The State of Austerity: Governance, Welfare, and the People

This chapter is concerned with how the ‘state’ is represented in austerity discourse. There is a strong consensus - on the left, in ‘anti-austerity’ discourse - that the state is what is at stake in the age of austerity. For those on the left of the political spectrum in Britain (and many other places in the global North), the term ‘austerity’ has come to signify a process in which the state is being ‘scaled back’, ‘rolled back’, or ‘dismantled’ (Blackburn, 2011: 19; Taylor-Gooby and Stoker, 2011: 14; Hall et al., 2013: 9) via a programme of ‘cuts’ to welfare in its many forms and broadest sense - services, benefits, and infrastructure. Through a ‘withdrawal of the state’, the coalition government is seen to be ‘seeking to embed in the UK a stronger neoliberal approach to social policy’ (Grimshaw and Rubery, 2012: 105; see also Macleavy, 2011; Hall, 2012). Commentators also tend to agree that this programme is ideologically motivated, rather than economically necessary (Wren-Lewis, 2011: 5). For the Conservative Party, it is argued, ‘a shrunken state is the prize’. If the coalition government is only to last a term, the Tories seek to leave behind ‘permanent change to the state, not just taking a wrecking ball to its fabric, but planting anti-state knotweed in the national mind’ (Toynbee, 2012a).