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Economic policymaking shifted away from neoliberal ideals towards ‘crisis’ Keynesianism during the COVID-19 pandemic. We use a comparative process tracing approach to examine how political and economic actors in Britain, Germany and the USA attempt to legitimise a potential return to neoliberalism to voters. We show that pro-neoliberal actors discursively construct a ‘crisis’ of COVID-Keynesianism by associating it with rising inflation and ‘unsustainable’ levels of government spending. Whilst emphasising key neoliberal policies of maintaining low inflation and fiscal conservativism to establish a return to ‘normal’ neoliberal policymaking. Therefore, we explain how the neoliberal policy paradigm reasserts itself when challenged.

Britain is an exemplar of a financialised economy that developed systems of household debt to drive economic growth from the 1980s onwards. The prevailing critical and constructivist accounts consider this development as a key feature distinguishing neoliberalism from Keynesianism. We challenge these prevailing accounts for insufficiently acknowledging the socio-political motivations and consequences of a significant rise in household debt from 1945 under Keynesianism. Synthesising the policy paradigm and Neo-Weberian approaches, we assess the socio-political purposes encoded within the rise in household debt throughout the Keynesian era. Our results demonstrate that household debt was regularly relaxed and restricted by Conservative and Labour governments in line with Keynesian economic ideas. Subsequently, we argue that the deproletarianising and conservatizing effects of household debt shifted voter preferences to the right, which influenced political party policies. The Heath government capitalised on this political shift by liberalising the financial sector and removing state-directed controls on the economy, establishing a distinct break from Keynesian demand management. We argue that the punctuated diffusion and evolution of household debt throughout the Keynesian era laid the social, political and economic foundations for the debt-driven growth model to develop in the 1980s

Machining high temperature superconducting (HTS) thin films is challenging due to the material’s sensitivity. Here, 200 nm thick YBCO microbridges were machined with a femtosecond laser (300 fs at 1030 nm wavelength) as a chemical free and flexible method with minimal edge damage. Transport measurements and Raman spectroscopy were used to analyse the bridges before and after laser processing. While transport and Raman measurements are commonly used separately to evaluate YBCO, our approach links both techniques to analyse laser induced damage. The link between changes in the Raman spectrum and transport measurements is investigated by identifying changes caused by repeated heat treatments while sequentially measuring the critical current density and Raman spectra. The data obtained is used to predict critical current density losses from changes in Raman peak intensities and shifts. This technique is further investigated by applying it to laser machined YBCO bridges which were exposed to highly localised heating. Results show that for bridge widths of 10 μm, a femtosecond laser can be used to repeatedly successfully machine microbridges with no loss in critical current density and that there is some correlation to critical current changes in the Raman spectra., This work was partially supported by the Air Force Research Laboratory - Aerospace Systems Directorate (AFRL/RQ), the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) under contract LRIR #18RQCOR100, and AFOSR/EOARD under contract FA 16I0E050 and the EPSRC (grant number: EP/L016567/1).