Just to remind, there has been no austerity

There’s a truth here:

Every government looks to save money. Sometimes, it’s a priority to reduce spending, as with post-2010 austerity. Even when overall spending is rising, politicians may reduce spending in one area to make progress on a priority elsewhere. Doing things more efficiently is always a good idea.

But announcing a spending cut is not the same as reducing spending, let alone achieving value for taxpayers’ money. That is a key lesson of the austerity years. Cuts announced in haste in one area today have repeatedly led to costs ballooning elsewhere tomorrow.

But it’s not the line about austerity which is that truth. For spending is up in cash terms, in inflation adjusted terms and as a percentage of GDP. No one at all has spent less.

However, there is that truth. That salami slicing budgets does not work. One way of describing it is as “library cuts”. Not an absolute truth but a great deal more than merely a tendency. When a budget is sliced then it is always the consumer, public, facing service - say, libraries - that gets cut. Never the monstrous bill for the bureaucracy and its pensions that does. “See, See! The b’tards are preventing us from lending you books!” and never is it that papershuffling be done faster and heaven forfend that papershuffling be done less.

Fortunately, we have an actual example of how to do austerity:

Argentina has historically been a country of failed governments, economic collapses, and debt defaults. Yet incredibly there are signs that – against all the odds – the bold, free market reforms of its libertarian President Javier Milei are beginning to work.

With inflation falling, interest rates coming down, and the peso on fire in one market, Milei is already proving the global Left-wing economic establishment – addicted to bigger government and endless deficits – wrong. Indeed, it may provide a template for other countries to escape from zero growth.

Quite so and that template is:

First, even without a majority in parliament, he has been ruthless. Whole government departments have been closed down overnight, regardless of the immediate consequences. The Ministry of Culture was axed, so was the anti-discrimination agency, and the state-owned news service. Only last month, he unveiled plans to fire another 70,000 state employees.

Do not try to salami slice budgets. Do not try to moderate what the state does. Have the state stop doing things. The Arts Council, EHRC and the BBC (yes, the licence fee is a tax, has been since the Brown Terror) sound like darn good places to start too.

Allow fracking, kill the planning system so we can have a concurrent housing led boom - the government needs to stop doing things and also to stop stopping other people doing things.

Chainsaws, that’s the economic tool of choice these days. No, don’t prune, chop down.