Conclusion: Anglo-American Politics in the Age of Austerity

Abstract

Critical junctures in the political and economic development of nations are not always self-evident to those living through them. In late 2008, however, it was obvious that momentous events were upon us. The financial system came crashing down and the world teetered on the brink of depression. The collapse of the grand banking houses of Wall Street seemed to bury in their rubble the free market model that had governed the US and UK for the previous 30 years. This was a crisis of Anglo-Saxon capitalism (Gamble, 2009a, p. 7). The logical expectation was that the political economies of both states would branch off onto a different path, even if the new route was not obvious. And yet, as chronicled in this volume, so much of what has occurred since then belies this prediction. In terms of public policy, economic governance, and political trends, there has been far more consistency than change. Lack of regulation in the financial sector was blamed by many for causing the crisis, yet changes in financial regulation have been relatively unobtrusive. Politics has been shaken up with the rise of the Tea Party movement in the US and the advent of a Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition government in the UK, yet this highlights that the trends have broken more toward the right, even if not definitively so.