Despite the deficit reduction rhetoric, George Osborne, the UK Chancellor, has in fact been doing the bare minimum to keep the markets off his back. He’s also had plenty of help from the Bank of England, which itself has become leveraged to the gunnels with government debt to ease the path back to fiscal sustainability. None the less, this is plainly a much better place to be than the Eurozone, which has imposed entirely counterproductive debt controls on governments and thus far at least, denied them the luxury of debt monetisation by the European Central Bank. The result is a crushing depression for much of the single currency bloc.