As the 2008 financial crisis spread across the global economy, the Labour government intervened to prop up the housing market by supporting mortgage lenders and offering tax concessions to those purchasing homes. Despite many commentators accrediting Labour with “saving the system”, the 2010 election resulted in a Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government, who promptly made it their priority to tighten the proverbial belt.

British people, the new government claimed, had “lived beyond their means”. Chancellor George Osborne announced that it was time to “cut the waste and reform the welfare system that our country can no longer afford”. As part of this austerity agenda, Osborne and Prime Minister David Cameron confronted a housing benefit bill that had mushroomed from £2 billion in the early 2000s to £20 billion in 2010. Logically, they sought to cut expenditure on the four million council and housing association homes where almost a fifth of the population still lived.

At the same time, lobbyists and Conservative politicians claimed that the Labour government had stifled the housing market by subsidizing council and social homes. Incredible as it might seem, Conservative ideologues judged the deregulation and outsourcing of the Blair years to have been insufficient to the task of unleashing the full potential of that market. In short, the coalition government was dead set on turning Thatcher’s property-owning democracy almost fully over into a landlord’s oligarchy.

Recall the definition we gave to squalor at the start of this book: your habitat kills you. In the previous chapter we considered New Labour’s strategy of public–private financing, deregulation and outsourcing to have led to an organized negligence practiced by the state and its local administrations. In this chapter, we track the logical endpoint of such a strategy, a form of what Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe (2003) has called “necropolitics”. For Mbembe, contemporary politics is defined not necessarily by a straightforward desire to kill populations, but by a right to expose particular populations to deadly conditions.

We argue that after 2010 the British state has effectively divided the population into those who cling to a category of “life” – people who comfortably own habitations that are constructed safely – and those deposited in a category of “death” – those occupying habitations that they can ill afford and are unsafe, as well as the homeless and asylum seekers.