[ZeroGravitas]

It's not. The government sharply cut when they got into power, then eased off a bit so that we got a tiny amount of growth to coincide with the election, now they're going to cut more again.

So success if you're a neo-con distaster capitalist, failure for everyone else.

[gadders]

So all those people that voted for the policy to continue two weeks ago are neo-con disaster capitalists? I never know there were that many of them.

[tjradcliffe]

Your account of UK economic growth is not correct: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-32493745

Economic growth in the UK was about 0.5% quarterly for all of 2013 and 2014, and actually dropped to one of the lowest rates in the past two years in the quarter before the election. So unless you broaden "coincide" to mean "the two years preceding an election", or almost half the currently fixed term of Parliament it is not posisble to sustain the claim you make. And if governments can reliably provide economic expansion over two years it isn't clear why they wouldn't do so all the time.

The social construction of "neo-cons" and "distaster capitalists" as the hated Other by the Left cannot mask the underlying objective reality that austerity policies have not been anything like the disaster that was confidently predicted, and may have even done some good, although I'm sure the proper economic analysis of the effect of these policies is a good deal more nuanced than the simple post hoc ergo propter hoc claim that pundits will be making, although the pundits on the Right do have the slight advantage of not having to actually make up facts to support their view in this case.

EDIT: in an equally contrarian reply to another comment above I did some digging into government expenditures in the UK and your claim fails on that basis as well. Government expenditures are mostly up between 2008 and 2014 inclusive.