Rightwing thinktanks call time on age of austerity

Free-market bodies support the government's ramping up of debts to confront the Covid-19 outbreak
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Britain's leading free-market thinktanks, which backed Margaret Thatcher's tax-cutting and privatisation agenda and sanctioned the last 10 years of austerity, have lent their support to the government's plans for unprecedented and sustained increases in public spending.

In a shift of stance that will give Rishi Sunak political clearance to ramp up UK debts to levels not seen in peacetime, the Adam Smith Institute, the Centre for Policy Studies, the Institute of Economic Affairs and Policy Exchange said they endorsed public spending increases to confront the coronavirus outbreak and state-funded investment to boost the recovery.