The Financial Times (4.7) reports that with leading neo-liberal Christine Lagarde taking up a key EU role George Osborne is pitching for the job of the Head of the IMF.
Osborne is currently Editor of the London Evening Standard, a previously decent if right-wing paper which he has turned into an unreadable viewspaper. If you are in London on a late afternoon or early evening check the piles of free Standards and compare with the number of people you see reading it.
Osborne was of course formerly the Tory Chancellor from 2010. Osborne has a history degree and knows little of economics or finance. What he does know however is that if their is a financial crisis (post-2008) then those who must pay for it are not his friends but those who already have the least in society. It was called austerity and was enabled by the Liberal Democrats.
The IMF has form of course (although even it suggested the EU was going to far with austerity measures in Greece) and the IMF cuts in Britain in 1976 underline the point. As Tony Benn, an opponent of the IMF and its cuts strategy, noted a loan from the IMF to prop up the UK economy post the 1973/4 oil crisis came with the demand for wage control (cuts in real terms) and cuts in welfare and public spending.
The Labour Chancellor Denis Healey implemented them and after 1979 Thatcher continued the work he had started.
Who knows if Osborne will get the IMF job (the FT thinks he has a good chance) but he is both uniquely unqualified and qualified for it at the same time
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