DAVID CAMERON’S warning about “red warning lights … once again flashing on the dashboard of the global economy” is an acknowledgement that his government’s economic policy is a shambles.

He and Chancellor George Osborne, with the complicity of the Liberal Democrat Orange Book neoliberal fanatics, claimed that the austerity agenda would eradicate the deficit during this Parliament.

It has fallen by a third but is rising again, so Osborne’s spurious “steady as she sinks” rhetoric must be rejected.

Cameron prefers to blame everyone but the Bullingdon boys for the economic problems.

He pointed to the eurozone “teetering on the brink of a possible third recession” and emerging markets slowing down.

If he had waited a few hours, he could have added that Japan is again in recession in the wake of a sales tax that choked off growth encouraged by last year’s quantitative easing.

Cameron and Osborne constantly assert that the British economy is performing much better than other leading industrialised countries.

The figures speak for themselves, but they don’t tell the whole story.

Britain’s conservative coalition actually killed an already existing mini-recovery that had been stimulated by government investment by Gordon Brown’s new Labour administration.

The Tories and Liberal Democrats backed an austerity approach designed to place the burden for the recession on the working class while assisting the wealthy individuals and businesses to grow richer.

That part of the coalition’s strategy has been a resounding success.

The rich have got richer at the expense of the poor, as the report issued yesterday by economists at the London School of Economics and Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex illustrates clearly.

The government’s much-touted tax changes may have taken some people out of paying income tax, but cuts in benefits and tax credits, together with higher council tax, have left them worse off.

The Chancellor’s oft-repeated claims of the economy turning the corner in line with his long-term strategy are threadbare because of the nature of the recovery such as it is.

Economic growth has largely been stoked by consumer spending based on an easing of credit restrictions and by a housing market price bubble that is already beginning to dissipate.

Aside from this specific peculiarity of the British economy, the Cameron-Osborne austerity agenda has been on a par with that foisted by Angela Merkel and the Bundesbank on the eurozone and by Abenomics in Japan.

The only major economy that has continued with appreciable growth, albeit at a lower rate and with a number of ongoing problems, is China where the Communist Party leadership invested heavily in infrastructure projects during the global crisis in order to stimulate the economy.

Britain, the EU and Japan all hope to see an outward-looking expanding global economy, but each expects its competitors to finance it through state investment.

Working people bear the brunt of this banker-dictated agenda which lays down unending austerity and hardship for the people of no property while the capitalist class sequesters an ever-greater share of national wealth.

Any alternative economic approach that includes public spending cuts, whether dubbed “fair” or not, will involve a squeeze on working-class living standards, which would render it unacceptable.

Only a qualitatively different approach, including a transfer of wealth from rich to poor and broader public ownership and intervention in the economy, can constitute a real alternative.