Introduction

When the corporate banks from Wall Street to Canary Wharf came tumbling down in 2008/9 many commentators were proclaiming that the neoliberal project had reached its endgame. It was none other than the Nobel Prizewinning economist Joseph Stiglitz who noted at the time that:

However, far from heralding a new settlement, with the instigation of a dual-track policy of bailouts of the banks and austerity, as Belzer and Wayne (2017) note, since 2008 we have seen the ‘greatest theft from the public in our entire history’. And far from witnessing its demise, we have seen an intensification of neoliberalism, with the consequences most acutely felt by those least able to resist its impacts, resulting, among other things, in a rapid rise in poverty and inequality. A report by Oxfam, for example, estimates that between 2010 and 2020, 25% of British children will be living in poverty and an additional ‘1.5 million working-age adults are expected to fall into poverty, bringing the total to 17.5 per cent of this group’ (Oxfam 2013: 2). Other effects of austerity are a significant rise in suicide rates, particularly among older males and disabled people (Antonakakis and Collins 2015; MacKenzie 2015). A blog by the Social Workers and Service Users against Austerity campaign outlines a growing evidence base of the direct impacts of austerity on children's social care practices. For children and families, this has led to increasing levels of mental and physical ill-health, powerlessness, loss of self-esteem and alienation, whereas practitioners with increasing caseloads and diminishing resources and frequent staff turnover are pushed towards narrow, time-limited and risk-averse models of intervention where relationship-based practice becomes a luxury (Gupta and ATD Fourth World 2017).