Introduction: A Hostile Decade for Social Policy: Economic Crisis, Political Crisis and Austerity 2010-20

The decade 2010-20 has been one in which the ‘wisdoms’ of the 1990s – that globalisation was here to stay, that inequality was in retreat and that markets and politics had reached a sustainable truce – were fundamentally challenged. In the wake of the 2008 economic crisis there was initially some public and political contemplation on a rebalancing of market fundamentalism with the social purpose of politics (for example, the purported ‘death’ of the Washington consensus). This was soon superseded, initially by a return to ‘business as usual’ followed by a turbo-charged attack on social provision and its underlying principles in the guise of austerity. There is nothing new about austerity, an idea and set of policies that have come to define government approaches to public and social policies over the past decade. Austerity describes self-imposed and/or externally imposed (temporary) cuts in expenditure to balance budgets. But austerity is also, and more importantly in terms of social policies, a political project aimed at transforming the welfare state and realizing ambitions with much longer roots. In wartime, austerity captures national adjustments to scarcity. Twenty-first century austerity is an objectively bad idea that has been politically operationalised to capitalise on prevailing conditions of uncertainty (Schui, 2014). The fact that a bad idea (or dangerous idea in Blyth’s (2013) parlance) can be engineered, promoted and implemented in the face of mounting compelling evidence of unremitting failure, is testament to the underlying, creeping strength of anti-collectivist ideology embedded in economic thought in the 1980s and normalised in the 1990s and 2000s (Wren-Lewis, 2018). Austerity is a slippery idea, reflecting and shaping approaches to the economy, public finance and public services so that welfare states no longer appear tenable (Farnsworth and Irving, 2015). It is about power and how it is wielded by powerful individuals, national and international institutions and governments (Streeck, 2017). Thus, while it is often portrayed as simply describing essential spending cuts, in reality it is far more complex and, when filtered through a powerful right-wing media and ideologues, pervasive. The key debates about austerity reflect disagreement about what it is, how it can be identified, measured, compared, evaluated and resisted, and the extent to which it is an Anglo-(neo) liberal problem or global in scale.