The coalition Government is indulging in an experiment that has always failed in the past and the cost to the individual will prove highly expensive, a leading intellectual has claimed.
Professor Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston said that Britain’s response to the financial crisis is comparable to the steps taken by President Roosevelt in 1936 when he introduced a series of measures in the United States that, Professor Chomsky believes, made the situation there worse.
Professor Chomsky, a bestselling political writer. said: “He [Roosevelt] cut back on economic stimulus. The country was still in a recession and it deepened the Depression exactly as predicted and it’s already apparently happening in England.
“So it’s a kind of an experiment in failed policies, which are almost predictably going to fail.” He added: “Recession is based on lack of demand and by reducing demand you deepen the depression.”
The academic questioned the Government’s so-called efficiency drive, which he claimed was only superficially efficient because it is something that can be counted. “If you were to measure the cost to the individual, however, it’s very expensive,” he said, before pointing out that “the costs to people are never counted”.
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Professor Chomsky, who is on a lecture tour of Europe, said: “I think the current programmes – and this is across the whole of Europe, but dramatically here [in Britain] – are kind of an experiment in something that has always failed in the past.”
His damning comments came as the Liberal Democrats were preparing to defend their role as part of the coalition in pushing through the cutbacks at their annual spring conference in Sheffield.