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The Coalition’s ‘Two Nations’ Hegemonic Project

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British Capitalism After the Crisis

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Abstract

Whilst the Coalition re-established Britain’s pre-crisis growth model, it effectively broke with the ‘One Nation’ hegemonic project which New Labour had pursued in office. In its place, the Coalition advanced a distinctive ‘two nations’ strategy which sought to build a limited but durable base of support. This chapter traces how this strategy underpinned the Coalition’s far-reaching programme of welfare restructuring and public sector retrenchment. The Coalition’s ‘two nations’ hegemonic project enjoyed a limited degree of success in the 2010–2015. But it also eroded some of the key mechanisms which had stabilised British capitalism in the pre-crisis conjuncture and laid the conditions for a backlash in the subsequent period.

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  1. Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute (SPERI), University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

    Scott Lavery

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Lavery, S. (2019). The Coalition’s ‘Two Nations’ Hegemonic Project. In: British Capitalism After the Crisis. Building a Sustainable Political Economy: SPERI Research & Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04046-8_6

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