May tells UK Conservatives end of austerity is in sight

Bloomberg

Prime Minister Theresa May promised austerity-weary Britons an end to years of public spending cuts, in a speech designed to paint a positive vision for the country outside the EU.
“A decade after the financial crash, people need to know that the austerity it led to is over and that their hard work has paid off,” May told the Conservative Party conference in her keynote speech in Birmingham on Wednesday.
Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond has faced months of calls to end the squeeze after a backlash cost the Conservatives their parliamentary majority last year. The government has already relaxed a 1 percent cap on pay increases in place since 2010 and promised extra funding for the National Health Service, a response to the electoral threat from the opposition Labour Party led by socialist Jeremy Corbyn, who has pledged to
increase spending.
Britain has brought down the budget deficit from a peacetime record of almost 10 percent of gross domestic product in 2009-10 to less than 2 percent in the last fiscal year, but the cost has been felt keenly, with almost 140 billion pounds of spending cuts hitting public services and social aid at a time when wage packets for millions of people effectively stagnated.