ABSTRACT
This is the first article to examine how Margaret Thatcher and David Cameron constructed respective rhetorical justifications for neoliberalism following periods of economic crisis. Particularly at the end of James Callaghan’s and Gordon Brown’s premierships, the Labour government(s) had navigated the country through sustained periods of economic turbulence that originated from global downturns (Reinhart and Rogoff 2009, 8-9;Woods 2010, 51-63). Specifically, these were the lingering consequences of the 1973 oil crisis and the 2008 economic crisis, both of which subjected the British economy to marked declines that the respective Labour governments had faced prior to facing the electorate in 1979 and 2010. On both occasions, Labour lost office to a Conservative Party which claimed that those economic circumstances had been largely precipitated by the Labour’s fiscal imprudence and excessive public spending, and that such expenditure had left Britain unprepared to deal with the ensuing economic disarray. Indeed, during both elections, the Conservative leader argued that Labour’s imprudence necessitated a firm change in direction towards much greater economic liberalism and a reduced role for the state. To do so, the Conservative Party’s leadership constructed rhetorical arguments to justify such a shift using the respective crisis as both a justification and an opportunity (the manner in which the political Right exploits economic crises to extend and entrench neoliberalism has been examined by Klein 2007 and Mirowski 2013), thereby presenting further economic liberalisation and rolling back the state as the sole solutions to the country’s ills.
