Austerity pasts, austerity futures?

This paper was presented as part of a panel titled 'Digging for the Future', organized by Rebecca Bramall. Since the financial crisis of 2007-8, the mobilization of the historical era of ‘austerity Britain’ as an analogy for the current conjuncture has both opened up and closed down possibilities for social change. A wide range of social actors – from policy institutes and cultural organizations to artists and community projects – have drawn upon the 1940s to imagine and describe alternative and often more sustainable ways of living. Wartime slogans such as ‘dig for victory’ and ‘make do and mend’ have informed this imaginary, as has an iconography of bunting, ration books, enamelware, and muddy carrots. As the implications of the coalition government’s spending cuts play out, emergent meanings of austerity have made it harder to make the environmental case for ‘less is more’, and a vociferous critique has emerged of ‘austerity nostalgia’, ‘poverty voyeurism’, and the (classed) politics of thrift. This paper reviews the factors that have constrained the articulation for progressive social change of austerity past to austerity present, and considers the possibilities for alternative future-making that this comparison may yet hold