ML-Implode News - Clinging to illusions -- the blinkered elite who still think austerity works | Aditya Chakrabortty | Opinion

... for those still running the show, the solution appears to be: keep those blinkers on. Take last week's autumn statement, which made clear that Britain is now heading for at least one lost decade. It predicted an earnings squeeze for the average Briton as bad as any in the past 70 years, and public debt climbing to Spanish levels. Listening to Philip Hammond, the chancellor, reeling off those numbers, I was reminded of what Keynes described in the 1930s as "the long dragging conditions of semi-slump".
Faced with all this, what did the new chancellor do? Cling with white knuckles to his illusions. First, the illusion that austerity works. When Osborne set out in 2010 his programme of spending cuts, wage freezes and privatisations, his pledge was that the entire thing would be over within one parliament. Then it was extended to two parliaments. His successor will soften that austerity, as predicted in the Guardian last month, but he will extend it into three parliaments, or up to 15 years. If a general election is held in 2020, the big question put to party leaders by the Today programme and others will be exactly the same as in 2010: what will you cut?

Hammond's second illusion is that some loose change chucked at roads, transport and other things marked "infrastructure" amounts to a growth strategy. The Â£23bn giveaway that made all the headlines is to be spent over five years: that makes it the equivalent of roughly 50 pence for every Â£100 of public spending.

This is dumb centrism and failed austerity, inflicted on a now mutinous public that is palpably sick of both. It fits perfectly and disastrously with the Theresa May modus operandi, which can be summed up as: Cameronism with a very quick paint job

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Clinging to illusions -- the blinkered elite who still think austerity works | Aditya Chakrabortty | Opinion | The Guardian