There's a handy line from Lord Macaulay's History of England that is occasionally wheeled out to explain why the instinctive old Tory belief in balanced budgets is wrong. Harold Macmillan used it once, to justify his government's high borrowing. "At every stage in the growth of that debt it has been seriously asserted by wise men that bankruptcy and ruin were at hand," Macaulay wrote and Macmillan said. "Yet still the debt kept on growing, and still bankruptcy and ruin were as remote as ever."
Or, in cruder language, never mind the deficit, feel the growth. It's always nice to be told that a problem isn't really a problem after all, and that charge faces David Cameron today just as it faced his Tory predecessors 200 years ago: a reckless enthusiasm for keeping spending down that has nothing to do with sound economic management.
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