The Violence of Austerity

The Violence of Austerity The Violence of Austerity Edited by Vickie Cooper and David Whyte First published 2017 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA www.plutobooks.com Copyright © Vickie Cooper and David Whyte 2017 The right of the individual authors to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7453 9948 5 Paperback ISBN 978 0 7453 3746 3 Hardback ISBN 978 1 7868 0062 6 PDF eBook ISBN 978 1 7868 0064 0 Kindle eBook ISBN 978 1 7868 0063 3 EPUB eBook This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin. Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England Simultaneously printed in the United Kingdom and United States of America Contents Acknowledgements vii Introduction: The Violence of Austerity 1 Vickie Cooper and David Whyte PART I DEADLY WELFARE 1. Mental Health and Suicide 35 Mary O’Hara 2. Austerity and Mortality 44 Danny Dorling 3. Welfare Reforms and the Attack on Disabled People 51 John Pring 4. The Violence of Workfare 59 Jon Burnett and David Whyte 5. The Multiple Forms of Violence in the Asylum System 67 Victoria Canning 6. The Degradation and Humiliation of Young People 75 Emma Bond and Simon Hallsworth PART II POVERTY AMPLIFICATION 7. Child Maltreatment and Child Mortality 85 Joanna Mack 8. Hunger and Food Poverty 94 Rebecca O’Connell and Laura Hamilton 9. The Deadly Impact of Fuel Poverty 101 Ruth London 10. The Violence of the Debtfare State 110 David Ellis 11. Women of Colour’s Anti-Austerity Activism 117 Akwugo Emejulu and Leah Bassel the violence of austerity 12. Dismantling the Irish Peace Process 123 Daniel Holder PART III STATE REGULATION 13. Undoing Social Protection 133 Steve Tombs 14. Health and Safety at the Frontline of Austerity 141 Hilda Palmer and David Whyte 15. Environmental Degradation 149 Charlotte Burns and Paul Tobin 16. Fracking and State Violence 156 Will Jackson, Helen Monk and Joanna Gilmore 17. Domicide, Eviction and Repossession 164 Kirsteen Paton and Vickie Cooper 18. Austerity’s Impact on Rough Sleeping and Violence 171 Daniel McCulloch PART IV STATE CONTROL 19. Legalising the Violence of Austerity 181 Robert Knox 20. The Failure to Protect Women in the Criminal Justice System 188 Maureen Mansfield and Vickie Cooper 21. Austerity, Violence and Prisons 195 Joe Sim 22. Evicting Manchester’s Street Homeless 203 Steven Speed 23. Policing Anti-Austerity through the ‘War on Terror’ 211 Rizwaan Sabir 24. Austerity and the Production of Hate 217 Jon Burnett Notes on Contributors 225 Index 230 vi Acknowledgements The origins of this book are a panel discussion on the ‘violence of austerity’ that was part of the conference, How Violent is Britain?, hosted by the University of Liverpool and the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies in May 2014. The conference brought together many of the authors in this book. Our first debt of gratitude is to Will McMahon, co-organiser of the conference, and who has supported us throughout this project. We are also grateful to others involved in organising the conference, especially Rachel Barrett, Rebecca Roberts and Arianna Silvestri. We would like to acknowledge those who participated in the conference and the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Foundation who supported it. Thanks also to the people at Criminal Justice Matters and Open Democracy who first published some of the ideas developed in the book. The support from our friends and colleagues at the Open University Harm and Evidence Research Collaborative and the University of Liverpool at different stages in the book’s development is greatly appreciated. We want to acknowledge the warmth and generosity of the people at the International Institute for the Sociology of Law (IISL), Onati – especially Ainhoa Baños-Antigua, Susana Arrese, Rakel Lizarralde, Ainhoa Markuleta and Elvira Muñoz – for their support during our visits and in the use of its remarkable library. The IISL is a special place that should be protected and treasured. We are so grateful to our friends and family for their support throughout the long process of putting this book together, and especially thank Davey Blackie and Kirstie Wallace for sharing their home comforts and allowing us to complete the project in its final stages. There are a number of people who, although their names do not appear as authors, made important contributions to the development of the book. Thanks especially go to Joe Halewood and Rory O’Neill for their unacknowledged contributions. David Castle has been a consistent source of encouragement, and a model of professionalism in seeing the project through from its beginning to the end. In particular, we thank the contributors to this book for sharing their hugely valuable insights and experiences, and also for putting up with what must have sometimes seemed like unreasonable requests and demands from us. We hope that it has all been worth it in the end. vii Introduction: The Violence of Austerity Vickie Cooper and David Whyte This book is about the devastatingly violent consequences of government policy conducted in the name of ‘austerity’. It is about the toll of death and illness and injury that so-called austerity policies have caused. It is about the life-shattering violence caused by decisions that are made in parliamentary chambers and government offices. This book is about the violence of politics. One decade after the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and seven years since the Coalition government first rolled out a suite of public sector cuts it described as austerity measures, the cuts continue to devastate communities. Despite a widely reported softening of political rhetoric, as this book goes to press in early 2017, UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, Phillip Hammond has just signalled a further deepening of the cuts in setting out his plans to implement a further 18 per cent reduction of government spending. The ‘Brexit’ vote to leave Europe is directly connected to ongoing austerity policies and their devastating impact on communities. The claim that we cannot afford the European Union has helped to construct a political solitude and severance from other countries that involves, first and foremost, the closing down of borders and ending of free movement (or at least the qualified right to free movement). This agenda has been amplified by the politics of austerity. Although it may come as a surprise to politicians like David Cameron and George Osborne, the chief architects of the austerity package who then conveniently resigned when people voted to leave Europe, austerity has fanned the flames of a xenophobic politics, permitting powerful elites to reconfigure political alliances and forge new ones. What we describe in this Introduction as an attempt to permanently dissemble the protection state has been consolidated by post-Brexit political rhetoric as we see the devastating effects of ‘austerity’ materialise. 1 the violence of austerity The contributions gathered in this book collectively present evidence showing that people most affected by austerity cuts are not only struggling under the financial strain but are becoming ill, physically and emotionally, and many are dying. Several chapters in the book demonstrate how austerity is a significant factor in suicide and suicidal thoughts. They tell how key groups feel humiliated, ashamed, anxious, harassed, stigmatised and depressed. The chapters illustrate how austerity affects people in wholly undignified ways such as having to compete for their own jobs and having to comply with welfare conditions in ways that chip away at their self-esteem and self-worth. People have to scream, kick and shout to have their most basic needs met. Street homeless people are forced to compete for the most basic provision of support by demonstrating that they are more ‘in need’ than the next street homeless person. Disabled people are forced to perform degrading incapacity assessments in order to prove that they are not fit to work and are entitled to state care and protection. Young people cannot find work that lifts them out of poverty and are forced to live in hostel-type accommodation. Women who urgently need to move out of abusive relationships are forced to stay with or return to their violent partners due to lack of adequate shelter provision. The physical and emotional pains of austerity are real and the effects are violent. People are fatigued, stressed, depressed and ill. In 2013, David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu published their ground- breaking book, The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills, in which they forensically detailed the deadly impact of austerity programmes on public health across the USA and Europe. Amongst their conclusions they showed that the total number of suicides had risen by 10,000 since the beginning of the financial crash in 2007, and millions of people across both continents had lost access to basic healthcare. In a series of hugely important analyses and testimonies, other writers, including Mary O’Hara, Kerry-Anne Mendoza and Jeremy Seabrook, have detailed the human impact of austerity in the UK.1 The first aim of the book is to extend those analyses to show how the toll of sickness and death created by the politics of austerity has left none but the most privileged in the UK untouched. Moreover, this scale of death and illness is simply part of the price that has been paid to maintain the basic structure of social inequality, whether measured by politicians as ‘collateral damage’ or by economists as ‘externalities’ (the 2 introduction: the violence of austerity unmeasured impact of financial transactions on bystanders who have nothing to do with the transaction).

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