Editorial: Austerity and some contemporary challenges for professionalism

The early post cold-war consensus - that bourgeois democracy has solved the riddle of history and a global capitalist economy will usher in worldwide prosperity and peace - lies in tatters; but no plausible alternatives of political and economic organization are in sight (Mishra, 2013). Globalisation has everywhere rapidly weakened older forms of authority. ‘Conservatives’ institute revolutionary free-market ‘reforms’; meanwhile technocrats slash employment and welfare benefits, and immiserate entire societies and generations. Both main UK political parties - Conservative and Labour - advocate continued austerity, albeit for the latter it has been defined as ‘austerity-lite’, with a mainstream position arguing for a slower reduction of debt, involving some combinations of spending and tax adjustments that would depend on the growth of the economy and tax revenues. This position however has proved to be not uncomfortable with people becoming very rich – putting the blame for the crash and the economic pressure for a recovery from the crash, on labour rather than the greed, avarice and shady practices of capital