Politically speaking, which is really what Niall Ferguson was talking about, 2 things have mattered:
1) the conservatives gave up on austerity (which was causing economic collapse) in 2012 and dropped all their debt and deficit targets, thereby allowing growth to reappear in 2014-15, but continued to pretend they were implementing austerity; and
2) the economy grew faster under labour in 2009-10 when they were implementing stimulus, as it has in the US - but labour (partly due to the weight of media against them) completely failed to get these messages across.
If left of centre (and in our case also centrist liberal democrat) parties buy into an austerity anti-keynesian message, they cannot hope to beat conservative parties. And the worrying thing now is that the conservatives are in power on their own and intend to implement much more dramatic austerity, not for any economic reason but from an ideological determination to shrink and privatise the state, which will hit the poorest and exacerbate inequality (as their solutions have already done dramatically since 2010). In britain at least, there is a huge amount of work to do for those who believe in recovery with a human face.
Matthew Martin
Director
Development Finance International
matthew.martin@dri.org.uk
1) the conservatives gave up on austerity (which was causing economic collapse) in 2012 and dropped all their debt and deficit targets, thereby allowing growth to reappear in 2014-15, but continued to pretend they were implementing austerity; and
2) the economy grew faster under labour in 2009-10 when they were implementing stimulus, as it has in the US - but labour (partly due to the weight of media against them) completely failed to get these messages across.
If left of centre (and in our case also centrist liberal democrat) parties buy into an austerity anti-keynesian message, they cannot hope to beat conservative parties. And the worrying thing now is that the conservatives are in power on their own and intend to implement much more dramatic austerity, not for any economic reason but from an ideological determination to shrink and privatise the state, which will hit the poorest and exacerbate inequality (as their solutions have already done dramatically since 2010). In britain at least, there is a huge amount of work to do for those who believe in recovery with a human face.
Matthew Martin
Director
Development Finance International
matthew.martin@dri.org.uk
