Austerity isnt about reducing debt, it's about reducing borrowing costs.
UK debt went from 50% GDP to 75% in two years by your own graph -- you'll notice that rate basically flatlined when austerity was introduced.
Increasing your debt load by 12.5% *GDP* YoY is an insane situation to be in; austerity was part of the policy response which enabled the UK to continue to borrow.
Ideologues on the left havent address this, as far as i'm aware. Preferring to blame austerity for one of the worst economic crises in modern history.
In the UK, however, austerity has been a persistent policy for over 13 years. Low taxation, low spending, persistent erosion of workers rights. No spending even when times were better, leaving it all the more fragile the next time.
Compare to the US, Canada and elsewhere, which performed strong austerity measures immediately following the 2009 crash, then dialled them back - as per economists recommendations - and recovered much faster than the UK.
What's going on is that the UK population is greying and far older than it once was, and huge portions of the UK budget are going towards paying pensioners, the NHS etc. Worse, the triple lock ensures that this part of the UK budget is essentially inflexible. The perceived "austerity" is jsut a reflection of demographic trends.
Or the country can experience a reduction in the quality of goods and services being delivered, for example instead of being able to see a doctor, some portion of the population is now expected to consult with someone less qualified.
It's high in historical perspective because the austerity years of the 2010s and Brexit choked growth. But we could still choose to spend more on services without being unusual in European terms
Since 1965 companies pay a much lower corporation tax.
Tax to GDP has been a little bit up and down but only recently did it breach the 1970s peaks.
I don’t think this matches with “ Taxation in the UK is currently at the highest levels in recorded history.”
Since it's not straightforward to get figures for before 1965:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_corporation_tax...
> Until 1965, companies were subject to income tax on their profits[11] at the same rates as was levied on individual taxpayers
> In addition to income tax, companies were also subject to a profits tax, which was deducted from company profits when determining the income tax liability
> At the time of Hugh Gaitskell's 1951 budget, the profits tax was 50% for distributed profits and 10% for undistributed profits.
> The tax rates fell to 22.5% on distributed profits and 2.5% on undistributed profits by 1957
This means that in 1951, if a company had a profit of 100, the taxes were *at least* (I'm using undistributed profits, not taking into account higher rates, etc.etc.) 52.75
(10% of 100, plus 47.5% of the remaining 90% of 100)
The 47.5% is the standard rate of "nine shillings and sixpence in the pound", per https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1951/apr/...
In 1959, a company with a profit of 100, would've instead paid in taxes *at least* 40.28
(2.5% of 100, plus 38.75% of the remaining 97.5% of 100)
The 38.75 is the standard rate per https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/1989-03-03/debates/3cc...
see also: "seven shillings and ninepence in the pound" per https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1959/apr/...
The current corporation tax main rate is 25% (the small profits rate is even less: 19%)
In any case, the low rate of taxation is only one element of the persistent austerity policies that have been in place since the 2009 economic crash.
In terms of government spending, we have easily-obtainable data on the NHS[2] and those available by thinktanks like IFS[3]. The NHS spending is low (and again consistently lower than our peers in Europe). I find the charts from the IFS interesting because it doesn't show a lot of change in spending year-on-year (relative to GDP) since the '90s, except for the catastrophes.
But the table at the bottom is very interesting. Health £ spending up, but equivalent to 2-3% increase YoY, which barely keeps up with inflation. Education, public order & housing spending are all DOWN in absolute terms, forget about inflation. Defense, social security, transport all increased at a rate less than inflation. (Obviously a huge increase in debt spending recently due to Covid measures.)
That there is long-term austerity exemplified. No myth.
[1] https://www.oecd.org/tax/revenue-statistics-united-kingdom.p...
[2] https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/projects/nhs-in-a-nutshell/nhs-...
[3] https://ifs.org.uk/taxlab/taxlab-key-questions/what-does-gov...
Er, no. The UK currently has the highest tax burden for 70 years.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/yes-five-million-are-on-...
Which by definition is austerity.
The austerity policy you're suggesting has been overwhelmingly found to have failed almost everywhere it's been tried. Cutting spending in a downturn creates slower growth, which makes it even harder to recover. The book in OP argues that austerity is not about recovery, it's about disciplining workers.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/07/imf-au...
Totally agree that austerity as practiced in this country is dogmatic and about keeping people in place.
The most popular theory (and one with some quite good empirical support) is that government should increase spending exactly following a crash or time of economic hardship. That has been the mainstream economical thinking for near a century.
What people mostly disagree with each other is what to do on times of strong growth.
We were borrowing at 1% (basically free money because inflation was higher) and we might have spent that on growth policies, but George Osbourne thought this was a good way to reduce the size of the state, a political decision.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/chartimage?uri=/economy/governmentpub... (source: Figure 1 here: https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/governmentpublicsectorandtaxe...)
You can see that it was indeed increasing through 2008/2009, although that was largely a one-off thing because of the financial crisis.
The problem is austerity didn't work, and the reason is that it also reduces economic growth (slowing growth of the demoninator - GDP). Without austerity, if we'd spent money on infrastructure, we'd likely have had higher growth, reducing debt to GDP that way.
Plus the fact is the markets were lending the UK money at 1% for very long terms all through the 2010s, so funding a large debt to spend on infrastructure would not have been difficult.