Many people are speaking out against austerity, warning of the huge dangers posed by the government’s massive and unnecessary spending cuts and the need to protest against them:
“We are the real opposition to what the government is doing, and we want to build that opposition to their austerity programme,” Mark Serwotka, PCS general secretary.
“We seem to be reverting to an older past in which a mega-rich minority pre-empts much of the profit of any growth in the economy while the rest of the population has to scramble for whatever they can get,” John Gray, formerly professor of European thought at the London School of Economics.
“We invented the banks to lend to the real economy, yet the austerity measures demand that we lend huge sums from the real economy to prop up insolvent banks. We need to be talking to people about macroeconomics, not allowing the government to present this as a crisis of the public sector,” Ann Pettifor, distinguished academic.
“Austerity as the solution is just wrong. There won’t be a return to confidence – quite the contrary. So the direction Europe is going is I think the wrong direction,” Joseph Stiglitz, economics Nobel prize winner.
“It’s becoming clear that Britain’s unnecessary turn to premature austerity is becoming a historic policy and political disaster that will haunt the country for years,” Paul Krugman US economist and Nobel prize winner.
