Does Will Hutton have a tendency to exaggerate bad news? In this piece, he quotes economics professor, Yanis Varoufakis: “There is zero chance of austerity working. It’s like thinking you can escape gravity by waving your arms up and down.” Broadsheet comment used to be all about the inevitability of painful cuts. Now it’s all about the desirability of growth. Will wants government to borrow, and quotes Keynes in his defence. I can’t quote anyone in support of me (yet), but at the risk of repetition: without needing to shell out vast sums, traffic system reform can provide growth and tens of billions of painless cuts. OK, Will is talking in trillions. Hundreds of trillions in bad bank contracts and loans. Underwritten by governments. So “private bank debt has steadily become public debt … where the gains were privatised and the losses socialised.” So much for the “free” market. But Equality Streets would still do more good on more levels, I submit, than most of the pendulum-swinging proposed in this article.
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