Merkel’s exasperation - Our idea of austerity is challenged

“I call it balancing the budget. Everyone else is using this term ‘austerity’. That makes it sound like something truly evil.”

One of the old truisms, hackneyed or otherwise, promised that if you controlled the agenda for a meeting then you controlled the outcome of that meeting. After all, if you controlled what might be discussed you probably controlled what could be decided. Equally, if you can engineer the vocabulary of a debate then you’ve gone a long way to setting the atmosphere, the political context or objective, in which it will be conducted.

For the last number of years Government and EU measures designed to confront our unsustainable spending and consequent economic crisis have been, without any sense of irony, described as a kind “austerity”.