The British government – moving from denial to blame shifting
The British economy is clearly declining and the Government has moved from denying the decline (it initially spent months talking up its claims that austerity would promote growth) to admitting the decline but diverting the blame to others. The others in this case – are the hopeless Europeans who move from one disaster to another. So now the narrative that is emerging in Britain is that its export-led recovery plans are being damaged by the failure of the Europeans to do something about the crisis there. There are two ways of thinking about that. If Europe was such a problem then it has been a problem for nearly 4 years and so it was misguided to deliberately damage domestic growth (via austerity). The other way to look at it is to note that the British economy has resumed growth under the support of the fiscal stimulus (introduced by the previous government) and then started to experience declining growth virtually from the day the current British government announced its scorched earth policy cutbacks. The recent Euro crisis has really nothing to do with that. It is clear that the British government is moving from denial to blame shifting.