projected on television screens and social media, and the reality of people’s everyday political struggles to be heard and represented’ (Davoudi and Steele, 2020: 113). Public confidence in government’s ability to strive for a fairer and better society has been gradually diminishing. While in 1986, 38 per cent of the respondents trusted ‘governments to put the nation’s needs above those of a political party’, in 2011, only 18 per cent did so (BSAS, 2013: 13, 16). In the future, a positive change depends largely on how the government handles the COVID-19 crisis. Judged by its initial laissez-faire approach and the lack of preparedness, especially in relation to testing and the provision of protective clothing for front-line workers, optimism may be premature.
Of the four conditions identified by Kynaston (2010), ‘equity of sacrifice’ is perhaps the most vivid manifestation of two ideologically driven approaches to austerity. Post-war austerity was seen as being shared by the majority of both working- and middle-class people; there was a sense of parity of sacrifice. This could not be more different from neoliberal austerity. Although the Coalition government tried to sell austerity measures through the use of rhetoric such as ‘We’re all in this together’, it soon became evident that the poor were getting poorer during austerity, and the rich were getting richer because of it (Davoudi and Ormerod, 2021). Indeed, neoliberal austerity has hit the most vulnerable people (women, children, the disabled and the sick) and left-behind places (for example, post-industrial regions in the north of England) the hardest.
Although real GDP (which takes into account changes in prices such as inflation) in the UK grew by 5 per cent between 2012 and 2018, public expenditure on low-income families and children dropped by 44 per cent: from £403 in 2010 to £222 per person in 2018 (HRW, 2019: 50). The government’s own statistics show a rise of 200,000 in the number of children in ‘absolute poverty’ compared with the previous year, reaching approximately 3.7 million children in 2018 (DWP, 2018: 8). Similarly, homelessness is estimated to have risen by 165 per cent since 2010, reaching 280,000 in England by 2019 (Shelter, 2019). As Garry Lemon, Director of Policy at the Trussell Trust (the UK’s largest national food-bank charity), puts it, the 2010 date is important because it marked a change of government from centre-left to centre-right and the introduction of ‘policies that radically cut state spending … the message was clear … we need to cut back to balance the books’ (cited in McGee, 2020).
Through a number of policies, notably, the reduction in the size of welfare benefits, the increase in the conditions attached to it and the changes in the procedure by which it can be accessed, austerity has been used to radically restructure the welfare system, with devastating effects on the lives of the most vulnerable groups, as well as on their ability to cope with the consequences of the COVID-19 crisis. For example, homeless people are struggling to self-isolate despite the fact that they are ‘three times more likely to have severe respiratory problems’ (McGee, 2020). The inequitable impacts of austerity policies are not simply the result of economic miscalculation; they are deliberately designed to achieve the neoliberal goal of reducing the social role of the state. Indeed, austerity is a key tenet of neoliberalism. As Peck (2012: 626) argues, ‘according to neoliberal script, public austerity is a necessary response to market conditions, and the state has responded by inaugurating new rounds of fiscal retrenchment’.
As Clarke and Newman (2012) suggest, austerity has evoked both the prospect of hardship and the memories of post-war solidarities. However, despite successive governments’ rhetorical appeals to the latter in order to legitimise austerity, it is the former that is prevalent in the contemporary political and cultural landscape. While hardship has been felt deeply, especially among the most vulnerable, solidarity remained a distant memory, at least until the COVID-19 crisis, when it was foregrounded partly by reference to the post-war era. As a result, people’s participation in austerity has been characterised by Clarke and Newman (2012: 309) as a ‘passive consent’ rather than a ‘popular mobilization’. However, we argue that if the outcome of the referendum on UK membership of the European Union (EU) is anything to go by, the initial ‘passive consent’ turned into an ‘active discontent’ with neoliberal austerity, which was ‘hijacked by far-right populist parties and turned into instruments of their regressive and divisive political agendas’ (Davoudi and Steele, 2020: 115). The far-right’s hijacking of the narrative has been facilitated because successive political leaders failed to condemn the market’s intensification and its pernicious, harmful effects (Shenker, 2019: 40), which were apparent even before austerity’s onslaughts. As shown in the 2019 election, the rising level of discontent with austerity could no longer be ignored by electioneers seeking to win the public’s vote. At the time of writing and in the face of the COVID-19 crisis, public spending has reached a scale never seen during peacetime.
The inequitable effects of austerity have had a spatial dimension too, with some of the poorest cities and regions of England being hit hardest, including the North East region. Severe cuts to local governments’ public spending (Bailey et al, 2015; Hastings et al, 2015) has compounded the inequitable social effects of austerity because, in these areas, disadvantage is concentrated and there is a heavy reliance on the public sector for jobs and services (Peck, 2012). The scale and severity of budget cuts, especially in the North East, has reduced local governments’ ability to deliver services and to manage the recurring crises of capitalism. Proclamations from Boris Johnson’s Conservative government to ‘level up’ the regional economic, employment and budget disparities remain exactly that, while actual actions for levelling up have become more imperative than ever as the COVID-19 crisis is widely predicted to exacerbate existing spatial and socio-economic inequalities (Partington, 2020). So far, central government activities regarding its response to the pandemic are foreboding. Critical responses – such as testing and tracing – have been centralised and privatised, against expert advice, while the role of the public sector and local public health networks has been overlooked. Furthermore, Public Health England has been effectively dismantled and the expertise and resources within local authorities and community organisations have hardly been utilised (Chakrabortty, 2020). However, amid the darkness of austerity Britain and the global pandemic, there have also been glimmers of hope in the form of a rising level of activities by civil societies.
Proactive civil societies as the ‘best of times’
The idea of civil society failed because it became too popular. (Wolfe, 1997: 9)
This provocation refers to the faith in many concepts that travel far and fast and pick up different meanings at every stop along the way. ‘Civil society’ is not an exception; its history goes back to ancient Greece and its development as a concept began with the Enlightenment thinkers (notably, Alexis de Tocqueville) and continued through the works of many scholars, notably, Gramsci, who ‘may be single-handedly responsible for the revival of the term civil society in the post-World War Two period’ (Foley and Hodgkinson, 2002: xix).