of all is how the two strategies would change the composition of the UK economy. The endgame for "Corbynomics" is to turn the UK into a high-skill, high-tech economy with world leading infrastructure and services and a highly educated and well-paid workforce (like Germany) while the logical endgame for ideological austerity is to deliberately reduce the wealth and standards of living for the majority of the UK population in order to meet the rising standards in China and India on our way down.

The shocking thing is that there are so many people out there who are unwilling or unable to recognise ideological austerity for what it is, preferring to buy into the economically incoherent narrative that there is no alternative but to have our living standards slashed while the tiny super-rich minority help themselves to ever larger slices of the pie. 

The people who have swallowed the Tory narrative that there is no alternative to ideological austerity will lap up the anti-Corbyn propaganda because they've been conditioned to believe in simplistic fairytale economics. If Corbyn does win, it's going to take an awful lot of effort to replace these ludicrous economic fairytales with worldviews that make any kind of sense on a basic macroeconomic level, not least because of the abject failure of the Labour Party over the last five years to stand up and criticise ideological austerity or to present anything remotely resembling a coherent alternative.

 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.

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12 things you should know about the Lib-Dem policy of Ultra-Austerity Forever

It's a busy election campaign so I shouldn't really be wasting my Sunday analysing the activities of a silly nonsense party like the Lib-Dems, but their latest policy announcement of 'Ultra-Austerity Forever' is so bizarre, so wrong headed, so economically illiterate, so off the charts crazy, it's a matter of morbid curiosity.

Like a horrific pile up on the other side of the motorway, it's giving me the compulsion to slow down and have a look.

I know it's sick and wrong to gawk like this, when I've got much more important election priorities to focus on like hammering the Tories for their malice and incompetence, or talking about the ambitious democratic socialist policies Labour are putting forward, or taking a more detailed look at the political landscape in Scotland, Wales, or Northern Ireland ... but I just can't help it.

So here are 12 things you should know about Lib-Dem Ultra-Austerity Forever.

Ultra-Austerity forever

There are two main strands to the Lib-Dem policy of Ultra-Austerity Forever.

The first is the enforcement of a "fiscal rule" that the government must create a permanent budget surplus of 1%, meaning that the government permanently extracts more wealth out of the economy than it invests back into it.

The second element is that the government deny funding to any project that cannot prove itself economically profitable, no matter the other benefits (social, environmental, public health, immeasurable effects on future economic prosperity ...).

No apologies

The Lib-Dems have never apologised for the ruinous consequences of the austerity fanaticism enforced by the 2010-15 Tory/Lib-Dem coalition (collapsing living standards, soaring poverty, the worst sustained decline in the value of workers' wages since records began, the slowest economic recovery in centuries, vandalism of the social safety net, deliberate under-funding of public services, the worst house building figures since the 1920s, the loss of the UK's AAA credit ratings, the lowest levels of infrastructure investment in the developed world ...).

Neither have they apologised for the fact that austerity extremism caused the living standards collapse that drove the Leave vote marginally over the winning line in 2016.

All of this devastation and chaos was caused by George Osborne's incompetent efforts to cut state spending back to a balanced budget (a 0% deficit).

The Lib-Dems aren't just unapologetic about their role in this devastation, they're actually promising to intensify austerity by aiming for a budget surplus of 1% (a deficit of -1%)!

They're not just refusing to apologise for austerity extremism, they're doubling down on it and pushing it harder than ever!

Investment vs Austerity

Investment economics says that you create prosperity by investing in stuff like infrastructure, housing, skills and education, high skill jobs, quality services.

Austerity economics says that you create prosperity by wantonly slashing away at all aspects of state spending in the vain hope that your economy will finally be the one that breaks precedent by demonstrating that it is possible to mindlessly cut your way to growth and prosperity.

There's absolutely no way that any Lib-Dem can pretend that their party leaders are intending to use tried and tested investment economics to achieve this 1% surplus because their political language is utterly infested with the kind of economic baby talk we've come to expect from austerity fetishists.

During the Lib-Dems' Ultra-Austerity Forever launch speech Ed Davey said "The spending competition between the Labour and Conservative fantasists has made Santa Claus seem like Scrooge".

He's literally ridiculing the idea of investing in public services and infrastructure projects! You'd have to be utterly clueless to not understand that this kind of anti-investment rhetoric is motivated by undying belief in crackpot 'let's cut our way to prosperity' austerity dogma.

Arbitrary economic illiteracy

Politicians love to put inflexible targets on things because they think "fiscal rules" make them sound important and knowledgeable, but in reality economists tear their hair out at nonsense like an inflexible 1% budget surplus, no matter what the circumstances.

You don't even need to have any economics training whatever to understand the idiocy of arbitrary targets like this. Just ask yourself why exactly 1% is the economically ideal number. Why not a 0.9% surplus? Why not a 1.25% surplus?

There's clearly been no actual calculation done. They've just settled on 1% because it sounds catchy and memorable, haven't they?

Also, what happens if something changes dramatically? What if these's a natural disaster? or a nuclear power station melts down? Or somebody explodes a dirty bomb in a British city?

Or what if it's something utterly mundane like the cost of government borrowing going up or down dramatically?

Under what circumstances does it become acceptable to break this completely arbitrary 1% fiscal rule?

Shrinking the state

An arbitrary fiscal rule enforcing the government to only ever spend 99% of what it extracts from the economy is quite obviously a recipe for shrinking the state relative to the size of the economy.

The desire to shrink the state has always been a mainstay of hard-right politics, and the Lib-Dems have actually thought of a way to legislatively encode this state shrinking ideology!

Bully for them. They're more dedicated to the hard-right state shrinking ideology than the Tories!

The price of everything, the value of nothing

The Lib-Dem strategy of using beancounters to analyse every single bit of government spending to ensure it is capable of turning a profit might sound fairly sensible in practice, but in reality it's an exercise in knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Just think about investments like a NHS diabetes awareness campaigns, or providing children's music lessons in schools, both of which cost money in the present, but have extremely nebulous and hard-to-measure potential future economic benefits in the long-term.

How is it even possible to estimate the long term economic benefit of these things in terms of reduced demand on NHS services and fewer lost sick days from work, or the potential future contribution to the £100 billion UK creative industries market?

And what might the cost of scrapping their funding turn out to be in 25 years time? How would you even begin to calculate the long-term economic repercussions?

Then there's the simple fact that money isn't everything.

OK, maybe a public investment only returns 90p in the pound, but what about other factors like the social benefit? Environmental benefits? Public health benefits? Quality of life benefits?

Why scrap all of that into the bin just to fixate on whether the investment pays back more than it cost in monetary terms?

How about paying for granny's operation after she's had a fall?

It turns out that elderly people with broken hips become exponentially more likely to die the longer they wait for treatment , which means the state would save huge amounts of money on the cost of the operation, the cost of future medical care and social care, the cost of future pension payments etc.

Spending money on reducing hip replacement waiting times for elderly people is clearly counter-productive if you view things from a purely fiscal perspective.

If it's more profitable to just let granny slowly die in agony rather than replace her broken hip, isn't that the fiscally responsible thing to do?

Incompatibility with their own damned policies

The idea of scrutinising every single element of government spending from a purely financial perspective isn't just narrow-minded, it's also incompatible with a number of the Lib-Dems own policies!

Take their pledge to plant 60 million trees.

From an environmental perspective tree planting is actually a fairly good idea (although not as good as setting aside land to naturally re-wild itself), but in terms of an economic investment alone, it's unjustifiable.

How on earth is planting millions of trees over thousands of acres of viable farmland ever going to spin an economic profit for the government?

The Lib-Dems are so inept that their headline election pledges are completely at odds with their proposed fiscal rules!

Outflanking the Tories

It's quite extraordinary to see the party of Charles Kennedy attempting to outflank the Tory party on the economic hard-right, with their state-shrinking, Ultra-Austerity Forever agenda.

This is a party that competed with Labour for socially progressive centre-left votes until just a decade ago, yet now they're presenting themselves as the most radical economically right-wing political party in British politics!

The last of the Cameroons

The last politician to dare raise the spectre of austerity to infinity was David Cameron, who gave a truly extraordinary speech promising permanent austerity for the masses, whilst surrounded by gold ornaments and all of the trappings of wealth and privilege at the Lord Mayor's banquet in 2013.

Promising 'austerity forever' was a bold move, even at the height of austerity mania in 2013, but promising it now, in the middle of an election campaign, when austerity has gone completely out of fashion so much that even the Tory party is trying to distance itself from it ... well it's absolutely wild, isn't it?

The Lib-Dems are clearly pining for their glory days of coalition government, six figure salaries, ministerial cars, important cabinet meetings ... And in their pathetic attempts to bring those past glory days they've resorted to the magical thinking of channelling David Cameron's political ghost!

Reconsidering the austerity coalition

Jeremy Corbyn has won the Investment vs Austerity argument so comprehensively that even the Tories are trying to distance themselves from austerity extremism, so it's incredible that the Lib-Dems have decided to double down on it as the last austerity party standing.

Given the Lib-Dems are the last remaining advocates of hard-right austerity fanaticism in British politics, surely it's time to reconsider their claims to have moderated the Tories during the austerity coalition years?

Why are we taking their claims at face value, when it now seems much more likely that they were just as keen on austerity as the Tories at the time, if not actively egging them on?

Tory target seats

Attempting to outflank the Tories to the economic hard-right looks like a suicidal political move if you think the Lib-Dems are after 'centrist' socially progressive votes, but in reality almost all of the Lib-Dems' priority target seats are Tory-held constituencies in the south and in suburbia.

Are they attempting to portray themselves as "more Tory than the Tories" in order to poach Tory target seats?

With the Lib-Dems there's always the strong possibility that whatever they're doing is the result of abject strategic incompetence, but in this case it does seem possible that they're attempting to resuscitate Cameroonian austerity extremism in order to woo voters in these marginal Tory seats.

Remainer doublethink

What the Lib-Dems clearly haven't considered is how their efforts to reanimate the political corpse of austerity is going to come across to the other core demographic they're targeting: Remainers.

For the last three years Remainers have been arguing against Brexit by saying it would mean "more austerity"*, so how on earth can Remainers even try to square this austerity is bad anti-Brexit argument with the Lib-Dems' stated economic policy of delivering ultra-austerity forever?

If you see yourself as a socially progressive 'centrist' type, who opposes Brexit because of the disastrous effect it would have on ordinary British people, how on earth would it be possible to support a party that's going to push ruinous austerity extremism even harder than Cameron and Osborne did?

Orwellian doublethink seems like the only plausible answer.

Conclusion

The Lib-Dems haven't just learned absolutely nothing from the two thoroughly deserved electoral kickings they've taken in 2015 and 2017, they've somehow convinced themselves to believe the polar opposite of the lesson they should have learned.

The obvious lesson they should have taken from these electoral routs is that they colluded too closely with the Tories, and that austerity extremism was a social and economic disaster that they should apologise for.

They should have not just apologised for the dire destruction in living standards that austerity delivered, but for the fact this austerity living standards collapse contributed directly to their own worst nightmare of the 2016 Brexit vote.

But what they've actually convinced themselves to believe is that the 2010-15 pre-Brexit period was some kind of magnificent utopia, and that the only way to return to those marvellous glory days is to dig up all the corpses from the austerity graveyard and reanimate them as ultra-powerful austerity zombies!

They're trying to bring back their own personal glory days by returning to the very stuff that actually brought their party crashing down!

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* = The Remainer argument that "Brexit means more austerity" is every bit as dishonest as the Brexiteers' "£350m for the NHS" ... and I say this as a Brexit-sceptic. Austerity is a policy of cutting investment in an economic downturn. It's an economically illiterate response to crises. The tried, tested, and proven response to economic crises is investment in stuff like infrastructure, housing, transport, manufacturing, services, skills and education (create quality jobs and modern infrastructure = create prosperity). No matter the scale of a Brexit economic downturn, austerity would always be the wrong answer, and anyone claiming it would be inevitable is guilty of legitimising the outright lie that austerity is the correct response to a crisis, when the slowest economic recovery in centuries and the worst period of wage decline since records began post-2008 is damning proof that austerity is absolutely the wrong one.

Here's an article on this tragic piece of remainer 'groupthink': Are you unwittingly guilty of spreading hard-right Tory propaganda