On Being ‘Inside’ Austerity: Austerity Chic, Consumer Culture, and Anti-austerity Protest

Abstract

On Friday, 24 April 2009, official figures from the Office of National Statistics revealed that the British economy had shrunk ‘at the fastest rate in 30 years’ in the first three months of that year (Kollewe, 2009). The figures were seen as throwing into question Labour Chancellor Alistair Darling’s more optimistic budget forecast, issued just a few days previously. That evening, the lead story on Newsnight (a current affairs programme) was the inevitability of ‘very substantial cuts in public spending’. ‘How will our lives change to cope with this new age of austerity?’, the programme asked. This was by no means the first time the phrase ‘age of austerity’ had been used to describe the new era of spending cuts, but it is a useful and representative instance to recall, because many of the themes and tropes with which we have become familiar were present in that edition of Newsnight, including the use of historical analogy. As Kirsty Wark explained in her introduction to the programme’s studio debate: ‘[t]his is the era of the new austerity, harking back to the post-war age of austerity when shortages and restrictions meant people had no choice but to “make do and mend”’. As if to underline the credibility of this comparison, David Kynaston, historian and author of a book about Austerity Britain 1945–51 (2008a), joined Wark to discuss how people would ‘cope’ with the coming crisis, along with television presenter Kirstie Allsopp.¹