Professor John McHale:

I could not agree more. Fiscal responsibility is independent of one's view of the appropriate size of government. If anything, I would say the more one believes in government, the more one should believe in fiscal stability because the latter is necessary to ensure one has the funding to pay for the government one believes in. We saw during the crisis what happened when the capacity to fund government was lost. People referred to it as austerity, but it was more a reflection of the fact that once a state lost access to funding, whatever alternative financing it sourced would come with conditions attached. As that is impossible to avoid, the ideal is not to get oneself into that situation in the first place.

It would be something positive that would come out of our interventions, if we can ensure that it does not become a party political or a left-right issue. It is something that we all believe in and whatever are one's goals in terms of the appropriate way to organise society, we see fiscal stability and sustainability as instrumental to achieving those goals.