So the UK grew by 0.6 per cent in the June-quarter 2013 on a seasonally-adjusted basis. The conservatives are crowing as hard as they can that fiscal austerity has cleared the decks for a private sector recovery. We believe them of-course because the economy grew by 0.6 per cent. Right? Wrong. We don’t believe them. The fact is that the budget deficit rose in the last year and the annualised growth of the government and other services sector to growth has been positive in the last two quarters after a sharp contraction in the fourth quarter of 2012. On July 25, 2013, the British Office of National Statistics released its latest National Accounts data in the form of – Gross Domestic Product Preliminary Estimate, Q2 2013. The data release comes on the back of another ONS release – Public Sector Finances, June 2013 – which showed that budget deficit and public borrowing rose over the 12 months to June 2013. So the direction in public net spending is up and that is the opposite direction to the intended fiscal austerity.

The problem of living in Darwin some of the time is that the normal day to day travel that one engages in while pursuing professional life becomes very onerous. It is a four hour flight to any of the capital cities (whereas most were around 1 hour or so from Newcastle). Further, the flight schedules are crazy because Darwin Airport has no curfew (because there is no residential areas nearby) and so you catch planes to and from, say Melbourne at 1.45 in the morning, fly all night, then have to hit the ground running to meet work commitments. This part of Darwin life is very austere. Talking about austerity – in a much more significant way, however – I read that Mr Ed Miliband, thinks he is the 2013 version of Clement Atlee and he can do great and radical “Labour” things in Britain while pursuing a neo-liberal economic austerity program. My immediate reaction was who does he think he is kidding. Sadly, the British Opposition leader seems to think his party can defy basic accounting – that is, reinvent the rules of addition and subtraction – as he tries to present himself as a small target but one imbued with traditional British Labour Party values. The point of this blog is to explain why this neo-liberal bluster is so anti-1945 Labour, without dwelling too much on history. My personal austerity (flying overnight last night) has impinged on my time to wax lyrical today!

Last week, the UK Department of Work and Pensions released a swathe of new – statistics – on poverty rates in Britain. While the Department tried as hard as it could to present the data in a misleading way and lied the facts, once analysed properly, are chilling indeed for a nation that pretends to be advanced and lectures Europe on its own misanthropic policy positions. I am sometimes asked when making public presentations how I judge the success or otherwise of public policy. I respond with a simple rule of thumb. The benchmark is not how rich the policy framework makes society in general but how rich it makes the poor! The conduct of governments in many nations over the last 20 years has not typified what a sophisticated and rich society should be doing to enhance the prospects of the weakest among us. The policies of the British government in recent years are the antithesis of sound public policy. In that sense, I judge Britain to be a failed state.