Brits face austerity by at least 2020

The British public should be prepared to put up with more austerity measures, at least by 2020, two key British thinktanks have warned.

According to the Institute for Government (IfG) and the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) the financial meltdown that began in 2008 would continue to plague Britain by at least 2020, that means the government™s sweeping spending cuts will persist for longer than the 2015 election.

IfG™s deputy director Julian McCrae said despite comments by Chancellor George Osborne that lack of growth will probably extend austerity measures by another two years to 2017, international experience shows that people should be prepared for the savings plan to be further extended to at least 2020.

“If the UK experience proves to be as drawn-out as the Canadian one [in the 1980s and 1990s], we should expect not just 2015, but also 2020 to be an austerity election,” IfG said.

Meanwhile, IFS’s deputy director Carl Emmerson suggested an incoming government can ease the cutbacks on state departments by increasing taxes after the 2015 that will lead to further pressure on the public.

According to the EU statistics authority, Eurostat, Britain still has one of the highest budget deficits in the European Union despite massive spending cuts.

Eurostat figures showed in April that Britain™s ratio of budget deficit to gross domestic product (GDP) was 6.3 percent in 2012 that is only behind debt-ravaged Spain, Ireland, Greece and Portugal in the worst-performing EU economies.

This is only slightly better than the situation in 2009 in the wake of the financial meltdown when budget deficit comprised 11.5 percent of the GDP in 2009, which put it behind Ireland and Greece.

AMR/HE

This article originally appeared on: Press TV