Austerity and Fairness in UK Parliamentary Discourse of the 2008 Economic Crisis. Inequality Revisited?

Economic inequality has steadily increased in the UK since the 1980s. This tendency has been heavily influenced by a style of governance, namely neoliberalism, that prioritises narrow economic imperatives and downgrades the importance of pursuing polices that enhance wellbeing and social justice. The 2008 economic crisis and the establishment of austerity as the solution to the crisis exacerbated this situation. Within this context, this thesis analyses the use of the words 'austerity' and 'fairness' as legitimisation tools in UK Budget parliamentary debates in the House of Commons. Using corpus linguistic methods, I compared two different corpora: a crisis corpus (2008-2012) and a separate corpus covering a period of economic growth (2002-2006). This allowed me to highlight the patterns of use of 'austerity' and 'fairness' and establish the semantic links between the two concepts, contextualising them in terms of economic inequality.
The results show that the crisis marked a clear change in the frequency and the semantic contexts of both 'austerity' and 'fairness'. During the crisis, austerity was related to debt morality, textured in ambivalent phraseological constructions. Firstly, the narrative of 'the age of austerity' emerges, where connotation in terms of urgency and epochal change were prevalent. Secondly, austerity becomes a label for business as usual, embedding deficit reduction in policy-making. Moreover, in the growth corpus, 'fairness' appears surrounded by key neoliberal concepts such as enterprise. This pattern, however, is absent in the crisis corpus. Instead, there is a clear tendency to associate 'fairness' with taxation, limiting the moral semantic scope of this word to that of reciprocity understood as an economic transaction or as responsibility to contribute. With these results, I argue that the government's role was limited to that of an accountant, concerned mainly with promoting the conservative values of sacrifice and reward, within which increases in economic inequality could be more easily tolerated.