“For the past nine years, the Conservatives have been cleaning up Labour’s mess. Because of the tough decisions that our party made and our success in bringing down the deficit, the economy has continued to grow and the public finances have been restored… The strength of the UK’s balance sheet – the hard work done by all of us in this country – means that we are now in a position to invest properly in our future.”
This is from the Conservative Party’s general election manifesto. If it sounds familiar, that’s because a similar narrative has also been pushed by much of the media.
Last year I wrote a book called ‘Media Amnesia’, which was about all the misremembering, strategic forgetting and rewriting of history that has happened during the years of austerity following the 2008 financial crisis. As a banking meltdown morphed into a public debt crisis, blame shifted from greedy bankers and free market ‘casino capitalism’ onto the public sector, immigrants and people who didn’t have much money. This forgetting and misremembering helped make austerity, privatisation and corporate tax breaks seem like common sense responses to the crisis.
