Recessions Are Discretionary

I was never a member of Momentum, but attending its Northern Regional Conference in 2016 changed my life, because I heard the paper that has since been published here. At the closing plenary session, I also joined in the standing ovation for Laura Pidcock. How time flies.

How, indeed. Since then, the Conservative Government has become electorally dependent on constituencies such as North West Durham, which had voted for Jeremy Corbyn once, and which would have done so again if he had held the Bennite line against Keir Starmer on Brexit.

Therefore, and not because of Covid-19, the Budget of March 2020 has ended the era that had begun with the Budget of December 1976, adopting instead the understanding that a sovereign state with its own free floating, fiat currency had as much of that currency as it chose to issue to itself, and readily available fiscal and monetary means of controlling any inflationary effect.

That that has been the necessary clean break, leaving the Labour Party to drown in its monetarism as surely as in his warmongering, will be evident from how far Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak now gave effect to these wise words of Alan Hutchison's: 

"Recessions are discretionary. Just like unemployment, going into recession is a choice made entirely and exclusively by the government of the day. Remember, if the private sector is somehow unable or unwilling to provide full employment, then there is still one sector left which is always able and should be willing."