Austerity in the Commons: A corpus critical analysis of austerity and its surrounding grammatical context in Hansard (1803-2015)

June 2015 saw thousands of UK citizens join ‘anti-austerity’ protests after the surprise election of the Conservative Party as the party of government at the Westminster parliament. People in other European countries have also campaigned against the prevailing political ideology that asserts that ‘we’ need to ‘balance the books.’ The very existence of a protest movement defining itself by opposition to austerity supports the status of austerity as a sociopolitical keyword summarizing a complex political process.