Scott Macnab: Austerity dilemma won't go away
The Climate of Austerity has been the defining mantra which dominated UK and wider Western politics throughout this decade. So the admission this week from Treasury, when an internal briefing was “mistakenly” posted online, that all the cuts of recent years will fail to get near its bottom line of wiping out the UK’s deficit, was quite a moment.
The mass cull of disability benefits, schools, student numbers, libraries and other public services had met with a vicious public backlash and anger over the hardline approach adopted. But the latest revelations means the yawning £70 billion annual gap between the money spent on public services and the taxes raised to pay for them is unlikely to be wiped out any time soon. George Osborne had pledged this would be eliminated in five years when he launched the UK’s austerity drive after arriving in No11 in 2010.
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