Afterword: New Labour’s Legacy … the Con-Dems and Zombie Blairism

Abstract

New Labour finally left office at the 2010 General Election making way for the first coalition government in Britain since the Second World War, led by a pairing of elite former public schoolboys David Cameron (Eton College), the Tory party leader and Prime Minister, and Nick Clegg (Westminster School) the Liberal Democrat as Deputy Prime Minister, the first UK two-party coalition government since the 1930s. This government quickly acquired the ambiguous popular label the Con-Dems. The primary objectives and political context for the new administration has been to continue the processes of shifting power to the private sector, thus displacing public service and economic provision and more immediately to move relatively swiftly to reduce the national budget deficit bequeathed by Gordon Brown’s outgoing Labour government. New Labour under Blair and Brown (the latter first as Chancellor of the Exchequer and subsequently, Prime Minister from June 2007) had participated in fuelling the illusion of prosperity by stoking the financial bubble, encouraging debt as well as unregulated innovation and ever more complexity (derivatives) rather than distinctly supporting growth in sustainable “real” production. In their final period in power, Labour under Brown were then forced to deal with the emergent financial crisis in the UK by printing money through quantitative easing (QE), and stemming the threatened banking collapse through their re-financialisation and partial nationalisation of banks as confidence began to disperse setting off the most recent recession, probably the deepest and most critical for the social, political, and economic status quo since the 1930s in the United States, UK, and beyond.KeywordsCoalition GovernmentQuantitative EaseFinancial BubbleSocial PolarisationRecent RecessionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.