Austerity, human rights and Europe’s accountability gap

There is a line in Ferdinand Mount’s book The New Few, on inequality, greed and the dual crises of politics and capitalism, where he remarks: “The trouble is that, on the whole politicians can only think about one thing at a time”. Here Mount refers to the focus in the 1980s and 1990s on the dire economic state of Britain but, he notes, in the process, “… other abiding imperatives were lost sight of [including]: the need to maintain the shape of our democratic institutions” that would protect Britain from the worst harms of the free market.