The phoney war over austerity

Philip Aldrick

The Times

The debate about austerity in this country is a phoney one, says Philip Aldrick. We treat it as a battle between puritanical rightwing fanatics, determined to balance the books no matter the damage to our social fabric, and kindly left-wingers who’d rather “reach for the state credit card” than cause suffering. But fiscal responsibility isn’t a right-wing fetish. Look at the Scandinavian countries so admired by the Left: from 2006 to 2016 (the years of the financial crisis aside) Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Norway all underspent their budgets. To them, fiscal prudence is “not right-wing malice but a left-wing virtue”. They rightly see living within their country’s means as “a national aspiration”, not a party-political issue. The real question is this: do we want to pay more tax for better public services, like Sweden et al, or less tax in exchange for smaller government, like the US. True, debt isn’t always a bad thing: borrowing money at low rates to spend on infrastructure can on occasion make more sense than raising taxes. “But shouldn’t running a deficit be the exception, not the rule?”