The Reality of 'Austerity' in the UK Today Austerity Bites: A Journey to the Sharp End of Cuts in the UK

We ‘live in an age of austerity’, claimed Prime Minister David Cameron, an age of austerity that he also viewed as being permanent. Even before the 2010 UK General Election, the notion of austerity was beginning to be articulated by Conservative politicians as the remedy for the 2007–2008 financial crisis that was then engulfing the United Kingdom. The notion of a country gripped by an age of austerity is of course not new. In his evocative and hugely rich account of post-war Britain, historian David Kynaston (2008) details the impact of an earlier age of austerity on the ordinary people of Britain, a time of huge hardship and want in the aftermath of the struggles of wartime. Yet many have commented that the current age of austerity is taking Britain back to an era that pre-dates the late 1940s, not least in terms of the huge reductions in public expenditure which sees spending by the state reduced to the levels of the inter-war period.