After eight years, the political and economic limits of austerity have at last been reached. Philip Hammond’s Budget on 29 October was a reflection of this changed reality. The Chancellor, a fiscal conservative, reluctantly conceded that “the era of austerity is finally coming to an end”. But he insisted that “the tough decisions of the past eight years were not driven by ideology”.
After the 2008 financial crisis, and the record budget deficit (9.9 per cent of GDP) that resulted from it, some spending cuts were inevitable. There was, however, no necessity for the scale of austerity imposed by the Conservatives since 2010. The result, as we have charted in our Crumbling Britain series, is a shrunken and enfeebled public realm.
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