The chapter begins with the question about how both agency and loss of agency are constructed within the context of the ‘hostile environment’ approach to immigration, and in the lead-up to the Brexit vote, where immigrants’ use of the National Health Service (NHS) and more generally the welfare state became a contested site. This chapter explores how immigrants’ use of healthcare was produced as a problem in need of policy intervention and harsh rhetoric. It will explain how new forms of agency (specifically the outsourcing of immigration controls), and new forms of obligation were created by a hostile environment. The chapter also examines claims for agency that had been lost (control over who can or cannot access public services) which are presented as in need of recuperation. In conceptualizing agency, the chapter uses John Clarke's theorization of agency in relation to contexts animating actions (2013). Clarke asks how contexts ‘make things thinkable (in Foucault's sense), possible, relevant, desirable and necessary’ or might ‘produce the obverse effects (making some things unthinkable, impossible, irrelevant, undesirable and unnecessary)’ (2013, p. 24). Contexts shape how we might ‘[imagine] the problem’, ‘provide languages for naming the problem and frame the sorts of remedial action or solution that might be seen as reasonable to pursue’ (2013, p. 24).

The contexts discussed in this chapter are neoliberal rationality, austerity and xenophobic, populist politics, and the synergies between them will be explored. The chapter examines how, through neoliberal reforms, the welfare state was transformed according to the principles of competition, individual consumer choice and conditional entitlement to benefits. This transformation has had the effect of undermining any (already limited) principles and practices of universalism and has rendered social solidarity unimaginable and unthinkable. The introduction of conditionality also rehabilitated some Victorian-era moralizing arguments about the undeserving poor. These developments have led to a situation where, within the context of ‘Austerity Britain’, the necessity of public sector cuts is largely accepted, and it is assumed that people are competing over a limited pool of scarce resources.