In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, rising national debt led intellectuals – particularly on the left – to theorise about the relationship between debt and economies. The late anthropologist David Graeber was critical of what he dubbed the rise of debtocracies, and the role that state actors played in using crises to legitimise policies of fiscal restraint, as the UK witnessed in 2010 under the coalition government. At the same time, heterodox economists in France, Italy and Spain began to question the legitimacy of indebtedness by conducting what they called “citizen debt audits”, and challenging the prevailing assumptions that spending restraint was necessary.
Debt has continued to animate policymakers in the UK – especially in times of crisis. And significant attention has been paid to the cardinal rule set by the government: reducing debt as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) over a five-year period. The Institute for Government (IfG) recently suggested that in order to nominally meet this rule, the government had pencilled in implausible spending restraints that would not survive contact with political reality. The Resolution Foundation think tank has been more direct, accusing the chancellor of announcing a “fiscal fiction” at the Budget in March.
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