Ministers are getting themselves tied up in terrible knots about austerity, which is now becoming the scapegoat for every public sector crisis. This this week it was even blamed for reducing life expectancy.

Paul Martin, the architect of Canada's successful debt reduction programme in the early 1990s as finance minister, maintained that for an austerity programme to work there had to be an end to it and governments could not keep ‘returning to the well' for more cuts.