Eaton writes that earlier this year, as the clamour for spending cuts grew, Budd warned: "If you go too quickly, then there is a risk that the recovery will be snuffed out and we will go back into a recession -- I mean what the Americans say: "Remember 1937."
And in a 1992 interview, he is reported to have said, "The nightmare I sometimes have, about this whole experience, runs as follows. I was involved in making a number of proposals which were partly at least adopted by the government and put in play by the government. Now, my worry is . . . that there may have been people making the actual policy decisions . . . who never believed for a moment that this was the correct way to bring down inflation.
"They did, however, see that it would be a very, very good way to raise unemployment, and raising unemployment was an extremely desirable way of reducing the strength of the working classes -- if you like, that what was engineered there in Marxist terms was a crisis of capitalism which re-created a reserve army of labour and has allowed the capitalists to make high profits ever since.
"Now again, I would not say I believe that story, but when I really worry about all this I worry whether that indeed was really what was going on."
Read Eaton's full piece at http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2010/07/class-war-budd-thatcher-cuts
