"Analysing political discourse in the British press during a time of crisis and austerity, this book examines how the concept of the welfare state has been constructed between 2008 and 2015. A corpus from four British newspapers from across the political spectrum is brought together to investigate the political debate on its evaluation and the ambiguity about its exact definition. A discourse-historical approach is used to establish what the welfare state is, and conceptual metaphor theory is then used to explore its figurative conceptualisations"--