Budget Day: should our times really be called ‘the age of austerity’?

It is Budget Day. Prepare for another barrage of “messages” about the virtues or perils, depending on your point of view, of ‘austerity’. From where has this ubiquitous term come? And should it apply to our times? Dot Wordsworth, our language columnist, has some answers:

‘If we are invited to think we are experiencing austerity, despite the heaps of cheap clothes in Primark or expensive food in Waitrose, then it is Mr Cameron’s doing.

In April 2009, not so long ago, at the Conservative spring conference (that needless enterprise) he promised an ‘age of austerity’. In the same speech he promised a ‘People’s Right To Know’, a plan under which ‘Every item of government spending over £25,000, nationally and locally, will have to be published online.’ No doubt it is, somewhere, though it is no more use to me than the cones hotline.

Austerity was a good honest label to popularise in the 1940s.