New Labour’s welfare-subsidised precarity made the Tory austerity assault easier

Evidence

This was the way Brownism and Blairism worked: allowing low wages and precarity to proliferate with one hand, mitigating their effects with benefits on the other. By then, like most of the population, I loathed New Labour. Labour had become so capitalist realist that surely it couldn’t be much worse if the Tories got in? I shared the widespread view that elections don’t change much: all that’s on offer are minimally different versions of the same thing (neoliberalism). … It soon became very clear that this was not the case. Cameron and Osborne unleashed capitalist realism 2.0, the most audacious confidence trick in recent political history: make the poor and vulnerable pay for the banking crisis. Use the crisis as a pretext to destroy even more of the welfare state. Sigh their fake sighs, and tell us what “difficult choices” they had to make… — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1819

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the whole capitalist realism project Fisher is known for; this is an explicit autobiographical instantiation of the theory he set out in Capitalist Realism. — connects to: Labour itself advanced austerity and monetarism before the Conservatives. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1090; Labour, not the Conservatives, delivered the first welfare-state cuts; New Labour operated within Thatcher’s neoliberal parameters. (+3 more)
• DEFINE: Gives a concrete sketch of what ‘capitalist realism 2.0’ means as a concept: crisis as pretext for welfare demolition under fake-sigh rhetoric.

Broader Connections

• New Labour operated within Thatcher’s neoliberal parameters. #corroborates (0.85)
• Labour itself advanced austerity and monetarism before the Conservatives. #corroborates (0.82) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1090
• Defeated Labour adopted Thatcherite economics before Thatcher governed #corroborates (0.80) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1090
• Labour, not the Conservatives, delivered the first welfare-state cuts #corroborates (0.78)
• Broader neoliberal shifts enabled austerity’s return to economic common sense #expands (0.76) — Mark Blyth, Austerity, 406
• Tory welfare cuts dismantled the welfare infrastructure that enabled working-class popular modernism #expands (0.74)