Professor Ben Rosamond presents his inaugural lecture at the School of Social and Political Science. Introduction by Professor John Devaney. 

Conservative economic policy discourse since the global financial crisis: from BS to deepfake. 

‘The economy’ is often the central focus of political exchange. While different claims about the economy may reflect alternative ideological perspectives on how scarce resources should be distributed, a notable feature across advanced democracies in recent decades has been the ‘depoliticisation’ of economic policy. Depoliticisation is visible both in the practice of economic governance and through the emergence and propagation of ‘expert’ understandings of the economy. Using the case of the UK since the global financial crisis, Ben Rosamond explores how these two facets have interacted in governing discourses about the proper management and orientation of the economy. He shows how, during the short span of time that witnessed the phase of post-crisis austerity budgeting, Brexit, the Covid-19 pandemic and the strange episode of ‘Trussonomics’, Conservative economic discourse became increasingly detached from both mainstream technocratic understandings of the economy and everyday citizen experiences of the economy. Meanwhile, certain claims about the economy – especially the tendency to fetishise deficits and debts – have remained remarkably resilient, despite the collapse in public confidence in Conservative stewardship of the economy.

Media

Professor Rosamond's presentation, on slide 2, refers to the following pieces of reviewed and published writing:

Top row middle: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13563467.2017.1373757

Top row right: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jcms.13029

Bottom row left: https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/publications/non-majoritarian-institutions-two-strands-of-liberalism-in-europe