5. Framing the Crisis: Private Capital to the Rescue

How, in the UK, were the financial, then economic, crises which erupted from 2007 onwards politically and popularly framed—framed, indeed, in ways which have allowed business-more-or-less-as-usual to proceed in their aftermath? The focus of this chapter is upon various discursive initiatives and narratives which were constructed and utilised as and since the crisis unfolded. I argue that it was through a series of (quite often contradictory) blaming and framing techniques—in turn, resting upon the use of analogy, motivated myopia and deceit, and often invoking some form of morality—that the construction, use and fact of economic, legal, political and social ignorance transformed the financial crisis into one of the public and the social.