There is a point which David Cameron likes to make in his speeches at the moment: that the Government's plan for reducing the deficit over the next four years will merely bring the national overdraft down to the level it reached in 1976, when Denis Healey had to beg a loan from the International Monetary Fund. "You see?" he is trying to say, "we aren't even in the foothills of the austerity Alps we have to climb: we need to go further, faster."
That Labour experience remains the relevant one for every politician who will be around after polling day to play a part, large or small, in the collective effort that lies ahead. In the Treasury and in Tory HQ, what happened a generation ago is being pored over for lessons that might help get us out of the black hole we are in. Unlike the Canadian fiscal rescue of the 1990s – itself a rich source of possible solutions – it has the advantage of being a very British crisis.
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