IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/cnpexx/v23y2018i1p27-45.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Legitimation of Post-crisis Capitalism in the United Kingdom: Real Wage Decline, Finance-led Growth and the State

Author

Listed:
  • Scott Lavery

Abstract

Since the 2008 financial crisis, capitalist development in the UK has been marked by both continuity and change. Whilst the Coalition government effectively re-established the UK's ‘finance-led’ growth model, it simultaneously broke with the legitimation strategy which New Labour had advanced in the pre-crisis conjuncture. The Coalition advanced a distinctive ‘two nations’ strategy which sought to secure a limited but durable base of support in a context of fiscal consolidation. This strategy was conditional upon the deep and unprecedented period of real wage decline which took hold in the post-crisis conjuncture. However, the Coalition successfully transformed this potential liability into a political asset, constructing a series of ‘moralised antagonisms’ between wage earners and welfare recipients, on the one hand, and private and public sector workers, on the other. Whilst this strategy secured a limited base of popular support, it also re-embedded a series of structural weaknesses within post-crisis UK capitalism. These imbalances are likely to undermine the stability of the UK’s finance-led growth model in the future and will condition British politics as the country embarks upon the process of leaving of the EU.

Suggested Citation

  • Scott Lavery, 2018. "The Legitimation of Post-crisis Capitalism in the United Kingdom: Real Wage Decline, Finance-led Growth and the State," New Political Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 23(1), pages 27-45, January.
  • Handle: RePEc:taf:cnpexx:v:23:y:2018:i:1:p:27-45
    DOI: 10.1080/13563467.2017.1321627
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13563467.2017.1321627
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/13563467.2017.1321627?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Wenying Fu, 2024. "State infrastructural power through scalar practices: On China’s decarbonization endeavors," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 56(3), pages 784-801, May.
    2. Karsten Kohler & Engelbert Stockhammer, 2022. "Growing differently? Financial cycles, austerity, and competitiveness in growth models since the Global Financial Crisis," Review of International Political Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 29(4), pages 1314-1341, July.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:cnpexx:v:23:y:2018:i:1:p:27-45. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/cnpe20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.