Why is austerity governable? A Gramscian urban regime analysis of Leicester, UK

Abstract

Austerity has been delivered in the UK without durably effective resistance. Read through a dialogue between urban regime theory and Gramsci’s theory of the integral state, the article considers how austerity was normalized and made governable in the city of Leicester. It shows how Leicester navigated waves of crisis, restructuring, and austerity, positioning itself as a multicultural city of entrepreneurs. The article explores historical influences on the development of the local state, inscribed in the politics of austerity governance today. From a regime-theoretical standpoint, it shows how the local state accrued the governing resources to deliver austerity while disorganizing and containing resistance. Imbued with legacies of past struggles, this process of organized disorganization produced a functional hegemony articulated in the multiple subjectivities of “austerian realism.” The article elaborates six dimensions of Gramscian regime analysis to inform further research.

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Why is austerity governable? A Gramscian urban
regime analysis of Leicester, UK
Jonathan S. Davies, Adrian Bua, Mercè Cortina Oriol & Ed Thompson
To cite this article: Jonathan S. Davies, Adrian Bua, Mercè Cortina Oriol & Ed Thompson (2018):
Why is austerity governable? A Gramscian urban regime analysis of Leicester, UK, Journal of
Urban Affairs, DOI: 10.1080/07352166.2018.1490152
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Why is austerity governable? A Gramscian urban regime analysis
of Leicester, UK
Jonathan S. Davies, Adrian Bua, Mercè Cortina Oriol, and Ed Thompson
De Montfort University
ABSTRACT
Austerity has been delivered in the UK without durably effective resistance.
Read through a dialogue between urban regime theory and Gramsci’s
theory of the integral state, the article considers how austerity was normal-
ized and made governable in the city of Leicester. It shows how Leicester
navigated waves of crisis, restructuring, and austerity, positioning itself as a
multicultural city of entrepreneurs. The article explores historical influences
on the development of the local state, inscribed in the politics of austerity
governance today. From a regime-theoretical standpoint, it shows how the
local state accrued the governing resources to deliver austerity while dis-
organizing and containing resistance. Imbued with legacies of past strug-
gles, this process of organized disorganization produced a functional
hegemony articulated in the multiple subjectivities of “austerian realism.”
The article elaborates six dimensions of Gramscian regime analysis to
inform further research.
Introduction
According to Peck (2017), the study of hegemony is about the “ongoing (re)construction of . . . ‘normal
reality’or commonsense”and, hence, “the ‘governance of normalisation’itself”(p. 15). However, the
urban governance of normalization is poorly understood, particularly in the context of austerity rolled
out since the global financial crisis of 2008–2009. Taking Peck’s cue, this article begins from the
premise that contesting neoliberal austerity requires a better understanding of normalization and the
urban hegemonies sustaining it.
British cities are a good starting point for this endeavor. Austerity has been delivered in the UK
without serious impediment despite a brief upsurge in national and urban resistance in 2011 (Nolan
& Featherstone, 2015). Drastic cuts to municipal services, public bureaucracies, and voluntary
organizations have been rolled out, benefits slashed, and punitive workfare regimes intensified.
UK cities are subjected to radical restructuring. By 2020, fiscal equalization will have been abolished,
leading to a system more closely resembling that in U.S. cities than the postwar British municipality
(Association for Public Service Excellence, 2016). In short, nationally driven austerity has decisively
accelerated urban neoliberalization.
In the period since the crisis, British urban studies have charted how austerity hit the poorest
areas and people hardest (Meegan, Kennett, Jones, & Croft, 2014) and how the UK government
targeted them deliberately (Hastings, Bailey, Bramley, & Gannon, 2017). It captures the discursive
architecture of austerity management (Fuller, 2017), the relevance of local traditions in determining
priorities (Lowndes & McCaughie, 2013), and experimental means of building new urban economies
(Gregory, 2015). Yet, there has been no attention to governability itself: how austerity becomes a
CONTACT Jonathan S. Davies jsdavies@dmu.ac.uk Centre for Urban Research on Austerity, Hugh Aston Building,
De Montfort University, Leicester LE1 9BH, United Kingdom.
Color versions of one or more of the figures in the article can be found online at www.tandfonline.com/ujua.
© 2018 Urban Affairs Association
JOURNAL OF URBAN AFFAIRS
https://doi.org/10.1080/07352166.2018.1490152

taken-for-granted dimension of urban political life. The article explores the normalization of
austerity through a historically grounded case study in the UK city of Leicester. We cast light on a
significant puzzle relevant to many British cities: how could a Labour city council opposed to
austerity diligently deliver measures designed to eradicate the institutions and traditions of urban
social democracy? Moreover, although the British case is exemplary, it is not exceptional (Crouch,
2011). The governance and disruption of normalization is a ubiquitous challenge, even in cities at the
forefront of urban insurgencies (Davies & Blanco, 2017).
Conceptually, the article problematizes the role of collaboration in austerity governance, in this
case from a political economy perspective on the urban regime ensemble. It explores our central
puzzle through a conceptual framework drawing from Gramsci’s(1971) theory of the integral state
and Stone’s(1989) urban regime theory. The article concludes by suggesting six dimensions of
Gramscian regime analysis, arguing that renewed dialogue between these approaches can assist
urbanists in disclosing and intervening in the continuum of hegemony/normalization and crisis/
insurgency.
Renewing a dialogue: Toward Gramscian regime analysis
Debate about potential dialogue between regime theory and frameworks allied to Marxism began in
the mid-1990s, exemplified by Lauria’s(1997) influential collection. The outcome of Lauria’s
endeavor was to make regime theory a foil in the search for scalar and political sensitivity within
the regulation approach. Contributors found the regime perspective on coalition building useful for
regulation theoretical purposes when situated in a dynamic account of international transformations
linked to crises of Fordism (e.g., Jessop, 1997). Dialogue died out around the turn of the millennium,
as intellectual concerns diverged. We reopen it in light of new conceptual developments and
empirical questions centered on the problem of governability in a period of fiscal retrenchment.
In developing regime theory, Stone (1989) adapted Tilly (1984) in arguing against structural
Marxism that the spheres of state, market, and civil society are loosely and only contingently
coupled. At the urban scale, rent-seeking corporations control production and development, and
citizens exercise electoral oversight of municipalities. The dominant coupling of the state and market
spheres materializes in U.S. cities because neither actor can accomplish its goals without access to the
resources of the other: local government needs corporate consent to raise revenues; the corporation
requires support from city hall to extract rents and profits. The capture of economic and electoral
power, respectively by business and city leaders, creates a structuring environment in which these
resource-interdependent actors are most likely to form a governing regime. Regime theory therefore
downplays “power over”for a social production model, “power to,”where pragmatic actors build
alliances to “get things done”(Davies, 2002; Davies & Blanco, 2017). Stone (1993) accordingly
downplayed the role of ideology in regime formation and maintenance:
In short, the ready availability of means rather than the will of dominant actors may explain what is pursued
and why. Hence, hegemony in a capitalist order may be more a matter of ease of cooperation around profit-
oriented activities than the unchallenged ascendency of core ideas. (p. 12)
Within these parameters, urban regimes emerge from the concrete objectives and coalition building
endeavors of resource-privileged actors. Stone’s central point was that whatever the structural
parameters, governing successfully depends on constructive political action to create durable alli-
ances: regime building takes effort.
The Gramscian approach begins from a very different position rooted in Marxism and conceiving
of bourgeois society as an emergent totality, riven by the structural contradictions of capitalism—what
Gramsci (1971) called the “historical bloc”(p. 137). The crisis tendencies integral to the historical
bloc (Gramsci, 1995) create contingencies and instabilities so that sustaining a political order takes
work, requiring continuous ideological and political effort.
2J. S. DAVIES ET AL.

The theory of the integral state is Gramsci’s conception of the political order within the
parameters of this contradictory historical bloc (Davies, 2011,2012). It connotes the provisional
unity of “political society + civil society”(Gramsci, 1971, pp. 262–263), where political society is
the coercive, ideological, cultural, and administrative apparatus of the ruling class in its govern-
mental guise and civil society the terrain of “so-called private organisations, like the church, trade
unions, schools and so on”(Gramsci, 1971,p.56fn), including today’s countless varieties of
nonprofits (Chorianopoulos this issue, Pill this issue). For Gramsci, civil society is a terrain of the
struggle for state power in this inclusive sense. In trying to make sense of the durability of
modernizing capitalist states during the revolutionary period of the early 20th century, he
observed that when the state “trembled, a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed
. . . a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks”(Gramsci, 1971, p. 238). Without civil society
institutions to resource political leadership and foster consent, bourgeois governments would
depend on direct coercion.
A Gramscian state of hegemony is accomplished, schematically, when a durable alliance of class
forces wins control of economic, political, cultural, and ideational levers of power and thereby
exercises leadership across the governmental and societal realms, signifying the “ethico-political
moment”of the state (Gramsci, 1971, p. 208). In diagnosing crises, Gramsci (1971) distinguished
deep “organic”changes in society (revolutionary upheavals), from everyday phenomena that “are
only conjunctural”(p. 250). The theory of hegemony is crucial for explaining why economic crises
often do not trigger immediate social and political crises of an organic kind. The multiscalar
reproduction of hegemony through coercion and consent, throughout government and civil society,
is the problematic of the integral state.
Despite foundational differences between the regime and Gramscian perspectives, there are
affinities. Like regime politics, the reproduction of hegemony requires continuous labor (Thomas,
2009). Moreover, like Stone, Gramscians recognize that hegemonies are not necessarily ideologically
coherent or encompassing. In short, the Gramscian and regime approaches converge at the point of
studying how different combinations of actors mobilize a variety of material and ideational resources
to produce more or less durable governing arrangements at urban scales. From this perspective, both
lend themselves to taxonomical innovation and comparison.
Recent conceptual innovations in the regime approach by Stone himself enhance the potential for
a productive conversation. Stone’s intellectual journey led him to reflect that he had focused too
much on the state–business nexus and (unlike Gramsci) neglected the resources of civil society. He
reformulated the core principles of regime analysis in broader terms (Stone, 2015):
The guiding tenet in inner-core regime analysis (its “iron law”) is that for any governing arrangement to sustain
itself, resources must be commensurate with the agenda being pursued. . . . A companion proposition is that for
any substantial and sustained agenda, a stable coalition is needed to provide the necessary resources. (p. 103)
This formulation helpfully sacrifices explanatory precision for conceptual parsimony and heuristic
plurality (Beauregard, 2012). Its agnosticism toward theoretical foundations allows myriad regime
forms to emerge from many background conditions, studied through any theoretical perspective
cognizant of the political effort involved in producing and sustaining hegemonies. The iron law
therefore creates a larger space for dialogue with Gramscian state theory than in the 1990s. In simple
terms, focusing on the constructive dimensions of local state power, in circumstances bequeathed by
historical struggle, enhances our knowledge about the contours of urban hegemony and its limits in
the age of austerity.
Methodology
The article reports fieldwork in Leicester undertaken between autumn 2013 and spring 2017. Over 4
years, we conducted 55 respondent interviews, seven nonparticipatory observations of events linked
to austerity governance, and four stakeholder focus groups. The interview data set encompasses
JOURNAL OF URBAN AFFAIRS 3

Leicester city councilors, officials from the municipality and other public organizations, actors from
the voluntary and community sectors, and community and anti-austerity activists. Respondents are
coded in the order cited in the article. Elected local politicians are coded P1–P4 and public officials
O1–O10. Voluntary and community sector employees are coded VCS1–VCS3 and anti-austerity
activists A1–A4. We cite three observations coded Obs1 (voluntary sector social inclusion forum),
Obs2 (Social Welfare Advice Partnership meeting), and Obs3 (public meeting about the future of
Belgrave Library) and three focus groups coded FG1 (service users), FG2 (themed on multicultural
governance), and FG3 (councilors). We also cite correspondence. We performed NVivo content
analysis, generating critical themes inductively around a coding framework anchored to our shared
project questions across the eight cities.
The article presents the case study as a historically informed urban political economy of austerity
governance. Invoking Jessop’s(1997) interpretation of Gramscian regime analysis, it focuses on how
practices of austerity governance “involve a structurally-inscribed mobilization of strategic bias”(p. 63);
in other words, how political responses to earlier waves of economic dislocation became inscribed in the
local strategies emerging after the 2008 crash. It explores how austerity governance operates through “a
strategically selective combination of political society and civil society”(Jessop, 1997, p. 64, emphasis in
original), materializing through a governing regime ensemble that emerged from, but is not reducible to,
contradictions of the historical bloc in which it is situated.
The analysis reveals that austerity governance has delivered a functional hegemony through a
form of regime politics anchored in “austerian realism.”This term refers to the practical imperative
to deliver austerity diligently under central government duress, for lack of any perceived alternative,
while attempting to preserve services, manage human crises, and build a competitive city. The
hegemony of austerian realism as a pragmatic governing disposition is crucial for understanding the
normalization of austerity in multiple governing arenas, through multiple coalitions constituting
Leicester’s urban regime ensemble.
Austerity and restructuring in Leicester
Located in the East Midlands region of England, Leicester is a city of some 342,000 people. It is
notably diverse. In the UK census of 2011, 49.5% of respondents self-identified as coming from an
ethnic minority background, up from 40% in 2001 (Leicester City Council [LCC], 2012). The city
was projected imminently to become the first UK city with a majority population of Black and
minority ethnic groups (BMEs; Balderstone, 2014). As we demonstrate below, multicultural diversity
is central to the city’s austerity governance strategy (see also Sullivan, Gleeson, Henderson & Lobo,
this issue).
With a brief interlude after the Anglo-American war on Iraq in 2003, Labour has long dominated
the politics of Leicester, currently holding 52 of 54 elected councilors. Leicester City Council
established the office of elected city mayor in 2011 to strengthen municipal leadership, encourage
agile decision making, and enhance the profile of the city (Davies & Thompson, 2016). Sir Peter
Soulsby has occupied the office since its foundation. The most prominent figure in the politics of
Leicester for decades, Soulsby has considerable personal authority and deep knowledge of the city
and its history.
For much of the 20th century, food and apparel industries underpinned employment, but
Leicester was never reliant on a single sector and also hosted engineering companies like Imperial
Typewriters (Gunn & Hyde, 2013). Some respondents recalled 20th-century Leicester in very positive
terms. One commented that it had once been among the richest cities in Europe and “quite an
affluent place”(A1). At one time, said P1, “employment was easy to get and especially hosiery,
knitwear, Imperial Leather.”Today, activists, scholars, local historians, and national media sources
still cite a 1936 League of Nations report ranking Leicester as the second richest city in Europe (e.g.,
“Foxes and Tigers,”2016). The claim is not important for its strict accuracy but because the
4J. S. DAVIES ET AL.

remembrance of affluent Leicester is part of the urban lore against which it is today represented
simultaneously as a city suffering acute deprivation and as a renaissance city.
Leicester experiences very high levels of deprivation, deriving in part from industrial retrench-
ment, discussed further below. In 2015, UK government statistics ranked it the 23rd most deprived
city (Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government, 2015). In 2014 it was reported to have
the lowest average household income in the country (NOMIS, 2016). The Office for National
Statistics (2014) published per capita gross value added trends between 1997 and 2013, painting a
picture of incremental and uneven relative urban economic decline for Leicester in that period.
However, as we explain below, official statistics do not capture the full extent of deprivation.
In addition, Leicester has been severely affected by austerity imposed after the 2008 crash. By 2020, LCC
was projected to have cut its discretionary spend by 63% since 2010, or 40% overall (LCC, 2017). In
practice, this means that municipal resourcing for nonstatutory services (for example, leisure, youth
services, and libraries) has collapsed and is increasingly concentrated in statutory social services also
under stress (Collinson, 2016). In 2010, social services comprised roughly one third of municipal spending
in Leicester. By 2020 they will comprise nearly two thirds (Figure 1). National government retains
responsibility for funding health and social welfare services. We discuss the governance of workfare below.
In addition, the Conservative UK government is subjecting municipalities to fiscal restructuring. By
2020, the national Revenue Support Grant (fiscal equalization scheme) will have been abolished for the
vast majority of cities. Most revenues will be raised locally: through the council tax, housing revenues,
fees and charges, and a localized business tax (rates). With the withdrawal of the Revenue Support
Grant, council tax will make up more than half of local authority income but with no commensurate
increase in revenues. Until now, local business rates have been pooled nationally and allocated
according to a redistributive formula. From 2020, they will increasingly be raised and spent locally.
Local business rates will therefore become an essential source of municipal revenue (Association for
Public Service Excellence, 2016). The city mayor will be permitted to raise business rates (strictly for
infrastructure projects) but only with the consent of local business leaders on the Leicester Local
Economic Partnership (LLEP). This entity is one of 38 nonstatutory local economic development
coalitions established by the UK government in 2011 (Pugalis & Bentley, 2013). This fiscal settlement
will make aspects of municipal spending in Britain directly dependent on corporate consent for the
first time and create a regime structuring environment more closely aligned to that of U.S. cities.
Figure 1. Source: City Mayor’s Office.
JOURNAL OF URBAN AFFAIRS 5

For local government commentators, many municipalities face a fiscal abyss. The most deprived
cities will be forced into race-to-the-bottom policies long familiar to urbanists in the United States
(Pill, this issue). Yet, this agenda has rolled out with barely a hint of resistance from Labour
municipalities, singly or in concert. The remainder of the article attempts to explain political
quiescence, through the study of austerity governance in Leicester.
The historical context of austerity governance
The roots of Leicester’s predicament, and its political response, lie in four interrelated processes
converging over a 20-year period from the early 1970s. These processes constitute structurally
inscribed conditions from which the strategies and tactics of austerity governance were selected.
First, like many cities in Europe and the United States, Leicester was subjected to waves of industrial
retrenchment, whose legacies remain inscribed in patterns of deprivation and spatial marginality
today (NOMIS, 2016). By 1990, swathes of industry in Leicester had collapsed under Margaret
Thatcher’s marketization offensive, a point we underscore in the discussion of multiculturalism
below (Gunn & Hyde, 2013).
A second related factor was the decline of militant trade unionism as industries were liquidated
and struggles to defend them were defeated. The defeats inflicted by the second Thatcher govern-
ment on powerful sections of organized Labour (notably the miners and the dockers) were decisive
in leading then–Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, to profess the so-called new realism, repudiating
municipal and industrial militancy (Davies, 2004). Degrading the capacities of the organized working
class opened the door to further restructuring while setting the political tone for trade union
responses to austerity. As we show in the discussion of Leicester, a painful education in the virtues
of caution, defensiveness, and “legalism”(fetishistic adherence to law) made it difficult for unions,
also much diminished in size and influence (Davies, 2011), to resist retrenchment forcefully in the
post-2008 period.
A third pivotal factor was the Thatcherite crackdown on elected local government and its
consequences for local political autonomy. Municipal socialism, a short-lived militant strategy for
resisting fiscal retrenchment, ran concurrently with the great union battles of the early 1980s
(Cochrane, 1988). It culminated in the struggle against the Thatcher government’s decision to
impose a cap on local authority rates (the residential property tax of that time). Some 50 local
authorities, including Leicester, led by then-Councilor Peter Soulsby, briefly refused to set legal
budgets. By 1986, however, resistance to rate capping had collapsed. Unlike Liverpool or Lambeth,
Leicester was not a key actor in the municipal socialist struggle, but lessons drawn from the period
remain inscribed in the politics of austerian realism.
By the late 1980s, the Thatcher government had decimated the industrial landscape, creating mass
unemployment. It had inflicted decisive defeats on the organized working class and smashed
municipal socialism. The defeat of municipal socialism saw intensified central government admin-
istrative control over British local government. The New Labour government of 1997–2010 only
tightened national control and oversight with constant meddling, auditing, targeting, and experi-
mentation. Blairism reinforced the sense of a municipal “dependency culture”among chastened and
browbeaten Labour authorities (Lyons, 2007). Copus, Roberts, and Wall (2017) go further, arguing
that after decades of central domination, UK local government exists in an “abusive relationship”
with central government and has fallen victim to “Stockholm syndrome”(p. 180). What we call
legalism in Leicester is an expression of this culture, reflected in risk aversion, fear of stepping
beyond the law, and scrupulously observing statutory minima.
By the early 1990s, the bitter lessons of the 1980s had become inscribed in the “new realist”strategies
of Labour authorities across the UK, as they sought rapprochement with business leaders and govern-
ment to drive the urban revitalization effort in an entrepreneurial direction—what Davies (2004)called
the new “logic of market led regeneration”(p. 576). With no prospect of defeating the government
through direct action, and little immediate prospect of removing it electorally, Labour municipalities
6J. S. DAVIES ET AL.

accepted, at differing speeds and with different degrees of reluctance, that attracting business
investors was the only plausible solution to urban decline and poverty.
Leicester appears to have been typical of UK cities in the rollout of these changes (Gunn & Hyde,
2013). However, with the defeat of class struggles and militant municipalism came the rise of identity
struggles, in part reflecting changing economic structures and in part the new political assertiveness
of women, gay people, and BME groups. Hall and Jacques (1983) captured the spirit: “Britain and
other advanced capitalist societies are increasingly characterised by diversity, differentiation, and
fragmentation, rather than homogeneity, standardisation and the economics and organisations of
scale which characterised modern mass society”(p. 11).
The recognition of gender and identity pluralism, the fourth critical change, spread gradually across
the international urban landscape. However, the early embrace of multiculturalism marked Leicester as
a pioneering city. Today, multicultural recognition and city branding mobilizes mythologies of minority
ethnic entrepreneurship originating with the arrival of Ugandan Asian refugees in the early 1970s
(McLoughlin, 2013). This mythology is a crucial plank of austerian realism.
Leicester saw waves of immigration throughout the 20th century, including European refugees
fleeing Germany in the 1930s. After World War II, refugees from Poland and Latvia moved into the
Highfields neighborhood, followed in the 1950s by African Caribbean people seduced into a now-
booming country with labor shortages (Virdee, 2009). Some 3,000 Kenyan Asians arrived in
Leicester in 1968, leading the local paper, the Leicester Mercury, to complain that the city was full
(Marett, 1993). The pivotal moment in the emergence of the multicultural city was the arrival of
between 2,000 and 4,000 Ugandan Asians expelled by dictator Amin in 1972. The city council
initially sought to deter them with advertisements in the Ugandan press. Mayor Soulsby later
described this move as “gloriously counter-productive”because it served only to draw refugees’
attention to the city (Popham, 2013). Marett (1993) wrote that despite the warning, incomers were
attracted by Leicester’s reputed “prosperity, industrial harmony, range of industry, cheap housing,
work for women and its central position in the country’s communication network”(p. 249). She
recorded that the majority of Ugandan Asian newcomers were “previously in some form of
commercial enterprise”encompassing professional, petit-bourgeois, and business occupations
(Marett, 1993, p. 251). From the outset, they found gainful employment and began opening
businesses and acquiring factories “producing hosiery, knitted garments and fabrics and also dye
and printing works”(Marett, 1993, p. 251). These developments were the foundations of today’s
garment industry, discussed below.
In stark contrast with the prosperous, harmonious Leicester of urban folklore, history records that
several hundred Asian workers went on strike at the city’s Imperial Typewriters factory in 1974,
claiming racial discrimination. The dispute was cited by the managing director as one of the reasons
for liquidating Britain’s last surviving typewriter manufacturer in 1975, costing the city 1,800 jobs
(Hudson, 1975). Juxtaposing accounts of a rising Asian entrepreneurial class with those charting a
declining organized (multiethnic) working class is instructive, because it points to trends that
gathered momentum thereafter.
As traditions of working class organization lost their potency and neoliberalization gained
momentum, so political leaders began to construe Leicester’s immigrant populations as entrepre-
neurial and entrepreneurialism as a virtue. City leaders embraced multiculturalism as new arrivals
added economic value and won political influence, reflected in multicultural governance arrange-
ments we discuss below. Machin and Mayr (2007) cited a public official claiming that Leicester’s
comparative resilience through recessions was owed mainly to Indian business, a claim echoed in the
national media (e.g., Brown, 2010). A councilor interviewed in our study captured the primary
logic (P1):
And people I know, they did not bring money with them but they brought their cultural ways, heritage,
tradition. And now, same authority is so grateful to these Uganda refugees, people that made their economic
contribution to the city, how the city—they have put it on the world map.
JOURNAL OF URBAN AFFAIRS 7

In Leicester, therefore, three common tendencies in Britain’s urban political economy converged with
this fourth local factor: a pioneering embrace of multicultural diversity. As we demonstrate below, this
four-way convergence proved conjunctively decisive. By this, we mean that rules of the game
established through the interplay of crisis, coercion, and consent from the 1970s to the early 1990s
remain inscribed in austerian realism today. They form the structurally inscribed conditions in which
the tactics and strategies of austerian realism were selected and applied in Leicester (Jessop, 1997).
Austerian realism as a governance strategy
The primary logic of austerian realism, defined earlier, is to proceed diligently with cuts and
restructuring mandated by national government. Municipal actors repeatedly insisted that they are
forced to deliver cuts against their will. A councilor quoted in the local newspaper, the Leicester
Mercury, stated bluntly: “We are not happy making cuts but we cannot set an illegal deficit budget. If
we do Eric Pickles will simply come in and take over the running of the council.”
1
P2, talking about
benefit cuts through the so-called bedroom tax, thought it was “dreadful.”However, “as a council
you are bound by the law of what the bedroom tax is. You have to implement it.”
2
Moreover, the municipality sought explicitly to avoid antagonizing central government.
According to P3, “There are political colleagues who would say we’ve sold out. It’s not like that
. . . drama and conflict aren’t in the best interests of the city.”The sense of feasibility encapsulated in
these comments excluded the possibility of alternatives to the extent of doubting (when interviewed
in 2014) that electing a Labour government would have made much difference: “whether that would
change I don’t know”(P4).
In making a strategic decision to modulate crisis-talk and avoid conflict with central government,
LCC chose a strategic path that influenced civil society partners. For example, the breakout group
consensus in Obs1, a voluntary sector forum on social inclusion, was that changes were “terrible,”“this is
really awful,”“but it is what it is, we make the best of what we are given”(contemporaneous notes). A
group of Voluntary and Community Sector homelessness service providers responding toproposals for a
reorganization in 2013 commented: “The voluntary and faith sector understands Leicester City Council’s
position regarding its need to manage budget reductions.”It sought a collaborative approach to “ensure
that budgetary reduction is achieved through a managed process of cost reduction, based on evidence of
need, across all services. The voluntary and faith sector will play its part in this”(LCC, 2013,p.59).
P3 explained the logics of austerian realism further, arguing that it is much easier to influence local
economic development than nationally imposed austerity: “the extent to which we can influence
development is much greater.”Concerning austerity, “our ability to make a real difference when the
resources of one are dependent on what we’re getting by way of benefits, what we are getting by way of
kinds of funding. . . . We can try and make the best of our job.”However, when it came to “attracting
inward investment, creating jobs, you can do much more, have much more influence.”
In the face of retrenchment and restructuring, most respondents saw developing a competitive
city as the only practical counterweight. With LLEP and other agencies, LCC has rolled out city-
center revitalization, tourism, heritage, and cultural strategies that might have seemed far-fetched
only a few years ago. According to Mayor Soulsby in a recent public lecture, Leicester had fallen
victim to a “collective inferiority complex”(contemporaneous notes). Thanks in part to good fortune
(discovering the bones of Richard III and Leicester City F.C. winning the Premier League in 2016)
and in part to economic resilience among BME populations, he argued that the city had recovered a
sense of purpose. Investing in public services remained a priority, but the city must also invest in
“the public realm, because the city centre is our shop window”(contemporaneous notes).
Austerian realism is therefore three sided. It reflects the strategy of austerity compliance in the
shadow of coercion, the Labour commitment to preserving pubic services within austerity limits, and
the imperative to develop an attractive, competitive city (see Keil’s, 2009, concept of “roll with it”
neoliberalization). Our research showed austerian realism to be a powerful adhesive, sustaining a
cross-sectoral ensemble for coping, managing, and mitigating the worst impact of austerity and
8J. S. DAVIES ET AL.

creating an attractive environment for business. It is Leicester’s structurally inscribed, strategically
selected governing bias, operationalized through multiple coalitions constituting the urban regime
ensemble. It resonates with Stone’s(1993) argument that regime hegemonies need not be anchored
in visionary idealism but can subsist on a shared sense of feasibility. We demonstrate this perspective
concretely in discussing three examples: workfare governance, the governance of multiculturalism,
and the governance of resistance.
Workfare governance
Welfare reform is the biggest challenge posed by austerity in a city with high unemployment and
income poverty. Many thousands of citizens have to claim benefits of different kinds. As P3
mentioned in preceding comments about the relationship between austerity and development,
rules are set and budgets administered by the national Department for Work and Pensions
(DWP). The system is implemented through local job centers run by the DWP. Under former
Secretary of State Iain Duncan Smith (2010–2016), it introduced reforms to deliver cuts in the
national welfare budget and reduce so-called welfare dependency. The reforms included a range of
benefit freezes and caps, but sanctioning (the removal of benefits for alleged rule infringements) was
especially punitive, denying the subject payments for weeks or months. According to LCC (2015),
16,545 sanctions were issued in 2013–2014, affecting several thousand people in Leicester when
multiply sanctioned individuals are taken into account.
The intensified workfare system contributed to a growing crisis of subsistence in Leicester and a huge
explosion in food bank use. Up to 50% of food bank users were reported to be victims of sanctioning (O1).
LCC employed the logics of austerian realism. In one report, it responded to concerns about the devastating
impact of sanctions, repeating the following denial of responsibility or agency three times in relation to
different benefits. “This Welfare Benefit is administered by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP)
and the Local Authority is unable to influence the policy or roll out programme”(LCC, 2016,p.3).
Rather than protest or dramatize the impact of workfare radicalization, LCC sought mainly to
contain the fallout. For example, it was allocated resources for crisis payments and established a
Social Welfare Advice Partnership to coordinate the local response. The researchers observed a
meeting of the Social Welfare Advice Partnership network in 2016 (Obs2). Attending were some 20
people from public agencies, including DWP and LCC, and local voluntary and community
organizations. The micropolitics of the network reflected the logics of austerian realism insofar as
it operated in a business-like manner, sharing information and seeking to coordinate resources in
order to manage and mitigate the fallout from workfare intensification.
However, at one point, the meeting was diverted into a more political discussion about the stress
in organizations constantly having to do “more with less”and the pain and bewilderment experi-
enced by people trapped in the workfare bureaucracy. When a delegate from the VCS (also an anti-
austerity activist) argued that the network should appeal to LCC to suspend its own welfare advice
spending review, the lead official ruled them out of order on the grounds that a body convened by
LCC could not petition the mayor. The discussion moved on when the chair said they would write to
the mayor expressing delegate concerns.
This encounter casts light on the capillary mechanisms through which austerian realism was
operationalized in the practices of workfare governance. The DWP set the agenda and generated
crisis management challenges for other organizations. Unable to see ways of challenging the agenda-
setting power of the DWP, the welfare advice coalition operated, somewhat grudgingly, as a flanking
mechanism. Magnusson (1985) defined the local state in its governmental sense as including
institutions and organizations based in a city and having the city as their core concern. From this
perspective, DWP occupied a dual role as external policy setter and as part of the urban regime
ensemble in its Gramscian sense: a coalition of governmental and nongovernmental actors, colla-
borating around what Davies (2004, p. 571) called “congruent”(by no means identical) agendas, here
anchored in austerian realism.
JOURNAL OF URBAN AFFAIRS 9

Multicultural austerity governance
Multiculturalism has several valences in Leicester’s austerity governance. First, it lends force to the
city’s development strategy, as LCC rolls out strategies for developing cultural and creative indus-
tries. Belgrave Road, also known as the “Golden Mile,”exemplifies this. Said P1:
So this is why now it is known as the Golden Mile because there is more gold jewellery sold on Belgrave Road
than. . . . To me it’s not just the gold, the metal; it is the people who have contributed physically, socially,
economically. And now the second-generation children, they have done so well. Now, the trade links that some
of them started like sending things to India, to other parts of Europe, other countries.
Most striking about this approach from the standpoint of governability was its influence on
respondents across the data set. Anti-austerity activists saw the focus on city-center development
(Peter Soulsby’s“shop window”) as unjust and exclusionary, but most respondents accepted that
Leicester has no alternative but to enhance its competitive position, in relation to which it mobilizes
its reputation for multicultural entrepreneurship. As O2 put it, comparing Leicester with the 1980s
and 1990s:
I think what’s happened since then is that city economy has recovered. It has become more diverse than it was
before. Ironically, I think we’ve resurrected more of the sort of the hosiery textile sector base than we thought
was going to be possible a few years ago. And a lot of that is down to . . . the migration of the Ugandan Asian
population and others into the city, some of whom have had that background as well.
Diversity and class
As the preceding quote shows, city branding is reinforced by mythologies surrounding the entre-
preneurialism of Ugandan Asian refugees and their successors. It represents Asian entrepreneurial-
ism as an exemplary, even performative model of urban citizenship. O3 observed of people arriving
in the early 2000s:
They were entrepreneurs back in Somalia, but that was before the war, you know. . . . They went to Europe and
so they’ve ended up here remembering that they were entrepreneurs, seeing the Asian community who are
entrepreneurs. . . . And then now, we have the Poles, so they just came right afterwards, and they’re really
hardworking and very good and stuff.
The entrepreneurs migrating to Leicester were credited with underpinning the economic resilience
of the city after the crash, especially thousands of Indian businesses in the city (Machin & Mayr,
2007). O4 commented:
In particular the Asian community, have all sorts of little networks and they’ve not suffered anything like as
much in way of unemployment and that sort of thing. Because they’ve worked, in some ways you could call it a
Big Society type of way.
O5 pointed to the importance of Asian family networks in sharing information about jobs and
transportation. “So, it doesn’t matter if they lose their job in Leicester because they can immediately
find work elsewhere and they can get there.”Consequently, argued O3, “the quite unique thing about
Leicester is, compared to a lot of other cities in the UK . . . the BME community here is not poor.”
In McLoughlin’s(2013) account, such representations “exemplify the co-option, containment
and commodification of Asian-ness”(p. 42). They also contrasted with representations of “native”
working-class White communities, which never recovered economically from de-industrialization.
One community worker in a traditional working-class area (VCS1) commented controversially:
“The local community are quite demotivated, lethargic and are happy with their lot. There is a
highbenefitdependencylocally...andsolongastheyaregettingtheirbenefitstheyarequite
happy.”Most respondents rejected this idea of a dependency culture, framing cultural pathology
in a subtler juxtaposition with Asian communities, said to “have looked after themselves very
much better than say, the White community who have . . . sort of run by different rules”(VCS1).
10 J. S. DAVIES ET AL.

Hence, “what we have is . . . I don’t know why, but over time is that sort of . . . you have sort of
the White adults in sort of the deprived areas. They just don’t have the same level of skills as a lot
of our BME population have”(O3).
It is important to record that cultural–pathological readings of working-class White alienation do
not apply to austerity itself, which respondents mostly detested. Their grip is situated not in
neoliberal idealism but in the construal of practical challenges framed by austerian realism (Stone,
1993): how communities must, of necessity, adapt and respond to an otherwise insoluble predica-
ment. The idea that developing a culture of self-help was the only viable response was not an
apologetic for austerity, but it made the commercial dispotif virtuous. Working-class White anomie
was rendered pathological, whereas working-class Asian and Black experiences of exploitation and
racism were veiled. Multiculturalism hails deprived citizens of all ethnicities with the injunction to
assimilate entrepreneurial culture and practice, with select BME groups as exemplars. In short, it
celebrates diversity in a way that simultaneously conceals and mobilizes class.
The approach exercised considerable pedagogic force, anchoring austerian realism in the leader-
ship aspiration for entrepreneurial flourishing: what we call the regulative idea of Leicester’s regime
ensemble. The specific tonalities of this strategic bias emerged from local understandings of the
conjunctively decisive shifts discussed earlier. They were operationalized through the LLEP, to which
we now turn.
Multiculturalism and sweatshop labor
It is also important to record that its power as a governing disposition did not mean that BME
entrepreneurialism was universally celebrated among activists or BME groups. On the contrary,
several respondents drew attention to continuing and systemic racism and challenged ethnic
stereotyping (e.g., FG1, FG2, P1). Respondents also highlighted research undertaken by the
University of Leicester (Hammer, Plugor, Nolan, & Clark, 2015), exposing sweatshop labor in the
garment industry and challenging exaggerated claims that BME groups in Leicester are “not poor”
(O3). It revealed that thousands of people in the area, disproportionately Asian women, work in
textile micro-enterprises for some £3 per hour, less than half the national minimum wage, a rate
achieved by employers underdeclaring working hours. This ultra-exploitative employment ecology in
the fragmented postindustrial garment economy is a dark side of BME entrepreneurialism.
Yet, as a governance problem, the sweatshop economy was framed by austerian realism. At the
initiative of local retailers worried about collateral reputational damage, the Ethical Trading Initiative
(a global multi-agency partnership) developed a program to address endemic breaches of labor rights
in Leicester. It formed a partnership of concerned retailers, industry bodies, unions, nongovern-
mental organizations, community groups, LLEP, and LCC. The Ethical Trading Initiative program
led to the Hammer report (Hammer et al., 2015), which laid bare the sweatshop economy and called
for a repertoire of measures, including enforcement.
However, the report proved controversial. Both LLEP and LCC were reticent about enforcement
and concerned about negative publicity. Local officials thought it too negative and sought to
emphasize good practice so that they “weren’t throwing the baby out with the bathwater”(O1).
O6 said that if unethical trading “raises its head too high, it could put off potential employers . . .
realistically, the only solution going forward is employment.”Moreover,
there are enforcement rules we could potentially use but they’re counter-productive. . . . It’s about education of
the sector. But again, you’ve got to be very politically sensitive about that . . . because when you’re looking to
pull businesses . . . you’ve got to be careful. You don’t want to put them off coming into the city if you’ve got a
negative perception.
This vignette exemplifies the adhesive power of austerian realism. All local actors opposed sweatshop
labor. At the same time, they sought to avoid conflict to protect Leicester’s reputation with investors.
With an ultrafragmented labor force also very difficult to organize (Hammer et al., 2015), the ensemble
JOURNAL OF URBAN AFFAIRS 11

of concerned retailers, LLEP, and LCC converged around what was effectively a damage limitation and
depoliticization strategy. This approach is the legacy of industrial collapse and deunionization, of
global economic competition, deregulation, and place marketing imperatives (Hammer et al., 2015).
There are multiple dynamics of “organization”and “disorganization”in play: the raft of factors
structuring the textiles micro-industry and exposing labor to sweatshop conditions on the one hand
and the logics of austerian realism animating Leicester’s development coalition on the other.
Multicultural community development
However, Leicester’scommunity development coalition highlighted another important side of
multicultural governance. As mentioned earlier, successful immigrant groups quickly won political
influence in the city. Respondents explained how, as part of the multicultural turn, an informal
multicultural governance coalition emerged including LCC, statutory agencies including the police,
the editor of the Leicester Mercury, and BME community leaders. LCC provided infrastructure grants
to BME umbrella groups to help with assimilation, community building, service provision, and
communication. Interviewed in 2013, O7 explained:
We do have an active community and voluntary sector in the city and we do interact with them, some of that is
formal because we have contracts with organizations to help us engage with certain communities; e.g., the
Leicester Council of Faiths or the Federation of Muslim Organizations, the Guajarati Hindu Association, Race
Equality Council—recognizing value those groups can bring in helping us understand/engage with those
communities of interest.
The process described by O7 is an important facet of regime building, involving the aggregation of
resources among actors with congruent interests: municipal cash and facilities to build community
infrastructure, in exchange for engagement, communication, and information pursuant to successful
integration. At the same time, the network collaborated to manage and diffuse tensions, as it did
when racists marched through Leicester in 2010 (BBC, 2010).
Under austerity, however, several BME umbrella organizations were defunded, justified partly on
equality grounds. The statutory Public Sector Equality Duty means that funding one minority group
while defunding another could be deemed discriminatory. Some groups have used Public Sector
Equality Duty to challenge austerity cuts, but in this instance, legalism resignified equality from a
substantive claim to social justice into a procedural constraint. Secondly, the communicative logic in
the preceding quote was subsumed by performance management logics and the imperative to
“deliver”(an important theme for public officials in FG3).
Austerian realist logics of pragmatism and legalism combined to produce a further logic to the
effect that “if you can’t fund everyone, you can’t fund anyone.”One significant umbrella group, the
African Caribbean Citizens Forum, collapsed as a result of defunding. VCS2 wrote to us:
All that is left of the African Caribbean voluntary and community sector is a few single-issue clubs/associations,
and a number of small volunteer run, led and managed social groups that do not have the means, capacity or
capability to fulfil a link or communication function. Sadly, the poor outcomes achieved by the African
Caribbean community have changed very little since the Scarman Centre report 20 years ago because the
Black community in Leicester is small and dispersed enough to ignore politically. It migrated here to help fill
labour shortages after the war, suffered unremitting institutional race discrimination but has made significant
contributions to the development of “multicultural”Leicester only to find that when the going gets tough again
the Black community loses what little it has had. Only time will tell on the impact.
It is important to record that the multicultural ideal remains strongly embedded in the politics of
the city and its continuing (if selective) celebration of diversity as the source of economic
resilience and cultural vitality. However, multicultural governance has been transformed, with
austerity uprooting the institutional basis for the informal coalition established in the 1980s. The
implications for both the economic and communitarian dimensions of multicultural governance
remain to be seen.
12 J. S. DAVIES ET AL.

Resistance: Between realism and revolt
According to Davies and Blanco (2017), regime theory is limited by its inattention to resistance as a
durable facet of urban political life. They argue that everyday resistance such as in Spain (Blanco,
Bianchi, and Salazar, this issue) can limit or deplete the governing capabilities of neoliberal austerity
regimes, even when they hold municipal, state, and economic power. Conversely, successful regimes
are able to contain or marginalize resistance. Leicester has seen vibrant campaigns over several years;
for example, in defense of fire, homelessness, hospital, and library services (Davies & Thompson,
2016). However, our research shows that austerian realism influenced both the governance and
practices of resistance, operating as a functional containment mechanism.
The city’s program for Transforming Neighbourhood Services exemplifies this. LCC sought,
through this program, to deliver budget cuts while preserving facilities in new multiservice hubs;
for example, by moving public libraries into community centers. Based on research in other cities,
LCC managers chose to divide Leicester into six program areas. According to O8, discussing lesson-
drawing from other cities,
What we learned was that we didn’t want to do the whole thing in one go . . . because that seemed to generate
concern, protest, anger all over the place and it took a long time for people to even accept what had happened.
So a different approach was taken, which was . . . to divide the city up into five or six areas.
O9 explained further:
So, if we think that the most challenging area is in the east of the city, and arguably, that has so much
complexity because of the diversity of the communities there and so forth, it makes sense for us to start in the
less complex areas. Learn the lessons and apply those as we move on.
The most challenging area did indeed generate significant resistance to the proposed closure and sale
of the Belgrave Library. The campaign was well organized, linking citizens from multicultural
backgrounds to strong political support from local members of parliament and ward councilors.
We observed the crucial public meeting of more than 300 residents (Obs3). At this meeting, the lead
councilor repeatedly voiced the logic of austerian realism. They applauded critical sentiments while
simultaneously communicating an implacable message:
However, we have to accept the world is changing. . . . We try to be as inclusive as possible. . . . But the reality is,
we don’t have the budget, I am not going to hide the reality, and I cannot explain any more clearly today the
reality of the situation. (contemporaneous notes)
These repeated invocations of “reality”generated angry responses. One speaker said they “know
about central government and understand that.”What disappointed them was that “listening and
seeing how the councillor is acting today, he seems more like a chief executive than a Labour
councillor.”The meeting applauded thunderously (contemporaneous notes). Shortly afterward,
LCC reversed the proposed closure, marking a victory for the campaign. But, asked why similar
protests had not been seen elsewhere in Leicester, A2 made an astutely Lefebvrian observation:
Well, I think we hear about things at different times. So . . . the different libraries were closed before ours was
and we didn’t know it was gonna come to us. So, I think in an ideal world yes, we would all stand together. But
the reality is services are not cut in one swoop, because then you would have the whole city up in arms against
you if you were the council.
From the standpoint of officials mired in austerian realism, this approach was good, pragmatic
management. From A2’s perspective it was divisive, undermining potential for a citywide movement.
The study suggested, secondly, that the experience of defeat in the 1980s continued to cast as
much of a shadow over anti-austerity politics as it did over municipal strategy. VCS3 commented on
the prospects for greater militancy, capturing the austerian realist zeitgeist:
Well, it’s a bit . . . a losing game, isn’t it really. I mean when diehards tried in the past, it hasn’t succeeded really.
It’s ended up losing what power it had, so that’s like picking a fight with no chance of winning it.
JOURNAL OF URBAN AFFAIRS 13

This quote also encapsulates the perspective dominating the UK trade union movement since the
1980s and mirroring that of Labour municipalities.
For example, in early 2017, the local branch of the public sector union, UNISON, issued a new
demand to LCC:
At present the best way in which the local Labour Group can support the people of Leicester is to refuse to carry
through further Tory cuts by setting a legal “no cuts”budget for the duration of the next three years. (UNISON
Leicester, 2017, emphasis in original emphasis)
Though this demand signaled an upshift in anti-austerity campaigning, it was framed by operating
logics dominating local politics since the “new realism”of the late 1980s. The city mayor, in an
obdurately austerian realist intervention, dismissed the UNISON proposal as “pure fantasy,”arguing
that the city council “going bust will not lead to the Tory Government crumbling.”
3
A third factor limiting resistance was the disorganization imposed by austerity itself. According to
A3, talking about workfare, “there is a theory . . . if you keep people’s bellies empty they haven’t got
have time to be politically active because they’re trying to feed themselves and keep a roof over their
heads, over their kids.”For A4,
I think it is precisely around the issue of everyone is being made to look at their own individual crisis and they
are so basically swept up in trying to deal with that, that it is very difficult for them to look at it in a wider way
which I think would potentially help every individual.
The workfare regime was thus seen as atomizing and silencing welfare claimants in multiply coercive
and consensual ways.
For a time, at least, the politics of workfare also divided those trapped in the regime from those in
relatively secure employment, pitching “strivers”against “skivers.”According to O10, interviewed in
2013, the “cost of living crisis has been attenuated a little by the recent . . . the low levels of inflation
. . . fall in oil prices which is no doubt welcome in many households and indeed businesses.”For P3,
interviewed in the same year, “Actually for most people most of the time this doesn’t affect them
very much and they don’t want to do anything different much from what they are already doing . . .
for most people life goes on.”Though millions of people suffered falling incomes, they were offset to
a degree and for a time by plummeting mortgage and energy costs. A significant fraction of wage
earners was not directly exposed to the crisis of social reproduction in Leicester and for this reason
was largely unaffected, at a personal level, by austerity.
The experience of Leicester reinforces the argument that as the resources of austerity governance
joined up, so resistance was weakened, contained, and disorganized. Explanation for this outcome
cannot be reduced to the lessons of the 1970s and 1980s, but it is intelligible only in the long shadow
they continue to cast. Resistance was durable in Leicester, but austerian realism contributed actively
to the spatial containment of resistance and to the muting of contentious politics.
Developing Gramscian regime analysis: Governability and its limits
The remainder of the article reflects on what Gramscian regime analysis discloses about the
governability of austerity in Leicester, presenting a six-point analysis in heuristic form (Table 1).
First, the study shows historical analysis to be crucial for understanding practices of urban austerity
governance. The Thatcherite offensive of the 1980s created conditions in which national government
could dictate the agenda and anticipate local compliance. A coercive and ideological apparatus
forged in bitter political struggles over earlier crises of Fordism and Keynesianism underpins this
enduring dependency culture. The harsh education of municipalities, trade unions, and elements of
the VCS in the follies of militancy continues to set the parameters of both urban governance and
resistance today. The outcomes of these conjunctively decisive struggles form the structurally
inscribed conditions of local action, from which Leicester’s local regime ensemble adapted to the
privations of austerity and restructuring.
14 J. S. DAVIES ET AL.

Second, Leicester has developed strong political and managerial leadership with the clearly
enunciated and widely shared disposition that we term austerian realism. This derives from the
combination of structural constraint, lesson-drawing, and local strategic calculus. It has been a
powerful tool in simultaneously articulating the injustice of austerity, the necessity of compliance,
and the imperative to position Leicester as an entrepreneurial city. Austerian realism is Leicester’s
strategically selective hegemonic strategy. It has proven to be a powerful adhesive for the multiple
coalitions and alliances constituting the urban regime ensemble.
Third, and derivatively, austerian realism endows the city with qualities and characteristics
required to navigate the challenges ahead. The torsion between the city’s growth strategy and its
valorization of multicultural entrepreneurialism is “productive”in the sense that it hails citizens with
an intelligible strategy for the future. It is “destructive”insofar as it veils shared class and racial
injustices. This future-oriented dimension is the regulative idea enhancing the hegemonic grip of
austerian realism.
Fourth, austerian realism successfully integrated an ensemble of local state actors through a range
of coalitions comprising departments of state, LCC (councilors and officials), local businesses, and a
variety of civil society actors. The regime ensemble materialized through multiple coalitions mobi-
lized around congruent interests and resource interdependencies. Warranted by austerian realism,
actors pulled in the same broad direction insofar as they were—however grudgingly—orchestrating
the delivery and management of austerity. The regime ensemble constitutes the local state in its
Gramscian, inclusive sense (municipality, government agencies in the city, business leaders, and
elements of organized civil society), sustained through coercion and consent. It constitutes what has
been, since the onset of austerity, a functional urban regime.
Fifth, the study demonstrates how austerian realism contained potential anti-austerity forces. The
political rationalization of defeat together with class, cultural, and spatial disorganization denuded
anti-austerity forces of the political vitality they needed to pose a threat to the regime, locally or
nationally. Through good fortune and strategic calculus, national government divided the working-
class population, pacifying some while bludgeoning others. Austerity governance held the requisite
unities and divisions in civil society in place. These resistance containment mechanisms were
exercised through the urban regime ensemble (Bayirbağ, Davies, & Munch, 2017).
Finally, what kind of hegemony does Leicester’s austerity governance signify? Gramsci (1971)
described the ideal-typical state of hegemony as the attainment of “intellectual and moral unity . . .
on a ‘universal’plane”(pp. 181–182). The preceding analysis shows the hegemony of austerian
realism in Leicester to be functional but by no means elevated in the sense implied by this quotation.
It rather “works”around the sense of shared feasibility among actors with congruent interests
posited by Stone (1993).
At the same time, it foments bitterness and alienation, reflected in preceding quotations and the
more general crisis of political authority signified by the Brexit vote of June 2016 and the rise of
Corbynism: the ideas of socialist politician and Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, mentioned as a
Table 1. Urban governability—A Gramscian regime theoretical perspective.
Gramscian regime analysis Leicester
Structurally inscribed conditions
of local action
De-industrialization, pacification of unions and municipal left, plus rise of multiculturalism:
conjuncturally decisive in determining local state response to crisis and austerity
Strategically selective hegemonic
strategy
Multiple facets of austerian realism: pragmatic compliance, austerity mitigation, and
entrepreneurialism. A functional hegemony
Regulative idea The entrepreneurial city inspired by foundational mythologies of multiculturalism
Urban regime Ensemble of coalitions sustained through coercion and consent: the local state in its
inclusive sense articulated through austerian realism
Resistance and containment Durable low-level resistance, muted by cultural, spatial, class, and territorial modes of
containment. Legacies of Thatcherism in damping anti-austerity struggles
Contradictions and pathologies Fragmenting multicultural governance, working-class anomie. National crises of political
authority, ideology, and representation. Weakly articulated in Leicester’s urban politics
JOURNAL OF URBAN AFFAIRS 15

source of hope by some respondents. These are manifest and potential contradictions and pathologies
operating in and above Leicester’s austerity regime ensemble.
On the national stage, Corbyn’s meteoric rise shows that millions of people have had enough of
austerity and will vote for alternatives to both pseudo-cosmopolitan neoliberalism and conservative
nationalism, when these are presented effectively. The infectious spirit of Corbynism may be
dissipating austerian realism by emboldening activists, trade unionists, and perhaps even browbeaten
Labour municipalities, some of which are moving toward remunicipalization strategies. As yet,
however, nationally manifested crises of neoliberal austerity governance, what Jessop (2016) called
“the organic crisis of the British state,”remain weakly articulated in the urban politics of Leicester.
To return to the continuum of normalization-hegemony and insurgency-resistance discussed at
the beginning, we suggest that the heuristic framework in Table 1 can be applied to disclosing many
different modes of urban governance. The six dimensions of Gramscian regime analysis contribute
to disclosing structural and constructive dimensions of urban power. They are a lens through which
to explore historical conditions and contemporary political economies of normalization, crisis,
resistance, and transformation (Peck, 2017). In other words, the heuristic is a tool for understanding
the positioning of cities in contemporary political economy, analyzing the balance of forces con-
stituting (or failing to constitute) a local state capable of delivering governing agendas pursuant to,
or against, neoliberal austerity.
Conclusion
The article began with a puzzle: how is it that austerity has proven so eminently governable? How did
Labour municipalities become effective agents of the dismantling of social democratic institutions and
traditions? By employing Gramscian regime analysis, the historically contextualized study of austerity
governance in Leicester reveals a favorable conjuncture, in which the legacies of past crises, struggles,
defeats, and political reorientations created a powerful structural, strategic, institutional and ideological
bias toward delivering austerity without fuss, consolidating a local regime ensemble, and leaving the
capacity to resist weakened and disorganized. Consequently, those least able to cope were compelled or
persuaded to absorb the costs of austerity, engendering crises of social reproduction at the individual
level that remained largely concealed in the urban political realm.
Incipient crisis tendencies and anti-austerity movements abound at the national and international
levels (Doussard & Lesniewski, 2017; Parés, Boada, Canal, Hernando, & Martinez, 2017).
Pathologies, or cracks in the austerity governance of Leicester, could further undermine containment
mechanisms and aggravate the deep crises of authority and representation afflicting British politics
(Jessop, 2016). Yet, the local regime ensemble in its inclusive Gramscian sense remained intact in
Leicester and largely unchallenged, as our research concluded. It has proven capable of mobilizing
resources, and thus the power, to contain urban politics in its emancipatory sense. Austerian realism
has been conjunctively durable, reinforcing Gramsci’s(1971) warning that economic crises do not in
and of themselves produce organic political crises—and moreover that political crises have no
necessary correlate in the rise of militant anti-austerity struggles.
The article sought through the tools of critical and heuristic theory to disclose means by which
order has been sustained in the face of manifold injustices and institutional turbulence. However,
torecognizeafunctionalausterityregimeisnottoimplythatitis“sutured”or that contra-
dictions and pathologies are forever manageable. Corbyn himself made a Gramsci-like observa-
tion, arguing after his unexpected election surge that 2017 was the year in which “politics finally
caught up with the 2008 crash”(Sparrow, 2017). Understanding the structural and constructive
means of organization, disorganization, containment, and overflow casts light on both the limits
of hegemony and the limitations that anti-austerity activists must overcome, if they are to build
on small successes and revitalize the urban “political”(Dikeç & Swyngedouw, 2017). In juxtapo-
sition with other cities discussed in this issue, Leicester presents an opportunity for dialogue
about how this might occur.
16 J. S. DAVIES ET AL.

Notes
1. Eric Pickles was secretary of state for communities and local government 2010–2015.
2. The “bedroom tax”is a sanction imposed on housing benefit claimants deemed by government officials to have
one or more spare bedrooms.
3. Cited in the Leicester Mercury.
Funding
The research reported in this article was funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council: “Collaborative
Governance under Austerity: An Eight-Case Comparative Study”(Ref. ES/L012898/1), led by Professor Jonathan
Davies. See http://cura.our.dmu.ac.uk/category/austerity-governance/. The first phase of the study was funded by the
Spanish Government’s Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under its National Development Plan (Ref.
CSO2012–32817), led by Dr Ismael Blanco. See https://transgob.net.
About the authors
Jonathan Davies is Director of the De Montfort University Centre for Urban Research on Austerity (CURA), part of
Leicester Castle Business School. He is principal investigator on the eight-case study of collaborative governance under
austerity reported in this special issue. His research interests encompass state theory, urban governance, and public
policy. In his capacity as Director of CURA, he advises the UK Labour Party’s Community Wealth Building Unit.
Adrian Bua is Research Assistant at De Montfort University’sCentre for Urban Research on Austerity and Researcher
at the New Economics Foundation in London. His research interests encompass political science, democratic theory,
and political economy.
Mercè Cortina Oriol is VC2020 Lecturer in Public Policy and Urban Politics at De Montfort University and a member
of the Centre for Urban Research on Austerity. Her research draws on social movement, community development,
citizen and political economy approaches to urban governance.
Ed Thompson is Associate Professor in the Department of Strategic Management and Marketing, Leicester Castle
Business School, at De Montfort University. His research interests relate to public management, resilience, and the
effect of austerity on them.
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