Abstract
The main political opponents of the Conservative Party have struggled to develop a coherent set of ideas by which austerity may be challenged. Under Ed Miliband, the Labour Party struggled to construct an alternative to the pre-crisis growth model while accommodating austerity and, specifically, the perceived need for deficit reduction. The election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader offers the prospect of a more coherent anti-austerity politics on the centre-left, yet there are few signs of austerity being dislodged from the the common sense of political discourse. The groups that seem to have had most success in challenging the Conservatives’ ideological hegemony have been those that have strongly articulated localist or nationalist sentiment, yet these groups are pragmatic on economic policy and only opportunistically anti-austerity.
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Berry, C. (2016). What’s Left?. In: Austerity Politics and UK Economic Policy. Building a Sustainable Political Economy: SPERI Research & Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59010-7_6
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