It has been ten years since the Conservative–Lib Dem government first enacted their programme of austerity and welfare reform. Records from the House of Commons Library show that since then, there has been approximately £90.8 billion of cuts made to public spending (Cracknel and Keen, 2016). These cuts have been vigorously pursued and have translated into a wide range of punitive policies. Despite the softening of political rhetoric around austerity by Conservative leaders and members of the cabinet since 2017, such policies have had devastating consequences, which will slowly continue to unravel for years to come. Poverty, hunger, high levels of debt, unemployment, homelessness, rising levels of physical and mental ill health, rising levels of crime, infant and adult mortality and ‘austerity suicides’ are just some of the effects that have become commonplace in the last decade (see Garthwaite, 2016; McCulloch, 2017; Mills, 2017; O’Hara, 2017). A United Nations expert ruled in June 2016 that welfare reforms and austerity measures implemented by successive Conservative governments in the UK are in breach of international human rights (UN Economic and Social Council, 2016). The government, however, disputed those findings and refused to change course.

Austerity has been framed by political elites as an era of ‘years of hard slog’ (Hammond, 2017), in which everyone pulled together in the face of adversity (Cameron, 2012a; Osborne, 2012). Yet this façade of togetherness slips when it is reported that Britain is now one of the most unequal countries in the developed world (The Equality Trust, 2017). Since 2014, there has been an explosion of wealth at the top, whereby the richest 1,000 people own more wealth than 40 per cent of households. In the five years leading up to 2017, the combined wealth of Britain's 1,000 richest people had increased by £253 billion (The Equality Trust, 2019). In contrast, 14 million people in the UK — one fifth of the population — now live in poverty (Alston, 2018).

Running alongside this, through the political justification for austerity policies, there has been the endless targeting, vilification, humiliation and scapegoating of certain groups, mainly those on the lowest incomes or who have experienced poverty and other forms of deprivation.