Public expenditure has increased considerably in the UK from around ten per cent of GDP in the 1870s to forty per cent and above in the 21st century. Clive Lee explores the fluctuations in state spending, highlighting the ongoing political conflict over the size and extent of welfare provision.

Originally published in 1961, this book became widely used as a textbook, as an important source of primary data on British government expenditure statistics and as the point of departure for further empirical and analytical studies of the behaviour of governments. The book was recognised as one of the formative influences in the development of a positive theory of government expenditure which sought to explain the size and structure of the system of public finance rather than justify it

This book considers the relationship between public spending and public deficit and the varying successes and difficulties governments have had in recent years to balance the two. As the fiscal crash of 2007/8 turned into the Great Recession and tax revenues tumbled, public finances across the UK, the USA and Europe plunged into deficit. Controversial attempts by governments to balance their budgets, commonly described as austerity by critics, had mixed success, politically and economically. Michael Burton outlines how politicians tackled the worst economic downturn in over half a century, drawing on previous examples of deficit-reduction to see how governments managed public finances in recessions and where austerity worked and where it failed. This two-part book, which for the first time provides an historical context to austerity, analyses firstly deficit-reduction in the UK in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2010-2016, and then looks at case studies in Europe, the USA, Canada and Asia Pacific. The author concludes that with the ageing population placing greater pressure through health and pensions on the public finances of the developed world, politicians and their electorates will have to learn to live long-term with austerity.

This volume offers a unique comparative perspective on post-war conservatism, as it traces the rise and mutations of conservative ideas in three countries – Britain, France and the United States - across a ‘short’ twentieth century (1929-1990) and examines the reconfiguration of conservatism as a transnational phenomenon. This framework allows for an important and distinctive point --the 1980s were less a conservative revolution than a moment when conservatism, understood in Burkean terms, was outflanked by its various satellites and political avatars, namely, populism, neoliberalism, reaction and cultural and gender traditionalism. No long running, unique ‘conservative mind’ comes out of this book’s transnational investigation. The 1980s did not witness the ascendancy of a movement with deep roots in the 18th century reaction to the French Revolution, but rather the decline of conservatism and the rise of movements and rhetoric that had remained marginal to traditional conservatism.