These proposals, when fully implemented, will not only enforce a permanent regime of fiscal austerity, but also further remove macroeconomic policy from democratic control. For these reasons they need to be vigorously fought right across Europe. But if readers in the UK imagine that they are not affected, since we are not in the Eurozone, they need to think again, for the structural deficit has also become the preferred fiscal target of Chancellor Osborne, backed by the Office of Budget Responsibility.  While the most influential economic think tanks, the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the National Institute for Economic and Social research, have begun to challenge the Coalition's austerity policies, they have not as yet repudiated the use of the structural deficit as a fiscal target. So what exactly is the structural deficit, and why is it such a danger?

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What lies behind this extraordinary restriction to be placed on the democratic right of national parliaments to determine fiscal policy? In essence, it is the politics of depoliticisation. European business and political élites want to avoid any return to `Keynesian' active macroeconomic management, which they see as inherently liable to capture by popular interests. During the neoliberal era, they have therefore increasingly sought to insulate economic policy decisions from democratic control, by handing over monetary policy to independent central banks; subordinating spending departments to Treasury / Finance Ministry control; and imposing fiscal targets. This drive has been supported by a wide-ranging ideological offensive, centred on the supposed virtues of `efficient' markets, supply-side competitiveness measures, flexible labour markets, tax cuts for the rich, privatisation, and free movement across borders of trade and capital (but not labour).

In Britain, mainstream political scientists have framed these changes in the wider narrative of public choice between market and state as modes of economic regulation, on which distinct `varieties of capitalism' have evolved. They assume that there is broad agreement on all sides as to society's core values and goals, and that the choice of a given variety (with specified policy institutional and practices) is made on the basis of their effectiveness.  `Depoliticisation', in this narrative, is about a shift from state to market.