Paul Krugman: Britain's Prime Minister Is a Prisoner to His Policies

“If this plan is working, what would a failing one look like?” So asked Martin Wolf in his column in the Financial Times in response to British Prime Minister David Cameron’s recent speech insisting that his austerity policy was right, is right and is succeeding.

Simon Wren-Lewis, an economist at Oxford, went through Mr. Cameron’s assertions in some detail online, among other things catching him more or less lying about what the Office of Budget Responsibility — roughly speaking the counterpart of the Congressional Budget Office in the United States — actually said about the impact of austerity on growth. I was particularly struck by the way Mr. Cameron is still claiming that Britain’s low interest rates show that his policy is successful and necessary.