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The UK's asylum and social welfare systems have both been transformed by major organisational changes, funding cuts, and privatisations through a decade of austerity. With this, asylum‐seeker accommodation and the impacts of welfare reform have become increasingly concentrated in already‐impoverished, peripheral urban areas such as Rochdale, Greater Manchester. Despite these parallels, scholarship and commentary in the UK has tended to consider welfare and border regimes in relative isolation. Based on ethnographic work conducted in two charity drop‐centres in the town, this article addresses this gap by exploring how the UK's converging politics and geographies of asylum and welfare governance shape everyday negotiations of deservingness and social in/exclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that as a consequence of austerity, police in England and Wales have taken over important roles in welfare and social policy institutions. This renders those institutions more coercive, punitive and exclusionary, and normalises a police worldview in those institutions. This process of what I call austerity-driven policification can be observed specifically well in the increasing numbers of police officers integrated into schools most affected by austerity. Such 'transinstitutional policing' in Britain is triggered by contradictory post-global financial crisis austerity measures, but reliant upon a long, racialised history of authoritarian neoliberalisation. Cuts to public spending in the 2010s reduced state institutions' capacities to provide for vulnerable people, who were further criminalised and whose rights to support and solidarity were further delegitimised by a radicalisation of the framing of welfare recipients as undeserving, social housing estates as drug-infested gang territories, and schools in deprived areas, and Black pupils in particular, as dangerous. Police, while subjected to austerity measures also, functioned as an institution of last resort, supplementing and replacing incapacitated state institutions, while also being presented as an appropriate institution to address problems increasingly understood to be of a criminal rather than educational nature. This article suggests that austerity-driven policification is an intensification of longer-term trends toward a larger role for police in the neoliberal era. It shows the racial and authoritarian nature of neoliberalisation, and its messy realisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wake of the deepest and longest recession that the United Kingdom has experienced since the 1930s, the consequences of Brexit and now COVID too, this article examines the origins, sustenance and puncturing of the growth dynamic it enjoyed since the early 1990s. It identifies what is termed the 'Anglo-liberal growth model' and its social policy corollary, 'asset-based welfare', considering the symbiotic yet increasingly tense and dynamic interdependence of the two. It argues that although both are compromised by the compound shocks of the crisis, Brexit and COVID, they have in fact become more not less intertwined and interdependent in these more troubled times. It considers the implications for the long-term sustainability of this fractious coupling and the wider consequences for UK economic performance and social welfare in the years ahead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic decline, such as we have witnessed in recent years, has disproportionately affected women and evidence demonstrates how financial hardship encourages entry to the sex industry. This worsens the working conditions within sex industry markets but, despite this, evidence documenting the effects of recent austerity measures on the sex industry is lacking. This article draws on qualitative longitudinal research following the 2007–2008 financial crisis to explore work trajectories and experiences of vulnerability through time among independent indoor sex workers in the UK. Participants' experiences demonstrate worsening conditions in the mainstream labour market, particularly for women and, within this constraining context, sex work represents a choice to mitigate economic vulnerability. Yet this creates increased competition in the sex industry alongside declining demand, which compromises economic security and worker wellbeing. Exploring sex workers' experiences over time contributes to a deeper understanding of the relationship between women's work practices and vulnerability during economic decline, which is necessary to inform policy responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the key findings of a study which critically analyses the construction of social class within UK media during the period 2010–2016 – part of the 'age of austerity'. Focusing upon 240 newspaper articles covering six topics (emergency budget, welfare reform, workfare, bedroom tax, food banks and zero-hour contracts), the study provides critical insights into how class is constructed in an important context: namely that of economic downturn and rising inequality. The findings suggest that a pro-austerity discourse dominates the coverage. Here austerity is described as necessary, and the idea of 'unavoidable scarcity' forms the basis for a 'moral divide' between a vague in-group – the 'ordinary hardworking people', defined by their idealised struggle and selfless sense of duty – and an exploitative 'other'. This both legitimises austerity and masks its broader impact. As the impacts become more apparent, however, challenges to the dominant narrative begin to appear. In the course of these challenges, the struggle inherent to class is placed back on the agenda, and class is increasingly constructed as an 'anxious concept' – a slippery slope down which one might fall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the emergence of the discourse of period poverty in UK news media across a two-year period. Using thematic analysis and discourse analysis, I analyse three themes: the focus on the schoolgirl, the silencing of the austerity context and the preoccupation with products and public figures to solve the structural issue of period poverty. In doing so, I argue that period poverty has emerged in the cultural sphere due to three key, and intertwined, forces: the continued dismantling of the welfare state and individualising of poverty, an escalation of mainstream feminism and feminist activism around menstruation, as well as high-profile individuals (celebrities, MPs, royals etc) supporting period poverty as philanthropy. This article brings together literature on austerity media culture and mediations of mainstream feminism/s. It expands scholarship on austerity media culture by analysing how the novel discourse of period poverty continues to individualise poverty and justify the ongoing dismantling of the welfare state, and it furthers scholarship on mainstream feminism/s by examining how the discourse of period poverty connects mainstream feminism/s with austerity and class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies the impact of the 2012 British austerity policies on youth political attitudes using a difference-in-differences. The study achieves this by combining longitudinal survey data from "Understanding Society" with a district-level estimate of the austerity shock that each individual faced between the years 2013 and 2015. The findings indicate that the welfare cuts had a negative impact on the political efficacy of young people, as they were more inclined to believe that public officials did not care about them and that they had no say in the actions of the government. Additionally, their satisfaction with politics, as determined by their perceived level of political influence, also decreased. Overall, the results suggest that the implementation of austerity measures increased the likelihood of political disenfranchisement among young people in Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The decision of the United Kingdom government to reduce its Official Development Assistance by £ 4.6 billion in 2020 was framed by its proponents as a nationalist response to a domestic financial crisis. This Conservative‐led austerity measure triggered the early closure of hundreds of aid projects globally. Concerned British politicians equated the cuts to moral failures as humanitarian and civil society actors claimed the lost funding would devastate the world's most vulnerable populations. In the vast space between British funders and the so‐called 'beneficiaries' of aid is a diverse cadre of mid‐level actors 'doing' and, in this case, 'un‐doing' development programming. This article examines their experiences in prematurely closing British‐funded projects in one postcolonial context, Malawi. Drawing upon semi‐structured interviews, the article explores the emotional, material and relational consequences of austerity. It builds on Didier Fassin's theorization of moral economies to argue that the timing and approach of this funding withdrawal violated the accepted moral economies of aid, breaching obligations between Malawian mid‐level aid workers and community members (including family) as well as among institutions. It concludes by considering how this particular rupture to the relational infrastructure of aid has prompted demands for recalibrated resourcing futures in Malawi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2008, the UK entered a period of economic recession followed by sustained austerity measures. We investigate changes in inequalities by area deprivation and urbanicity in incidence of severe mental illness (SMI, including schizophrenia-related disorders and bipolar disorder) between 2000 and 2017. We analysed 4.4 million individuals from primary and secondary care routinely collected datasets (2000–2017) in Wales and estimated the incidence of SMI by deprivation and urbanicity measured by the Welsh Index of Multiple Deprivation (WIMD) and urban/rural indicator respectively. Using linear modelling and joinpoint regression approaches, we examined time trends of the incidence and incidence rate ratios (IRR) of SMI by the WIMD and urban/rural indicator adjusted for available confounders. We observed a turning point of time trends of incidence of SMI at 2008/2009 where slope changes of time trends were significantly increasing. IRRs by deprivation/urbanicity remained stable or significantly decreased over the study period except for those with bipolar disorder sourced from secondary care settings, with increasing trend of IRRs (increase in IRR by deprivation after 2010: 1.6 % per year, 95 % CI: 1.0 %–2.2 %; increase in IRR by urbanicity 1.0 % per year, 95 % CI: 0.6 %–1.3 %). There was an association between recession/austerity and an increase in the incidence of SMI over time. There were variations in the effects of deprivation/urbanicity on incidence of SMI associated with short- and long-term socioeconomic change. These findings may support targeted interventions and social protection systems to reduce incidence of SMI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A decade of austerity has amplified concern about who gets what from public services. The article considers the socio-economic and gendered impacts of cuts to local environmental services which have increased the need for citizens to report service needs and effectively 'co-produce' services. Via a case study of a UK council's decade of administrative data on citizen requests and service responses, the article provides one of the first detailed analyses of the unfolding impact of austerity cuts over time on public service provision. It demonstrates the impact of austerity across the social gradient, but disproportionately on the least affluent, especially women. The article argues for the importance of detailed empirical examination of administrative data for making visible, and potentially tackling, long standing inequalities in public service provision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article critically analyses the management of public sector austerity. Focusing on the case of UK local government chief executives, we develop the concept of austerity imaginaries. We provide four examples of these based on extensive interviewing. Offered as a theoretical concept, austerity imaginaries involve shared understandings of the role and potential for local government during times of acute fiscal pressure. We contribute empirical knowledge about the local dynamics of austerity and contribute to critical scholarship in this field. We argue that a simple thesis of ruination and destruction can obscure the creative work involved at the front line and we advocate the value of engaging both critically and empathetically with the everyday meanings in action of public managers working in circumstances far from their choosing. At the same time, the imaginaries reveal the insidious ways in which neoliberal assumptions about the public sector appear to delimit the scope for action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political economy literature has sought to explain the rapid shift from fiscal stimulus to austerity after the 2008 crisis. Influential contributions highlight the relative explanatory value of ideational or structural factors in contributing to post-crisis austerity. Drawing on Stephen Gill's (1998) analysis of new constitutionalism and Peter Burnham's (2001) understanding of depoliticisation, I contend that these frameworks offer a more useful lens to understand how post-2010 austerity in the US and UK was shaped by an enduring consensus on macroeconomic policy governance consolidating during the 1990s. Examining the role of fiscal mechanisms such as PAYGO in the US and the 'Fiscal Golden Rules' in the UK, and the operational independence conferred to central banks, I illustrate how Third Way governments institutionalised budgetary reforms and distanced macroeconomic policymaking from popular political contestation. Despite temporary lapses with this logic of fiscal restraint, as well as the rollout of historic monetary policies after 2008, I argue that these practices became deeply embedded within state institutions. Focusing on PAYGO in the US and the OBR in the UK, I show how policymakers redeployed policies and practices from the 1990s amidst the 2008 crisis to externalise responsibility for implementing austerity measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comparative empirical evidence for 22 OECD countries shows that country differences in cumulative mortality impacts of SARS-CoV-2 are caused by weaknesses in public health competences, pre-existing variances in structural socio-economic and public health vulnerabilities, and the presence of fiscal constraints. Remarkably, the (fiscally non-constrained) U.S. and the U.K. stand out, as they experience mortality outcomes similar to those of fiscally-constrained countries. High COVID19 mortality in the U.S. and the U.K. is due to pre-existing socio-economic and public health vulnerabilities, created by the following macroeconomic policy errors: (a) a deadly emphasis on fiscal austerity (which diminished public health capacities, damaged public health and deepened inequalities); (b) an obsessive belief in a trade-off between 'efficiency' and 'equity', which is mostly used to justify extreme inequality; (c) a complicit endorsement by mainstream macro of the unchecked power over monetary and fiscal policy-making of global finance and the rentier class; and (d) an unhealthy aversion to raising taxes, which deceives the public about the necessity to raise taxes to counter the excessive liquidity preference of the rentiers and to realign the interests of finance and of the real economy. The paper concludes by outlining a few lessons for a saner macroeconomics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This paper aims to explore the lived experiences of key stakeholders working with homeless people during the implementation of universal credit during the austerity years. Design/methodology/approach: The literature on austerity reveals welfare reforms' impact on support services staff. Service providers' perceptions of the impact of austerity-led policies and welfare reform via nine interviews with people working in homelessness organisations in Brighton and Hove in the UK. Service providers see the situation for their service users has gotten worse and that the policies make it more difficult to extricate themselves from their current situation. Three central themes relating to the impact of austerity-led welfare reforms were, namely, Universal Credit: the imposition of a precarious livelihood on welfare claimants; a double-edged sword: "If people are sanctioned: people can't pay"; and "Hard to maintain my own mental equilibrium". Findings: More precisely, this paper captures service providers' perceptions and experiences of the impact of austerity-led policies on their services and how they believe this, in turn, impacts their clients and their own lives. Research limitations/implications: The dimension cuts across service provision to vulnerable people and is intertwined with health and well-being outcomes. Austerity is detrimental to the health of service users and their clients. It is known that when it comes to the health and well-being of the most vulnerable, who have suffered most from the impacts of austerity policies. However, in times of open austerity, it falls also on those trying to ease their suffering. Originality/value: The data suggest that policies were developed and accentuated by austerity, which led to the stripping of welfare support from vulnerable people. This process has impacted the people who rely on welfare and service providers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The food bank has become a charitable safety-net for those who have been failed by the social security system in times of austerity and during the Covid-19 pandemic. In this article we evidence the rise of food banking in the context of declining social security, examining the decade of austerity in the UK and the Covid-19 period. We also contextualise the process of normalisation of food banks as a new safety-net in a reduced welfare state. We argue that the welfare state has failed to address a fundamental 'Want' – namely, food security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the everyday experiences of arts and cultural organisations in negotiating the UK government and cultural policy priority for funding income diversification. Identifying the challenges of declining public funding and the connected pressures for arts and cultural organisations to be accountable, this article positions income diversification in relation to New Public Managerialism. In doing so, the need to examine the everyday experiences of how arts and cultural organisations engage with and respond to the income diversification priority is established. This article then presents findings from empirical research with arts and cultural organisations under the following three themes: balancing simultaneous sources, managing timelines and working through change. The discussion develops this analysis by identifying portfolio working and precarity as prominent and significant features of organisations' experiences. Portfolio working is evident in how organisations identify and manage multiple, potential funding sources. Precarity is evident in the uncertainty and instability of managing the multiple funding sources, and in the way that organisations address operational issues of planning and working practices. To conclude, the concept of organisational portfolio precarity is proposed as a way to critically understand the everyday situations and implications of how art and cultural organisations respond to the income diversification priority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theorisations of state violence under austerity have been criticised for their imprecision. In response, this article introduces the concept of institutional neglect: a specific modality of structural violence. We argue that institutional neglect occurs when state services deny care to eligible clients. This is a normative claim which locates an obligation to care in the body of the state. Through case studies of two local authority-run care services in the UK, we identify three banal, quotidian techniques of neglect: delay, deferral, and diversion. We emphasise that care is not necessarily an antidote to violence; instead, care and violence are increasingly entangled within state bureaucracies under austerity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political parties often seek to appeal to women voters through policy pledges. However, little is known about how – or whether – these policies influence women's voting behavior. Drawing on focus groups conducted with women voters, I explore how women perceive, experience, and negotiate gendered policies in their voting behavior using the 2015 British General Election as a case study. Overall, I find that "class-based" economic policies pertaining to the sexual division of labor matter to women voters, whereas policies seeking to tackle discrimination against women ("gender status" policies) are comparatively less salient. Crucially, attitudes toward class-based policies differ by life-stage. Taken together, I argue that studies on gender and vote choice should devote greater attention to the electoral context in addition to socioeconomic factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Controlled Organ Donation after Circulatory Death (DCD) was re-introduced in the UK in 2008, in efforts to increase rates of organs for transplant. Following reintroduction there were debates about the ethics of DCD, leading to production of legal and ethical guidelines. Today, DCD makes up 40% of deceased organ donors, leading to claims that the UK has 'overcome' its ethical challenges. However, there is little understanding of how DCD works in practice and the ethical implications of making DCD routine in the context of the NHS. This paper draws on data from an ethnographic study examining the practices of DCD in two acute NHS Trusts in England. Interviews with Intensive Care staff and Specialist Nurses in organ donation, observations of organ donation committee meetings and analysis of Trust documents were conducted. Findings reveal that the routinisation of DCD has created new ethical issues relating to interactions between organisational timeframes for DCD and (under)resourcing for, and de-prioritisation of, donation within an NHS subject to austerity. They include: the perceived burden on families and implications for consent when there are delays in the donation process, due to theatre space and retrieval team shortages; family and staff distress when death does not happen 'on time'; and the problem of where to take patients who do not die in time to donate. I argue these temporal-ethical issues are likely to become heightened as potential donor rates increase with the new opt-out legislation, unless the resourcing required to deal with these problems are also addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political opposition to fiscal adjustments has varied significantly across countries. Our analysis links this variation to differences in the congruence of voter attitudes towards fiscal trade-offs across political blocs in different countries. These differences in attitudes, in turn, coincide with the implications of the distinct macroeconomic growth strategies that these countries pursue. Based on original survey data, we show that in Germany, supporters of different parties not only share similar views on the appropriate size of fiscal adjustment, but also on how to distribute these cuts across various spending items. In Spain, there is fundamental disagreement on the amount of austerity, but voters largely agree on the composition of fiscal adjustments. In the UK, there is disagreement between voters of diverging political blocs on both accounts. Variation in public attitudes, therefore, gives rise to very diverse political dynamics surrounding fiscal adjustments in different countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The framing of shale gas development has received widespread attention, especially in the UK, United States, and throughout Europe. However, little has been said about what lessons can be learned from the shale development case about the role of language in use in the construction, contestation and closure of environmental problems. This article teases out and clarifies the subtle variations in the way the concept of the "frame" has been interpreted and operationalized; puts forward an analysis of the difficulty of achieving discursive closure in the UK shale development policy debate; and identifies possible implications of the failure of the "bridging fuel" argument for environmental discourse more broadly, asking in particular if this failure represents a challenge to ecological modernization or its continuation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction or background Life expectancy is an important summary measure of population health. In the absence of a significant event like war or disease outbreak, trends should, and historically have, increase over time, albeit with some fluctuations. Sources of data Data were extracted from the human mortality database for life expectancy at birth and age 65 years from 1980 to the latest available year for England & Wales, Scotland (Great Britain), France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and Germany. Areas of agreement It is well established that life expectancy improvements in Great Britain have stalled in recent years, and that a similar stalling was seen in other high-income countries during the mid-2010s. Areas of controversy The significance and causes of the slowdown in improvement in life expectancy in Britain are disputed. First, was Britain's slowdown in progress in life expectancy in the 2010s a deviation 'from' earlier sustained improvements or simply returning to normal (slower) improvement rates following faster gains in the 2000s? Second, did other European countries have slowdowns comparable to that in Britain? Growing points Life expectancy, as a summary measure, conceals inequalities. Other measures, such as lifespan disparity, complement it in understanding changing trends. While annual fluctuations in life expectancy are expected, continued stalls should raise concern. The three British nations examined were the only ones among these European countries to experience stalling of life expectancy gains in both sexes. Areas timely for developing research While it is clear that Britain is making less progress in health than similar countries, more research is needed to explain why. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reflects on City's interview with the UK activist group, Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC), examining their practices of resistance within the broader structural frame of austerity capitalism. This enables an exploration of how capitalism has constructed disability as an exclusionary category over time to support the accumulation of wealth, from urban industrialisation to austerity capitalism. The paper also engages with Gargi Bhattacharyya's argument that austerity is deployed through a post-colonial logic of racialisation, exploring how this notion may be applied to disabled welfare claimants. It also explores her argument that austerity marks a shift towards a post-consent politics but argues that both coercion and consent are key dimensions of state governance that seek to produce public acquiescence to punitive policies that threaten disabled people's livelihoods and lives. Indeed, the multiple struggles against austerity, including those by DPAC, clearly indicate the failure of moves towards a post-consent politics. The paper demonstrates how the city, therefore, is not only a key site for exclusion but also a central site for resistance. DPAC's resistances disrupt and contest austerity's processes and model an alternative prefigurative politics based on collaborative care and the use value of social reproduction. This opens up possibilities for post-capitalist futures and a right to the city based on collective rights and power. DPAC positions itself as both an identity and a class campaign, integrating reformist strategies into a longer-term anti-capitalist agenda and reaching outwards to other urban struggles that are similarly resisting the harms inflicted on bodies and minds by global capitalism. Therefore, building on the work of Mary Jean Hande, this paper argues that disabled people are not simply worthy of inclusion when theorising and constructing anti-capitalist and urban resistance, but are integral to and at the forefront of such struggles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For many young adults in the UK, austerity has restricted capacities to access secure housing, employment and social welfare, with sharp implications for reproduction and reproductive futures. Exploring these lived reproductive experiences, this article develops a conceptual framework that brings together social reproduction, emotional labour and relational work in new ways, specifically through the concept of 'carrying'. Carrying, I argue, beholds a range of embodied, emotional and laborious qualities that are required for contemporary social reproduction. To demonstrate, I draw on research based in the North East of England, as an area that has seen detrimental cuts in the name of austerity and has some of the lowest fertility rates in the UK. Empirical examples come from 12 in-depth Oral History and Future interviews, a technique specifically developed to explore present-day narratives about (not) having any or more children. It is argued that the emotional, embodied and relational labour of carrying is key to understanding the experience of reproduction in this context, particularly regarding (1) carrying possibilities, (2) carrying bodies and (3) carrying instabilities. These forms of labour often go unnoticed and unchecked and yet can shed new light on reproduction. To close, I argue that because the labour of reproduction is carried forward into the life-course, reproductive futures are yet another way in which social inequalities can widen further under austerity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Austerity and welfare reforms – such as Universal Credit (UC) – are changing the ways in which care is delivered in the UK, increasing the precarity of individuals and the organisations who care for them. New cultures of care are emerging as a result. We show how an emplaced affect of 'edgy-ness' shaped a culture of care within third-sector organisations and housing associations working in Cornwall, UK. Drawing on a collaborative project consisting of four housing associations and four VCSOs, we explore 'edgy-ness' as one specific affect of precarity through an analysis of practitioners' narratives of the project and its success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The financialization of everyday life has received considerable attention since the 2008 global financial crisis. Financialization is thought to have created active financial subjects through the ability to participate in mainstream financial services. While the lived experience of these mainstream financial subjects has been the subject of close scrutiny, the experiences of financial subjects at the financial fringe have been rarely considered. In the UK, for example, the introduction of High-Cost, Short-Term Credit [HCSTC] or payday loan regulation was designed to protect vulnerable people from accessing unaffordable credit. Exploring the impact of HCSTC regulation is important due to the dramatic decline of the high-cost credit market which helped meet essential needs in an era of austerity. As such, the paper examines the impact of the HCSTC regulation on sixty-four financially marginalized individuals in the UK that are unable to access payday loans. First, we identify the range of socioeconomic strategies that individuals employ to manage their finances to create a typology of financial subjectivity at the financial fringe. Second, we demonstrate how the temporal and precarious nature of financial inclusion at the financial fringe adds nuance to existing debates of the everyday lived experience of financialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'Age of Austerity' has ruptured the social fabric of contemporary Britain. Arising from our three-year Life on the Breadline project, this article represents the first fieldwork-led analysis of the multidimensional nature of austerity-age poverty by academic theologians in the UK. The article analyses the impact that austerity has had on Christian responses to poverty and inequality in the UK. We draw on our six ethnographic case studies and interview responses from over 120 national and regional Church leaders to exemplify the four approaches to the Christian engagement with poverty that we identified during our research: 'caring', 'campaigning and advocacy', 'enterprise' and 'community building'. We argue that the Church needs to grasp the systemic, multidimensional and violent nature of poverty in order to realise the potential embedded in its extensive social capital and fulfil its goal of 'transforming structural injustice'. The paper shows that the Church remains nervous of moving beyond welfare-based responses to poverty and suggests that none of the existing approaches can force poverty into retreat until the Church re-imagines itself as a liberative movement that embodies God's preferential option for the poor in every aspect of its life and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The past decade of austerity in the UK has accelerated changes in the relationship between citizens and the state. Cuts to welfare spending have resulted in uneven geographical impacts, further distorting the UK society and economy. Analysing specific policies within the new patterns of welfare spending, we argue that austerity policies have compromised the UK state's promotion of an ethics of care. We distinguish between welfare changes which intensify long standing policy trends, and others, such as automation and digitalisation of the welfare system, which are qualitatively different to previous reforms. To offer an example of how this is playing out in place, we explore a detailed case study of the English coastal town of Great Yarmouth, which was an early pilot town for contemporary welfare reform in the UK. The case study situates welfare changes within the widespread and uneven austerity measures of the past decade, showing how public services of the local state are weakened despite increased need. We find that many non-profit organisations try to fill some of the gaps in the tattered social safety net. However, they too are dependent on state funding, and so austerity also depletes their capacity to care. In this sense, care is interdependent, multi-sited, and interlocking. Through this case study of a town with high claimant counts, we show how these changes in the redistributive state precipitated a crisis in care, and exacerbated poverty and territorial injustice in an already highly divided country. UK austerity has drastically altered the role of the state, leaving many people more susceptible to other crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whilst the COVID-19 pandemic and 'cost of living' crisis revealed and intensified the United Kingdom's (UK) socio-spatial inequalities, these crises did not emerge into a vacuum. Long-term trends of deindustrialisation and austerity have meant many places particularly the former industrial areas across the North and Midlands have been 'left behind'. The current crises have exposed the structural fault-lines created by austerity across 2010/20 especially comprising significant cuts to welfare and local government services, with the outcome being sizable parts of the UK's post-industrial landscape experiencing poverty and destitution. In this paper, we focus upon deindustrialised Stoke-on-Trent in the North Midlands of England. Enduring long-term deindustrialisation and suffering from austerity, the article draws on qualitative and quantitative data to outline how the city contains a panoply of embedded structural problems including low-paid jobs, welfare retrenchment, poverty and destitution. Given it is a possibility that austerity will be reimposed after the next UK general election in December 2024, the paper concludes by briefly discussing the implications of these structural problems for UK government policy, indicating the urgent need for alternative policies to adequately address structural issues in places like Stoke. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the serious, negative consequences of austerity have discouraged political participation in many of its forms, because affected citizens believe that political participation will not achieve anything. Based on interviews with members of the public across England, many people feel that participating is not worthwhile because the government will not listen. This belief stems at least partially from the coalition and Conservative governments' narrative choices since 2010, in which they argued that austerity is the only viable option for economic recovery following the financial crisis. As a result, individuals feel they lack influence, which further undermines their motivation to participate. It is fundamental to understand why citizens facing rising poverty, health problems and food bank usage are reluctant or unable to engage in politics. A lack of political voice may exacerbate the issues faced by vulnerable people living under austerity, meaning this research makes an important contribution to understanding the consequences of austerity, both in the UK and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an investigation into the racialized and gendered dynamics of the intensifying crisis in care for older people in the United Kingdom. Deploying a feminist political economy framework, we reveal how the care crisis is an intersectional crisis of social reproduction worsened by both austerity and COVID-19. We do this through an analysis of a small set of interviews with South Asian older women with care needs, conducted during the first period of UK national lockdown in 2020. This was a pilot study, focusing on the challenges faced in accessing formal and informal care during this period of the pandemic. The experiences, fears, and vulnerabilities that came through in the interviews are located within a broader analysis of the racialized care crisis—one that reveals the long-term harms that austerity, including "austerity Islamophobia," generated for these older women and their families as they struggled to provide and access un/paid care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dementia is a global health challenge and currently the focus of a coordinated international response articulated through the notion of 'dementia‐friendly communities and initiatives' (DFCIs). Yet, while increasing research attention has been paid to the social and spatial dimensions to life with dementia in a neighbourhood setting, the temporalities of dementia have been largely overlooked. This article sets out different aspects of the lived experience of time for people with dementia and unpaid carers, before exploring the temporal politics of formal dementia care and support. The authors show that time is a site for material struggle and a marker of unequal relations of power. People with dementia and unpaid carers are disempowered through access to formal care, and this is illustrated in their loss of (temporal) autonomy and limited options for changing the conditions of the care received. The authors advocate for a time‐space configured understanding of the relationship with neighbourhood and foreground a tempo‐material understanding of dementia. Set against the backdrop of austerity policy in the UK, the findings reveal that ongoing budgetary restrictions have diminished the capacity for social care to mediate in questions of social justice and inequality, at times even compounding inequity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a critical intervention into recent geographical debates on racial capitalism, interrogating the role that Housing Associations (HAs), the main form of UK social housing, play in its (re)production. Housing Associations are institutional, third‐sector spaces within which novel forms of financialisation and bordering take place. Race is central to these processes, but insufficient critical attention has been afforded to the intersections of class, race, and migratory status in extant research on UK HAs. Moreover, existing research into housing and racial capitalism is provincial in its North American focus, typically examining home ownership and private renting. We argue this is a significant lacuna given that new and multiple forms of racialised exclusion, inequality, and extraction cohere in social housing. There is accordingly a pressing need for a robust interrogation of racial capitalisms through UK HAs, and of the role of HAs via the conceptual lens of racial capitalism. In concluding, the paper argues for a new focus on 'actually existing' racial capitalisms, and the need for detailed analyses of the logics and practices of racial capitalisms across a variety of sites and scales, helping debates move beyond their conceptual heartland in North America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In September 2012, Save the Children UK launched the It Shouldn't Happen Here campaign, to raise awareness of the incidence of poverty amongst British children, and raise funds for the charity's UK programmes. Shortly after the launch, SCUK experienced severe media and political backlash, as primarily centre and right-wing commentators described the campaign as a political stunt, and sought to discredit, deny and depoliticise the claims that severe child poverty 'happens here'. Drawing on interviews with former staff, and an analysis of the media response, this article explores the ways in which the campaign and the ensuing backlash were embedded in a set of colonial and racialized discourses around 'who is poor' and who is deserving/undeserving both in Britain and globally. Crucially, the findings from this study raise important challenges to the recent reintroduction of questions of race (as whiteness) in populist discussions around class and poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Community wealth building provides an important counterpoint to the orthodoxy of place based economic policy in the UK. It puts forward a framework for economic change which shows that local areas can intervene effectively to build wealth from within so that they are less reliant upon extractive forms of economic development. Instead, wealth building within a community is about recognising the wealth that already exists in an area and intervening to encourage that wealth to flow more readily, particularly from capital to labour. This article explores the background to the development of community wealth building in the UK and its connection with the debate on the everyday economy. It finds that there is a close alignment between the objectives of building wealth and the everyday economy, particularly in areas which not only feel 'left behind', but arguably, who have been kept behind by a policy regime which has actively dismantled their sense of place, agency and identity, and in turn, devalued the role and purpose of the businesses and economy that already exists, in favour of elusive 'growth' and/or 'pioneer' sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of intergenerational fairness has taken hold across Europe since the 2008 financial crisis. In the United Kingdom (UK), focus on intergenerational conflict has been further sharpened by the 2016 'Brexit' vote to take the UK out of the European Union. However, current debates around intergenerational fairness are taking place among policy makers, the media and in think-tanks. In this way, they are conversations about, but not with, people. This article draws on qualitative interviews with 40 people aged 19–85 years and living in North-East England and Edinburgh, Scotland's capital city, to explore whether macro-level intergenerational equity discourses resonate in people's everyday lives. We find widespread pessimism around young people's prospects and evidence of a fracturing social contract, with little faith in the principles of intergenerational equity, equality and reciprocity upon which welfare states depend. Although often strong, the kin contract was not fully ameliorating resentment and frustration among participants observing societal-level intergenerational unfairness mirrored within families. However, blame for intergenerational inequity was placed on a remote state rather than on older generations. Despite the precariousness of the welfare state, participants of all ages strongly supported the principle of state support, rejecting a system based on family wealth and inherited privilege. Rather than increased individualism, participants desired strengthened communities that encouraged greater intergenerational mixing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article tracks how a trope of middle-class household thrift, grounded on the autarchic Aristotelian oikos, has long fueled derogatory discourses in Britain aimed at low-income urban residents who practice quite different forms of thrift. Since the 1970s this trope has migrated across scales, proving a potent metaphor for national economic policy and planetary care alike, and morally and economically justifying both neoliberal welfare retraction compounded by austerity policies and national responses to excessive resource extraction and waste production. Both austerity and formal recycling schemes shift responsibility onto consumer citizens, regardless of capacity. Further, this model of thrift eclipses the thriftiness of low-income urban households, which emerges at the nexus of kin and waged labor, sharing, welfare, debt, conserving material resources through remaking and repair and, crucially, the fundamental need for decency expressed through kin care. Through a historicized ethnography of a London social housing estate and its residents, this paper excavates what happens as these different forms and scales of household thrift coexist, change over time, and clash. Ultimately, neoliberal policy centered on an inimical idiom of thrift delegitimizes and disentitles low-income urban households and undermines their ability to enact livelihood practices of sustainability and projects of dignity across generations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this 'state of the art' review, we draw on the Irish and UK context to ask 'what can welfare stigma do?' Our question provokes thinking about welfare stigma not as an inevitable 'cost' of the structure of welfare provision, but as something that does socio-political work and which may be deliberately mobilised to do so. This, we argue, is a particularly pertinent question to ask in the Irish and UK contexts, bound together by some shared liberal welfare regime characteristics that are particularly associated with welfare stigma and by the effects of a period of austerity capitalism that continues to re-shape the meaning and experience of welfare. Yet, going beyond welfare stigma as inherently negative, we highlight a limited literature on resistance that suggests the potentialities of welfare stigma in the service of positive social change toward a new welfare imaginary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a standard operating backdrop in the United Kingdom, for more than a decade austerity has become an increasingly dominant logic as to how policing can be delivered and (re)configured to do 'more with less'. Yet beyond simple rationalisation of public policing in line with market principles, a more complex and long-standing trajectory underpins relations between the police and commercial 'others' set within this climate. With austerity as a guiding 'code', it has accelerated rather than punctuated the evolution of public policing dispersal. Using path dependency theory, the paper argues that change across both law and policy via different forms of critical juncture has embedded commercial principles, while simultaneously reconfiguring the symbolic (and operational) status of the police and their relationship with the public. In turn, the paper highlights that such pluralisation, in a genealogical sense, has tilted police authority away from central state control to a more dispersed and commercial model – but on a long-term trajectory which long precedes austerity as part of path-dependent change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organizational reform has been commonplace in the response to global socio-economic changes. Rising managerialism, consumerism and marketization has accelerated reforms; providing challenges for the healthcare professions. The latest socio-economic challenge, austerity, and its professional implications have scarcely been researched. This study aims to explore the lived reality of austerity as experienced by physiotherapists working on the frontline of the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK. Ethical approval was granted by the University of Nottingham; the study was advertised via the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy online network. Two participants took part; semi-structured interviews were completed, audio recorded, and transcribed. Data was analyzed using thematic analysis. Three themes arose from the data: (1) Fulfilling professional responsibilities; (2) Changing organizational landscape; and (3) Professional reality of rationalizing and accommodating austerity. The clinical implications of austerity included increased length of hospital stay, insufficient community services, constrained resources, and understaffing. Participants demonstrated attempts to preserve their professional status and services through restratification throughout the intra-professional hierarchy, changing division of labor, and re-professionalization. Despite claims that austerity is coming to an end, it remained a reality for these clinicians in the NHS. Physiotherapists in this study used similar methods to preserve practice when faced with exogenous constraints as seen in medicine, such as re-professionalization and restratification. However, this attempt to defend professionalism by a non-medical healthcare profession was met with both successes and losses and has implications for the wider healthcare profession ecology, identifying an area for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article conceptualises home cook Jack Monroe as an 'austerity celebrity', a mediated figure who forged her public persona directly through articulations with austerity culture. Drawing on an intertextual analysis of her blogs, cookbooks, interviews, speeches and representations across the media, I argue that Monroe demonstrates the paradox of anti-austerity celebrity in becoming economically successful as the face of modern poverty. Monroe's navigation of a dual identity of celebrity and activist manifests in her critique of the government, her middle-class precarity, her status as a mother and her queer identity which requires consistent 'authenticity labour'. In Monroe's case, this labour is visible as a constant and politicised struggle over the terms of her 'authenticity'. While unable to manage her more complex middle-class, queer identity, which confronts the established grounds of 'feckless mothers', the UK tabloid media attempts to frame Monroe's success as a rags-to-riches style narrative reinforcing hegemonic rhetorics of resilience and creativity as routes to overcoming adversity. This analysis of the struggles at work in Monroe's mediated presence demonstrates how the moral imperatives for women to offer to resourcefully manage the 'challenges' of austerity cuts, arguably draws attention away from austerity as structurally and politically motivated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues for the need to reconsider the changing nature of in-work poverty (IWP). In doing so, the authors present evidence not included in current debates or statistics, of people working in more than one job, yet still experiencing IWP. Using the dynamic theory of poverty and a qualitative approach, the authors identify various structural constraints that sustain cycles of IWP. This highlights the multidimensionalities of poverty, incorporating the temporalities, types and depths of IWP. The evidence demonstrates how poverty is experienced and individualised and also how it is created and sustained through paid work, rather than being challenged by it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Satisfaction with dental services can provide valuable insights into aspects of quality including access as well as changes in this over time. In the UK publicly funded dental services are ostensibly delivered by private sector general dental practitioners for whom private patients represent an opportunity cost to the provision of care to public patients. This study examined changes in satisfaction as economic circumstances and policy changed in Britain between 1998 and 2019. Methods: Data were taken from successive waves of the British Social Attitudes Survey a representative cross-sectional survey of the population between 1998 and 2019. Descriptive statistics and a series of logistic regression analyses were used to examine the relationships between satisfaction and a range of socio-demographic characteristics over time. Results: 37,328 usable responses were extracted from the survey spanning 21 years of data. Over the course of the survey approximately 71% of the sample was very satisfied, satisfied or neither satisfied nor dissatisfied with publicly funded dental services. Satisfaction fell at the outset of the study period but rose following the economic downturn from 2008 which coincided with increased use of publicly funded services. Differences were evident in satisfaction between older versus younger respondents, more affluent versus less affluent respondents and better educated versus less well-educated respondents. Satisfaction did not appear to change in response to policy changes. Conclusion: Satisfaction is an important outcome of service provision. Policies aiming to improve satisfaction with publicly funded dental care in the UK must take account of the competing demands on dentists' time from private patients. At times of economic expansion or when supply has been disrupted, these may be particularly acute and require specific interventions to improve access for those who depend on public services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public opinion on complex policy questions is shaped by the ways in which elites simplify the issues. Given the prevalence of metaphor and analogy as tools for cognitive problem solving, the deployment of analogies is often proposed as a tool for this kind of influence. For instance, a prominent explanation for the acceptance of austerity is that voters understand government deficits through an analogy to household borrowing. Indeed, there are theoretical reasons to think the household finance analogy represents a most likely case for the causal influence of analogical reasoning on policy preferences. This article examines this best-case scenario using original survey data from the United Kingdom. It reports observational and experimental analyses that find no evidence of causation running from the household analogy to preferences over the government budget. Rather, endorsement of the analogy is invoked ex post to justify support for fiscal consolidation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates how the British trade union movement sought to challenge the politics of austerity after the North Atlantic financial crisis of 2008 by founding a union‐led coalition: the People's Assembly Against Austerity. To lay the ground for the study, it redefines the concept of discursive power as the capacity of trade unions to influence the public debate by producing and self‐mediating frames and circulating them through the mainstream media, the Internet and social media to a mass audience. Data were collected over 3 years (2013–2015) using interviews and scraping tweets from Twitter. The findings reveal how the People's Assembly created and sustained a heterogenous coalition through a policy of nonpartisanship and a consensus‐driven decentralised network of grassroots local assemblies orchestrated by a national organisation. The article contributes to the literature on trade union revitalisation by demonstrating how combining coalitional and discursive power is a combustible mix that can help revitalise the political influence of trade unions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on interviews with welfare claimants living in Essex, UK, this article examines the material and symbolic effects of the UK government's 2012 Welfare Reform Act, and it highlights the participants' interpretations of and responses to that. In reaction to their sense of material and symbolic exclusion, participants made moral claims for their inclusion through a notion of social citizenship based on collective reciprocity and care. They claimed to have paid-in to the national purse in various material and moral ways until circumstances outside of their control meant they could no longer do so. They thus asserted a moral-economic right to social inclusion and an ensuing right to receive adequate, non-stigmatised, and non-punitive welfare. These moral-economic claims differ from other, more public, counter-narratives to welfare reform and government austerity, and they assert a clear but subtle opposition to the market-bound logic of the reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the volatility of sources of individual and household level income in the UK in the years 2009-2017, following the Great Recession and government austerity. We find that the volatility of (pre-tax) earnings and disposable income has fallen for the working-age in this period, largely due to fewer negative and large earnings shocks. For older individuals, we also find a fall in the volatility of private income, mainly due to fewer positive and large income shocks. Taxes and transfers help stabilise incomes, with social security cash benefits and income-dependent refundable tax credits reducing household private income volatility by around a quarter for the working age, and 40 percent for those aged 60 or over. However, over the sample period, taxes and benefits became less well correlated with earnings, reducing their ability to counteract swings in labour income. The findings illustrate the consequences of fiscal retrenchment and the cut-backs to welfare benefits on the stability of incomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social care provision across high-income countries has been transformed over the last ten years by personalisation – a policy agenda to give people with eligible support needs more choice and control over their support. Yet the ideological underpinnings of this transformation remain highly mutable, particularly in the context of reduced welfare provision that has unfolded in many nations advancing personalisation. How the policy has manifested itself has led to an expectation for people to self-build a life as individual consumers within a care market. This article draws on a study exploring how people with learning disabilities in England and Scotland are responding to the everyday realities of personalisation as it is enacted where they live and show the relationality inherent in their practices. We propose that the personalisation agenda as it currently stands (as an individualising movement involving an increasing responsibilisation of individuals and their families) ignores the inherently relational nature of care and support. We propose that social care policy needs to recognise the relational ways in which people build their lives and to advocate a redistribution of responsibility to reduce inequalities in the allocation of care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the everyday experiences of young white working-class men living in coastal towns badly affected by austerity programmes implemented in the UK since 2010. The lives and aspirations of marginal young men seldom feature in studies of the effects of economic crisis and austerity. These men are positioned at the intersection of several rhetorical constructions with contradictory and ambivalent affects. They are expected, and still expect, to become wage earners and providers, largely through their own efforts and self- improvement. A rhetoric of social mobility disguises structural inequality, producing a false promise of hope or 'cruel optimism' about future prospects. Simultaneously, young working- class men, especially those without employment, typically are constructed as a threat to (middle class) society, difficult or dangerous, and authors of their own disadvantage. We explore how young men, without regular work and often lacking family support, talk about everyday experiences, social relationships, feelings and emotions and hopes for the future in coastal towns with a particular place in the national imaginary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]