•Should we celebrate the growing contributions from voluntary sector and charitable organisations as the best of times for a flourishing civil society, or should we reproach the decline of public services as the worst of times for a diminishing welfare state?
•Should we embrace civil society initiatives as a mark of resistance to neoliberal policies, or should we repel them for mopping up the consequences of such policies?
•Do civil society responses to austerity offer genuine or false hope?
•Will the flames of their actions burn strongly enough to withstand the harsh winds of neoliberal austerity and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic?
In engaging with these questions, the chapter unpacks two core concepts that run throughout: austerity and civil society. In doing so, particular attention is paid to the North East of England in the context of the pre-COVID-19 policy landscape in the UK. This focus provides both an illustrative example of the implications of austerity measures and civil society roles, and the contextual setting (along with Chapter 2: ‘The North East of England’) for the case-study chapters in this volume.
Neoliberal austerity as ‘the worst of times’
The collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2007 paved the way for the largest, widest and deepest financial crisis in living memory. It revealed the inherent contradictions in the global capitalist economy, as well as the drastic consequences of excessive deregulation of the financial markets for social equality and political democracy. The financial crash was followed by the bailing out of the failing banks with a huge amount of public money, and one of the worst economic recessions in Britain. The then Labour government’s response was to introduce a set of fiscal stimuli, which was promptly withdrawn by the subsequent Conservative–Liberal Democrat Coalition government in 2010 and replaced with a wave of drastic austerity policies that continued until 2020, when it was, perhaps temporarily, suspended by the Conservative government, mainly in response to the pandemic and its economic contagions.
The dictionary definition of ‘austerity’ refers to the ‘difficult economic conditions created by government measures to reduce public expenditure’ (Oxford English Dictionary). In this definition, reducing public expenditure is invoked as the only ‘natural’ solution to economic problems. Other economic solutions such as increasing corporate taxes are not considered. The definition, maybe inadvertently, depoliticises austerity as an economic necessity rather than a neoliberal political choice (Mattie and Salour, 2019) – a choice based on an economic rationality that has recently been further boosted by highly acclaimed economists (notably, Alberto Alesino). They suggest that by cutting welfare spending, taxes will go down, leading to an increase in the money available to private investors, whose increased wealth will eventually trickle down and reach everyone else. So, those who have disproportionately suffered from the cuts simply need to be patient. According to these economic rationalities, what matters is the effect of austerity on aggregate gross domestic product (GDP)1 figures rather than the differential impact on different social groups. While they ask the question of when austerity works and when it does not, they shy away from asking for whom austerity works.
David Kynaston (2010) makes an intriguing comparison between post-2010 and post-Second World War austerity, and argues that ‘austerity was a hard sell in the 40s. Today it’s harder still.’ He argues that the four conditions that enabled popular assent to post-Second World War austerity are not present in the contemporary political climate. These conditions are: ‘shared purpose’, ‘hope’, ‘confidence in the political class’ and ‘equity of sacrifice’. While recognising the contextual differences between now and the 1950s, we argue that the presence or absence of these conditions is largely the manifestation of different ideological approaches to austerity. These conditions are discussed one by one, with reflections also made regarding the post-COVID-19 implications.
The post-war sense of ‘shared purpose’ was invoked by the necessity of fighting off fascism and collectively responding to the devastations and destructions of the war. Today, as Kynaston (2010) suggests, there is no similar ‘historic feelgood victory to look back on’. The vacuum has been filled by ‘a moralistic good housekeeping, live-within-our-means of future redemption’ narrative that is not only at odds with the dominant culture of consumption, but also an advocacy of neoliberal morality about individualisation of responsibility, privatisation of social risks and self-reliant resiliency (Bohland et al, 2018). The latter has been applied not only to individuals, but also to institutions, notably, local authorities (John, 2014). The responsibilisation agenda ignores the effects of structural inequalities and considers social problems such as low educational attainment, poor housing, low income, morbidity and premature death as consequences of personal choices and individual failings (Barry, 2005). Imposing stringent austerity measures offers the potential for a neoliberal government to sermonise on the follies of a nanny state, on individual failings and on a ‘broken society’, as the Coalition government claimed. Failure of government to meet citizens’ needs in the face of austerity is presented as a failure of the nanny state and the inherent problems associated with it, not a failure of (re)distribution and underfunding. People are vilified as being victims of their own irresponsibility rather than the collapse of the social contract. In many ways, health and economic crises resulting from COVID-19 have been exacerbated by decades of underinvestment in areas such as health, social care and social benefits in the name of austerity.
Post-war Britain was a time of grief, and also a time of ‘hope’. Based on egalitarian ideals, the state could legitimately intervene in the free market and redistribute national wealth socially and spatially. It was also expected to share with citizens the responsibility for social risks. Hope was founded on this social contract and its manifestation in the provision of free education, social housing, the national health system and lifetime social security, all of which cultivated a hopeful prospect for social mobility. According to neoliberal ideology, however, state intervention in the market is not only inefficient and ineffective, but also morally dangerous because it is claimed that providing welfare cultivates a culture of dependency and eradicates self-reliance (Davoudi and Madanipour, 2015). Former Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron’s notion of a ‘Big Society’ was indeed an advocacy of civil society assuming greater responsibility for societal problems, though without any accompanying transfer of resources. These assumptions have been called into question in response to the COVID-19 crisis, whereby the state has had to step in to provide safeguards for those affected by its economic consequences.
The ‘trust and confidence’ that was enjoyed by the post-war state and its political institutions has since been eroded. While key post-war political figures ‘attained almost surreal levels of personal popularity’ (Kynaston, 2010), the level of trust in political elites has dropped significantly, as shown in a British Social Attitudes Survey (BSAS, 2013: 16): ‘The last 30 years have seen a number of important institutions fall from grace very publicly … and there is a clear sense that people have lost faith in some of Britain’s most important institutions. This certainly applies to politicians and the political process.’ Austerity has been introduced amid