Summer of Unrest: The Debt Delusion: Exposing ten Tory myths about debts, deficits and spending cuts

By Mehdi Hasan

Britain in 2011 is in the grip of debt hysteria. If the current coalition government is going to be remembered for one thing it is the cuts: the most severe that this country has seen for decades. Cuts to university funding, libraries and public sector workplaces have seen the most high profile resistance, with the type of protest on the streets not seen since the Poll Tax riots and the Thatcher years.

In this ebook, Mehdi Hasan exposes ten myths about the debt, deficits and spending cuts, and asks if this programme of austerity is really necessary or whether it is actually an economic strategy with its roots in an ideology that extends much further back in time than the global economic collapse of 2008.

BRAIN SHOTS is the pre-eminent source for high quality, short-form digital non-fiction. The Summer of Unrest series brings together stellar writers to explore the issues surrounding the austerity measures in the UK, uprisings in the Middle East and the nature of the protest movements springing up all over the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vintage Digital
• Release date: Jul 28, 2011
• ISBN: 9781446483855

Mehdi Hasan

Mehdi Hasan is an award-winning British-American journalist, anchor and author. Hasan is the host of The Mehdi Hasan Show, which airs on both MSNBC and NBC’s streaming channel Peacock. He has interviewed everyone from General Michael Flynn and Erik Prince, to Bernie Sanders and AOC, to John Legend. Hasan is a former columnist and podcaster at The Intercept, and his op-eds have also appeared in The New York Times and The Washington Post. In Britain he was formerly the political editor of The New Statesman. Win Every Argument is his second book.

Book preview

BRAIN SHOTS is the pre-eminent source for high quality, short-form digital non-fiction. The Summer of Unrest series brings together stellar writers to explore the issues surrounding the austerity measures in the UK, uprisings in the Middle East and the nature of the protest movements springing up all over the world.

The other titles in the series are:

REVOLUTION ROAD by Peter Beaumont

ACTIVISM OR SLACKTIVISM? by Tom Chatfield

KETTLED YOUTH by Dan Hancox

TAHRIR – 18 DAYS OF GRACE by Nariman Youssef

GENERATION VEXED by Kieran Yates and Nikesh Shukla

About the Author

Mehdi Hasan is Senior Editor (Politics) at the New Statesman and is a former news and current affairs editor at Channel 4. He is a regular guest on the BBC’s Question Time and The Big Questions, and also appears on BBC News, Sky News, Al Jazeera and LBC, where he is a guest presenter. He recently published ED: THE MILIBANDS AND THE MAKING OF A LABOUR LEADER (with James Macintyre).

THE DEBT DELUSION

EXPOSING TEN TORY MYTHS ABOUT DEBTS, DEFICITS AND SPENDING CUTS

MEHDI HASAN

Contents

Cover

Summer of Unrest: Series Introduction

About the Author

Title Page

The Debt Delusion

Copyright

Introduction

‘At every stage in the growth of that [national] debt it has been seriously asserted by wise men that bankruptcy and ruin were at hand. Yet still the debt kept on growing; and still bankruptcy and ruin were as remote as ever.’

Lord Macaulay, The History of England, 1849¹

Britain in 2011 is in the grip of debt hysteria. We have been living, it is said, beyond our means and, as a result, both the national debt – the net accumulated borrowing by the government – and the budget deficit – the amount that the government borrows each year – have soared in recent years. How to cut the deficit, and pay down the debt, has become the defining political and economic issue of our age; deficit reduction, says the Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, ‘is the glue that binds this coalition together’.²

In the words of Samuel Brittan, doyen of economic commentators and friend of Margaret Thatcher: ‘The British political classes are going through one of their occasional bouts of masochism, with party leaders vying with each other on the theme of who can cut public spending faster and more effectively.’³

Deficit hawks, clad in hair shirts and wielding axes, prowl the corridors of Whitehall, the Palace of Westminster and the BBC. Across the political spectrum, from right to left to wherever the Liberal Democrats might be these days, politicians and policymakers mouth the mantra of ‘Cuts, cuts, cuts’. ‘Swingeing’, one of the oddest words in the English language, has become a regular feature of the political and media discourse. So too has ‘austerity’, the noun originating in the fourteenth century now embraced with glee by conservatives and liberals alike. Such is the obsession with austerity that the publishers of the Merriam-Webster dictionary named it as its Word of the Year for 2010.⁴ Commentators speak of ‘austerity chic’;⁵ the multimillionaire Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gideon George Osborne, glibly invokes an ‘age of austerity’.⁶

The debt delusion – that Britain is bust, broke, bankrupt – reigns supreme. A note left in jest by Liam Byrne, the outgoing Labour Chief Secretary to the Treasury, to his Liberal Democrat successor, saying ‘there’s no money left’,⁷ was seized upon by po-faced and mendacious coalition ministers as a convenient justification for their ideologically inspired orgy of savage and immediate cuts to public expenditure.

The forked-tongued Osborne and his boss, Prime Minister David Cameron – a former propagandist for Carlton Communications –