A decade of ‘austerity’ Britain

more interested in children as future workers than in happy, healthy childhoods, saying that we do not lift the poor ‘by hammering the people who are successful’! (Sayer, 2016: 164).

Blair was a warmonger. He allied with then president George W. Bush on the US’s ‘war on terror’ to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, despite widespread public dissent. In fact, during his first five years, he took British troops into battle five times, more than any other prime minister in British history. This was to be his downfall, but his legacy remains that, on Tony Blair’s watch, ‘the top 1% carried on taking more and more each year as compared to the year before, just as fast as they had done during the Thatcher years’ (Dorling, 2018a: 18).

The naivety of New Labour under Tony Blair (1997–2007) was based on a belief that neoliberalism could bring about the end of class, a new classless society, based on meritocracy. This completely missed the point: ‘neoliberalism is itself a class project: an ideology which aims to restore and consolidate class power, under the veil of the rhetoric of individualism, choice, freedom, mobility and national security’ (Tyler: 2013: 7). This decoupling of class inequalities directly led to the abjectification of the ‘chav’ so firmly stitched into media ridicule by comedians David Walliams and Matt Lucas with their representation of Vicky Pollard as a feckless, irresponsible, ignorant, teenage mother to be both feared and ridiculed. Tony Blair, far from his promise, brought in a new political formula in the name of socialism: ‘a neoliberal perceptual frame through which to perceive “the masses” as an underclass of people cut off from society’s mainstream, without any sense of shared purpose’ (Blair, 1997, cited in Tyler, 2013: 176). No wonder Margaret Thatcher described Tony Blair as her biggest success!

Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the action of human beings. (Mandela, 2005)

A decade of ‘austerity’ Britain

The general election of 2010 brought an inconclusive result. The ‘Big Society’ was the platform on which David Cameron ran for office and became the driver of the coalition between the Conservative party and the Liberal Democrats. The ‘small state’, so we were told, was about handing over power to communities and local people, an act of participatory democracy and community empowerment. Nothing could have been further from the truth. This was a smokescreen for ‘austerity’ measures, absolving state responsibilities for the poorest in society by making the poor responsible for their own poverty while dismantling public sector provision. It was a pincer movement. Political persuasion was applied, Gramsci-style. David Cameron was an ‘enthusiastic purveyor of the austerity narrative’ (O’Hara, 2020: 138). This independently wealthy, public school educated, White, male Oxford University graduate used a ‘toxic narrative’ based on ‘“troubled” families who were the dangerous zombie vanguard of an out-of-

control “intergenerational” poverty and welfare “dependency” epidemic’ (O’Hara, 2020: 137) to create hatred and fear in the minds of the general public. This convincing rhetoric was based around ‘welfare scroungers’, making a lifestyle choice to live on benefits, ripping off hard-working families who pay taxes, and bleeding the economy dry. ‘None of this was borne out by the facts – none’ (O’Hara, 2020: 138). The result has been a disaster for everyone, rich and poor alike. By 2015, the UK was the most unequal country in Europe, and there are no winners in divided countries.

This sets the scene for a discussion on ‘austerity’, the antithesis of social justice! Imogen Tyler talks about austerity as ‘a twenty-first-century enclosure movement’ (Tyler, 2020: 170). I think that captures the essence of the concept perfectly. ‘Austerity’ was not an economic necessity, it was a political choice to serve the interests of the rich by robbing the poor of the welfare commons, the infrastructure of public goods and services that had been the mainstay of society since the implementation of the welfare state. In 2010, the most savage attack on public goods began:

… the rapid closure of local hospitals and clinics, public libraries, local museums, post offices, children’s nurseries, community and youth centres, day-centres and residential care homes for disabled people and pensioners, and the enclosure of common land, including parks and playing fields. The amount of services, facilities, buildings and land once held in common by local communities, now sold by cashstrapped local authorities to developers, or simply abandoned to decay, is staggering. (Tyler, 2020: 170)

Generations of public sector knowledge and expertise as well as buildings, facilities and land have been contracted out from the public to the profit sector in a system of fragmented, precarious organisations, with the voluntary sector trying to protect those worst hit with street provision, homeless shelters, foodbanks, breakfast clubs for the swathes of poor children who go to school hungry, and so on and so on. The public sector was never the right of the government to sell: it belonged to the people.

Austerity is nothing less than a government-orchestrated programme of theft. (Tyler, 2020: 170)

Exploring this concept of the commons further, Sayer’s (2016) analysis is critical and tackles the misconception of individualism. We do nothing on our own; we are part of a whole. That whole includes the past and the present, determining whether or not we meet our responsibility to hand over the world in better condition for next generations to inherit. We are always immensely indebted to previous generations; what we inherit provides a platform for what we are able to develop, including the natural resources that the Earth offers us. So, our common