Introduction

An ‘age of austerity’ – a term used previously only to describe the UK austerity programmes in the years immediately following the First and Second World Wars – was cited as the answer to what Prime Minister David Cameron called ‘the age of irresponsibility’. The task, he said, was to ‘identify wasteful and unnecessary public spending’ (2009). The UK's ‘fiscal crisis’ created space for the re-birth of austerity politics (see O’Connor, 1973), and the (re-)framing of policy discourses, such as fiscal responsibility aligned to the new predicament (Prince, 2001). Referring to UK public services, Clarke would call this particular context ‘the financial crisis of the state and fiscalization of policy discourses’ (2005, p. 213).

A rise in austerity politics can generally be said to incite new government policies which impact upon our daily lives. In ‘Austerity Britain’, the contested policies that cut legal aid funding and court system financing threaten justice and the rule of law, which are the very foundations of the legal systems in England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The UK's legal systems are admired and respected worldwide for their strength and robustness. This good reputation is now at risk of decline, owing to the situation in England and Wales, as the case study presented in this chapter recognizes. Thus, it is necessary firstly to identify and then to critically analyze policies that affect law and justice, the impacts of such policies and resistance to them. The growing body of literature on austerity policies which scope wideranging areas of public life has identified a worrying trend: the clear reversal of policies designed to be enabling and inclusive into policies which constrain and exclude.

Offered as a case study of the wider debate on austerity-throughpolicy in Britain, this chapter reviews legal aid reform, which previously has been described as ‘discount justice’ in other common law jurisdictions, as now threatening England and Wales as well (see Baum, 1979; Greenberg and Cherney, 2017).