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As we approach a decade since the 2008 financial crisis now is the time to critically evaluate its political, economic and social consequences. From this distance we can recognise the scale and scope of the financial crisis and how it fostered a much deeper political and economic crisis in the UK that is mirrored across Europe. From this vantage point we can recognise the Austerity agenda emerging in the wake of the crisis and conceptualised in different ways: as political ideology, as coherent narrative and political strategy as well as a policy programme with clear objectives and recognizable outcomes. There is no consensus on whether the UK ever recovered from the crisis; less still that the UK economy is capable of recovering on its current trajectory. Strong political support for financialised growth ensured a failed response to the crisis, which consequently resulted in the UK economy taking longer to recover from 2008 financial crisis than from the 1929 Great Depression. Public policy commitments to Austerity compound economic fragility by advocating the simultaneous deleveraging (paying down debts) of both the public and private sectors. Austerity-led recovery is elusive, forecast in the medium-term but always revised down.
This series seeks to expose the ‘hidden’ costs of Austerity-led recovery and this article contributes to this by articulating why and how Austerity is a failed experiment. This begins with acknowledging the well-established weakness of the dominant economic framework used by political elites, policy-makers, and media commentators to evaluate the relative success of the UK economy. Feminist political economy offers a methodology for unpacking how macroeconomic inequalities are made and re-made through the social foundations of the economy allowing us to ‘see’ the hidden costs of recovery. As contemporary economics begins to acknowledge the unequal relationships that sustain market failure, feminist political economy already conceptually captures the different scales of economic activity at the household, but also the community, level which provides an important advantage when seeking to make definitive claims about an on-going economic experiment.
