The Financial Times has found the near perfect apologist for ‘Austerity’! A reading of the Wikipedia entry on Nicholas Ian Macpherson, Baron Macpherson of Earl’s Court, is impressive, to say the least.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Macpherson

In the wake of the utterly failed Neo-Liberal Dogmas, in the Crash of 2008, what those Neo-Liberals offered was the political necessity of the wholesale dismantling of the Post War Welfare  State, as the means to the end of bringing back an elusive prosperity. This was part of the larger plan of the Mont Pelerin Olympians, of destroying the very fabric of the ‘West’: the shared destiny of the ‘Commonwealth’ and its replacement with the Social Dawinism of the ‘Almighty Market’, celebrated by the epigones of Austrian Economic Romanticism.

Baron Macpherson’s historically garnished rationalizations for more politically and economically sophisticated iterations, of the necessity of the ‘Strong Medicine’ of that Austerity, faces the real political end of this mirage, in the person of Jeremy Corbyn. With each twist and turn of Tory political desperation, Mr. Corbyn’s political strength grows. Real questions remain: will the Tories call for another ill-fated referendum? Another is where is Rovian political guru/technocrat Lynton Crosby?

The reader is presented, on the same page, a link to Martin Wolf’s intervention on the question of the viability of ‘Austerity’, which is his usual to and fro, but ends in this final  paragraph:

‘So should austerity be over? If we mean that it is safe to leave the fiscal deficit where it is, the answer is no. If we mean that it is possible to avoid lowering the share of public spending in GDP any further, the answer is yes. The argument that the UK has chronically underfunded public services is respectable. But higher spending means higher taxes. That additional taxation also needs to be well targeted and designed. The extra money raised needs to be well spent, too. Otherwise, the effort would be a huge waste. That would be quite senseless.’

https://www.ft.com/content/1b94c71e-5054-11e7-bfb8-997009366969

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/48b2f6f8-5270-11e7-a1f2-db19572361bb