Labour itself advanced austerity and monetarism before the Conservatives.

Evidence

This fact was mirrored in the decline of Mr. Callaghan’s government. As Labour lost parliamentary strength, so it has drifted deep into the ideological territory of the Right, occupying with panache many of the positions only just evacuated by the Right. It was Labour, not the Conservatives, which applied the surgical cut to the welfare state. And there was Mr. Healey’s not wholly unexpected conversion to orthodox monetarism and fiscal restraint—tutored by the IMF and the oil price. In this climate of austerity, Keynes has been decently buried; the Right has re-established its monopoly over “good ideas”; “capitalism” and “the free market” have come back into common usage as terms of positive approval. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1090

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to economic thought—the burial of Keynes and rise of monetarism echoes Hall’s recurring theme of Thatcherism as ideological construction; connects to later ‘New Times’ debates. — connects to: Cameron’s Conservatives campaigned on protecting services before imposing austerity — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 169; New Labour’s welfare-subsidised precarity made the Tory austerity assault easier — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1819
• SHARE: The point that Labour, not the Tories, made the first welfare-state cuts is a provocation worth sending to anyone writing on UK austerity history.