
Austerity
By Mark Blyth
I don’t get why austerity endures such a bad press. If you’re austere, you live within your means. Yet governments are barracked for adopting the same ideology. It’s nuts!
Yet there are many — those in question rarely use words of less than seven syllables (Ruth Davidson, how’s it hanging?), to keep up with the Jonesians — who angrily reject the idea of nations tightening pursestrings and belts to get back on an even keel.
2008 showed us through the banking crisis and our global financial meltdown, that something needed to change.
And if austerity wasn’t the way forward, then what?
Humans need help when it comes to minding our bank balances and business. And even when we’re counselled with logic, we rarely listen. Take exhibit A: the EU referendum. If only we’d given it some rational consideration in the cold light of day, we’d fast have appreciated that the NHS wouldn’t get an extra £350m a week, and that our borders wouldn’t be closed. And without those pledges, what else did Brexit supposedly bring to the table?
I’m not a learned man. I’ll leave that to our author, Mark Blyth. He has a radically different way of interpreting the concept of austerity and presents a lot of supporting evidence in Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea that it works, and it doesn’t.
Yes, as he makes clear on the cover, austerity can be dangerous. And I don’t know whether it was intentional to make it sound fairly acceptable, but the subtext certainly left my palate cleansed of the sour taste provided by alternative commentators on the state of where we are and, instead, where we could have been.
The world is no bed of roses and the grass is rarely greener. We may deride our leaders in state, but they do have the best interests of the country at heart and I now feel more than ever that austerity was the only way out of this mess.
Where we go from here requires an entirely different set of principles and prophecies. But that’s for another book and set of instruments.
Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea is available now at Amazon.

