live-within-our-means of future redemption’ narrative that is not only at odds with the dominant culture of consumption, but also an advocacy of neoliberal morality about individualisation of responsibility, privatisation of social risks and self-reliant resiliency (Bohland et al, 2018). The latter has been applied not only to individuals, but also to institutions, notably, local authorities (John, 2014). The responsibilisation agenda ignores the effects of structural inequalities and considers social problems such as low educational attainment, poor housing, low income, morbidity and premature death as consequences of personal choices and individual failings (Barry, 2005). Imposing stringent austerity measures offers the potential for a neoliberal government to sermonise on the follies of a nanny state, on individual failings and on a ‘broken society’, as the Coalition government claimed. Failure of government to meet citizens’ needs in the face of austerity is presented as a failure of the nanny state and the inherent problems associated with it, not a failure of (re)distribution and underfunding. People are vilified as being victims of their own irresponsibility rather than the collapse of the social contract. In many ways, health and economic crises resulting from COVID-19 have been exacerbated by decades of underinvestment in areas such as health, social care and social benefits in the name of austerity.
Post-war Britain was a time of grief, and also a time of ‘hope’. Based on egalitarian ideals, the state could legitimately intervene in the free market and redistribute national wealth socially and spatially. It was also expected to share with citizens the responsibility for social risks. Hope was founded on this social contract and its manifestation in the provision of free education, social housing, the national health system and lifetime social security, all of which cultivated a hopeful prospect for social mobility. According to neoliberal ideology, however, state intervention in the market is not only inefficient and ineffective, but also morally dangerous because it is claimed that providing welfare cultivates a culture of dependency and eradicates self-reliance (Davoudi and Madanipour, 2015). Former Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron’s notion of a ‘Big Society’ was indeed an advocacy of civil society assuming greater responsibility for societal problems, though without any accompanying transfer of resources. These assumptions have been called into question in response to the COVID-19 crisis, whereby the state has had to step in to provide safeguards for those affected by its economic consequences.
The ‘trust and confidence’ that was enjoyed by the post-war state and its political institutions has since been eroded. While key post-war political figures ‘attained almost surreal levels of personal popularity’ (Kynaston, 2010), the level of trust in political elites has dropped significantly, as shown in a British Social Attitudes Survey (BSAS, 2013: 16): ‘The last 30 years have seen a number of important institutions fall from grace very publicly … and there is a clear sense that people have lost faith in some of Britain’s most important institutions. This certainly applies to politicians and the political process.’ Austerity has been introduced amid ‘a growing disjunction between the stage-managed political theatres that the elites are engaged in and are projected on television screens and social media, and the reality of people’s everyday political struggles to be heard and represented’ (Davoudi and Steele, 2020: 113). Public confidence in government’s ability to strive for a fairer and better society has been gradually diminishing. While in 1986, 38 per cent of the respondents trusted ‘governments to put the nation’s needs above those of a political party’, in 2011, only 18 per cent did so (BSAS, 2013: 13, 16). In the future, a positive change depends largely on how the government handles the COVID-19 crisis. Judged by its initial laissez-faire approach and the lack of preparedness, especially in relation to testing and the provision of protective clothing for front-line workers, optimism may be premature.
Of the four conditions identified by Kynaston (2010), ‘equity of sacrifice’ is perhaps the most vivid manifestation of two ideologically driven approaches to austerity. Post-war austerity was seen as being shared by the majority of both working- and middle-class people; there was a sense of parity of sacrifice. This could not be more different from neoliberal austerity. Although the Coalition government tried to sell austerity measures through the use of rhetoric such as ‘We’re all in this together’, it soon became evident that the poor were getting poorer during austerity, and the rich were getting richer because of it (Davoudi and Ormerod, 2021). Indeed, neoliberal austerity has hit the most vulnerable people (women, children, the disabled and the sick) and left-behind places (for example, post-industrial regions in the north of England) the hardest.
Although real GDP (which takes into account changes in prices such as inflation) in the UK grew by 5 per cent between 2012 and 2018, public expenditure on low-income families and children dropped by 44 per cent: from £403 in 2010 to £222 per person in 2018 (HRW, 2019: 50). The government’s own statistics show a rise of 200,000 in the number of children in ‘absolute poverty’ compared with the previous year, reaching approximately 3.7 million children in 2018 (DWP, 2018: 8). Similarly, homelessness is estimated to have risen by 165 per cent since 2010, reaching 280,000 in England by 2019 (Shelter, 2019). As Garry Lemon, Director of Policy at the Trussell Trust (the UK’s largest national food-bank charity), puts it, the 2010 date is important because it marked a change of government from centre-left to centre-right and the introduction of ‘policies that radically cut state spending … the message was clear … we need to cut back to balance the books’ (cited in McGee, 2020).
Through a number of policies, notably, the reduction in the size of welfare benefits, the increase in the conditions attached to it and the changes in the procedure by which it can be accessed, austerity has been used to radically restructure the welfare system, with devastating effects on the lives of the most vulnerable groups, as well as on their ability to cope with the consequences of the COVID-19 crisis. For example, homeless people are struggling to self-isolate despite the fact that they are ‘three times more likely to have severe respiratory problems’ (McGee, 2020). The inequitable impacts of austerity policies are not simply the result of economic miscalculation; they are deliberately designed to achieve the neoliberal goal of reducing the social role of the state. Indeed, austerity is a key tenet of neoliberalism. As Peck (2012: 626) argues, ‘according to neoliberal script, public austerity is a necessary response to market conditions, and the state has responded by inaugurating new rounds of fiscal retrenchment’.
As Clarke and Newman (2012) suggest, austerity has evoked both the prospect of hardship and the memories of post-war solidarities. However, despite successive governments’ rhetorical appeals to the latter in order to legitimise austerity, it is the former that is prevalent in the contemporary political and cultural landscape. While hardship has been felt deeply, especially among the most vulnerable, solidarity remained a distant memory, at least until the COVID-19 crisis, when it was foregrounded partly by reference to the post-war era. As a result, people’s participation in austerity has been characterised by Clarke and Newman (2012: 309) as a ‘passive consent’ rather than a ‘popular mobilization’. However, we argue that if the outcome of the referendum
