Architects of austerity: George Osborne and David Cameron in 2015.
Credit: Ben Birchall/PA

“We got there in the end – a remarkable national effort”: that’s how former chancellor George Osborne celebrated the government meeting his deficit target on the day-to-day budget two years late. “It was the right thing to do,” was David Cameron’s smug echo.

It’s easy for the architects of the Tories’ ideologically driven austerity to be triumphalist, given they did not suffer the consequences: the worst squeeze in wages of the major industrialised countries except depression-ravaged Greece; the slashing of social security for low-paid workers and disabled people; the surging child poverty. New research suggests that austerity played a key role in the Brexit vote, which plunged Britain into national crisis, too, and which turfed both men out of office, although both continue to prosper, Cameron with his “trotters up”, as Danny Dyer so memorably put it. But there is another devastating consequence of […]