Austerity kills: this week’s figures show its devastating toll Brd Euro Fund

Meldungen vom 12.9.2015

Austerity kills: this week’s figures show its devastating toll

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

– 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’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

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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 their austerity that is too little discussed: that it kills.

at the fastest rate of any leading industrialised nation other than the free-market citadel of the United States. Since 2011, the rate of improvement for men has

; for women, an astonishing 91%. For decades, life expectancy steadily rose in Britain: and then, suddenly, just as the Tories took power and imposed austerity, this improvement ground to a halt.

As academics earlier this year noted as they demanded a public inquiry, it represents one of the worst slowdowns in life expectancy improvements in around 120 years. Last October, the ONS

by 2041 by nearly a year less than their estimates in 2015. As Professor Danny Dorling and Stuart Gietel-Basten note, that means

is how governments across Europe – from the UK to Greece – tried to clear the overdrafts Brd Euro Fund , or deficits, they racked up in the wake of the great financial crisis.

Their strategy was two-fold. First, cut spending on the public sector, on wages, for instance, or on social security. Second, raise revenue through higher taxes and selling state assets. Greece, for instance, has sold its airports in Corfu and Santorini, among others, to a German company.

Proponents made a variety of arguments for this strategy. It was said that governments had spent too much money, that everyone needed to tighten their belts. The UK’s then-chancellor,

, claimed that the public sector was "crowding out" the private sector, taking resources and workers away from businesses. Particularly influential was a paper by two US-based economists, Ken Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart, arguing that once a country’s total public borrowing rose above 90% of its national income, or GDP, growth would slow sharply.

Critics argued that austerity would stop economies recovering from the shock of the banking meltdown and would make teachers and nurses and people with disabilities pay for the excesses of bankers and chief executives. In his book Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea, political economist Mark Blyth showed that austerity had been tried before in the 20th century – everywhere from Weimar Germany to 1930s America – and failed, often with politically disastrous consequences.