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Part I
The UK experience
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1
The UK news media and austerity
Trends since the global financial crisis
Steve Schifferes and Sophie Knowles
Introduction
Our previous study (see Schifferes and Knowles, 2014), based on a content analysis of key commentators in the years from the 2008 financial crisis to the 2010 General Election, showed how the foundations of the Liberal-Conservative Coalition government’s austerity policy were laid in the debate during the preceding two years. Austerity was not a policy unique to this government, and earlier crises, from 1922 to the 1975 International Monetary Fund (IMF) crisis, had led to public spending cuts (Burk and Cairncross, 1992; Roberts, 2016). What was unprecedented was the length of time that austerity has persisted as the central policy framework 10 years after the financial crisis began.
This chapter looks at how leading commentators in the UK quality press supported or criticised the austerity policy despite growing evidence that it was not working or delivering higher living standards to ordinary citizens (Resolution Foundation, 2017). We find that the terms of the debate, while fluctuating at times, barely shifted despite some challenges to the prevailing ideology. Using the methodology from our 2014 study, we examine the views of influential opinion formers who had the power to shape this debate: from 2012, when austerity was virtually unchallenged, to the run up to the 2015 General Election, narrowly won by the Conservatives on an austerity agenda. With this in mind, we wanted to see how the quality press reflected the terms of this debate. Did they offer different terms, options and alternatives to austerity? While the nature and coverage within the tabloid press is perhaps easier to predict, we look at a cross-section of the quality press, which we hoped would represent a broader and more nuanced debate. We, therefore, explore the way in which the quality press framed the debate on austerity in the lead-up to the narrow and unexpected Conservative victory in the 2015 General Election.
In particular, we ask in our study:
- How has the quality press been framing and contributing to the contours of the debate surrounding austerity as an economic policy?
- Are there continuing trends that have continued in the debate since the 2008 financial crisis, or are there departures since the Coalition government took power in 2010?
- What effect did changing economic and political circumstances have on the debate?
Literature review
In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the media’s relationship with the financial sector has been widely criticised for being too cosy and uncritical (Lewis and Thomas, 2014; Mair and Keeble, 2009); too dependent on a narrow range of sources it uses for information (Knowles et al., 2016; Manning, 2013; Picard et al., 2014); and wedded to narratives that have been shown to have a free-market bias (Davis, 2014; Schiffrin and Fagan, 2012). The crisis, which at first centred on the collapse of the financial system, metamorphosed into a broader debate on the role of the state that was resolutely political in tone and ideological in nature.
During economic crises, public opinion has been shown to shift to both the right and to the left (Blekesaune, 2007; Stevenson, 2001). However, most studies show that it is the way the debate is framed by elites and mediated by the media that has the most decisive influence on shaping political views (Marx and Schumacher, 2016; Murdock and Gripsrud, 2014). This is true despite the rise of social media as an alternative channel of communication. A study of a discussion of austerity on Twitter during the 2015 election campaign shows that although there is a lack of mainstream news media presence, it is still the mainstream media that dictates the debate, as the volume of Tweets peak whenever the topic is mentioned offline, for example in news articles or talk shows (Ragnedda and Ruiu, 2017).
A number of studies show the strength of the neo-liberal, pro-austerity agenda in the British press. One study suggests that although the inevitability of austerity was challenged by the press in the months immediately after George Osborne announced his first budget in 2010, ultimately, little was found in the way of alternatives to what was proposed (Fairclough, 2016). The Guardian newspaper was the only publication to stand out as being against the ‘unnecessary pain’ of cuts to welfare payments.
This press attitude was paralleled by declining support for welfare spending among the general public (see Harkins and Lago-Ocando, 2016, for a discussion of the historical roots of this attitude in the UK). By 2015 the British Social Attitudes longitudinal survey found support for increasing taxes and spending more on health, education and social benefits had fallen from 63% in 2002 to 37% by 2015, and support for more spending on the poor was even lower (Taylor and Taylor-Gooby, 2015). This survey shows Labour supporters tend to support welfare payments, while Conservative supporters do not – a gap that has widened in recent times. Another survey, of 3,500 adults in the UK (Marx and Schumacher, 2016), confirms that political affiliation is a more likely predictor of support for welfare than income levels. It also shows the power of media frames in shaping public attitudes. When shown articles that emphasize debts and deficits rather than inequality, there is lower support for welfare payments. Conversely, after looking at news articles reporting poor economic prospects, there is generally support for generous unemployment benefit.
In this chapter we trace the way that media commentators have shaped the post-2010 debate on austerity, and to what extent they have reinforced or questioned the narrative of the Coalition government. As the literature review demonstrates, the media play a particularly key role at a time of paradigm shifts, by either questioning or reinforcing the case for a new economic or social policy (Dean, 2013; Lippmann, 1922; Mirowski, 2013; Parsons, 1989).
The austerity debate
For the purposes of this chapter, it is important to understand what we mean by ‘austerity’. We therefore review the changing meaning of austerity in 20th-century Britain. The literature on austerity shows that attempts to cut back public spending have a long history, beginning with the 1922 Geddes Axe which was responding to the increased government spending in World War I (see Roberts, Chapter 5 in this volume). In the 1940s austerity took on a different meaning as the attempt to curb private spending to help fund the welfare state in strained economic circumstances (Kynaston, 2007).
In the 1970s, the IMF demands that the UK cut public spending to avoid a run on the pound fundamentally damaged the credibility of the Labour government and helped Mrs Thatcher’s Conservatives to electoral victory in 1979 (Burk and Cairncross, 1992; Roberts, 2016). These cuts to public spending, however, were temporary and not entirely driven by ideology.
The paradigm shift that followed the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 has been labelled ‘neo-liberalism’, and involved a much broader shift away from state provision to free-market capitalism. It included privatisation of state industries, the sale of council housing, big tax cuts for higher earners and the liberalisation of financial markets. Austerity was now just one weapon in shrinking the state. But it was this objective that emerged as the fundamental driving force in the 2010–15 austerity drive.
Austerity first emerged as the key response to the sharp rise in government debt due to the financial crisis in the run-up to the 2010 General Election. The economic competence of the Labour Party came under increasing attack, and by October 2009 most commentators had endorsed the Conservative’s austerity agenda (Schifferes and Knowles, 2014). Although the Conservatives did not win the election outright, they were able to form a coalition with the Liberal Democrats on a platform of implementing austerity to save the UK economy as the Eurozone appeared to be deteriorating into chaos (D’Ancona, 2013; Kavanagh and Cowley, 2010; Wring et al., 2011).
After the Coalition took office, the new chancellor, George Osborne, seized the opportunity to shape the austerity narrative and blame Labour for the austerity that was now needed. His narrative – that the deficit was caused by Labour overspending – was simple and powerful. Labour’s mistake was “the failure to fix the roof while the sun was shining” (as Goerge Osborne himself put it in his 2010 conference party speech), which had put the British economy and the British government in such dire straits. This went unchallenged for many months, as Labour fought an internal leadership battle and then appointed a Shadow Chancellor who appeared to advocate ‘austerity lite’. The power of George Os...
