The first moves of a new prime minister can have lasting consequences. When Clement Attlee went from being wartime deputy prime minister to Labour prime minister in 1945, he had little alternative but to offer the nation the peacetime equivalent of Churchill’s blood, toil, tears and sweat.
The age of austerity was born as the UK rebuilt its wartorn economy. Shortages necessarily involved rationing until a fully fledged peacetime economy could be restored. The contrast with the Conservative-Liberal Democrat policy of austerity from 2010 onwards could hardly have been starker.
