Public policy since the 1930s rested on a broadly unquestioned ‘Keynesian’ consensus. This took for granted that economic planning, deficit financing and full employment were inherently desirable and mutually sustaining. Its critics offered two lines of argument. The first, quite simply, was that the array of social services and provisions to which Western Europeans had become accustomed were not sustainable. The second argument, offered with particular urgency in Britain—where the national economy had staggered from crisis to crisis for most of the post-war decades—was that, sustainable or
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