The Cultural Politics of Austerity

Past and Present in Austere Times

R. Bramall

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780230360471
• eBook ISBN: 9781137313812
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

This timely book examines austerity's conflicted meanings, from austerity chic and anti-austerity protest to economic and eco-austerity. Bramall's compelling text explores the presence and persuasiveness of the past, developing a new approach to the historical in contemporary cultural politics.

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Introduction: Austere Times

Austerities

This book is about the meanings of austerity. In it, I argue for an understanding of austerity as a site of discursive struggle between different visions of the future. This site of struggle extends beyond party politics and debates about economic policy into environmental, anti-consumerist, and feminist politics, into the terrain of media, consumer, and popular culture, and into people’s everyday lives. Focusing predominantly on the UK context, I explore the ways in which the historical era of ‘austerity Britain’ (1939–54) has been used as a representational resource and point of comparison and analogy in the discourse of austerity that emerged in the wake of the 2007–8 global financial crisis. And I show how ‘left’-political (green, red and feminist) orientations to austerity discourse, and to diverse uses of the past in the present, are tied up with longstanding assumptions about the relationship between history, culture and politics. In this introduction, I set out some of the reference points and critical contexts for this argument, drawing attention to certain tensions and antagonisms within austerity discourse.

The approach I have just described departs from dominant critical conceptions of austerity. For some commentators, austerity is first and foremost, and sometimes exclusively, an economic procedure. Underlining the extent to which the UK’s austerity policy is associated with the incumbent Chancellor, one analyst comments that ‘[i]n the George Osborne paradigm in which we live, austerity is an economic policy: deficit-cutting, slashed spending and the mysterious evaporation of benefits’ (Elmhirst, 2010). This definition could apply to many national contexts outside of the UK, and in particular to the US and countries in the ‘eurozone’. Reflecting on the global reach of austerity, political economist Mark Blyth defines it as ‘the “common sense” on how to pay for the massive increase in public debt caused by the financial crisis’ (Blyth, in Posner, 2010; Clarke and Newman, 2012: 300). Yet because there is such extensive opposition to the idea that economic ‘austerity’ is the right approach (see for example Blackburn, 2011; Wren-Lewis, 2011; Krugman, 2012), it is a rare commentator who does not recognize that the policy of austerity also has an ideological dimension.

John Lanchester, a popular interpreter of the credit crunch (Whoops!, 2010), recommends a distinction between ‘cuts’ and ‘austerity’, where the former refers to ‘specific budgetary cuts leading to specific cuts in services’ and the latter to ‘a general reduction in government spending’. Lanchester argues that while the cuts are ‘real’, austerity is ‘less easy to locate’ (2013: 5). If this is the case, he asks, why is the UK’s coalition government so keen to reiterate its commitment to austerity? The reasons, he concludes, ‘are to do with politics rather than economics’, and the explanations he gives have been frequently reiterated in critical debate about economic policy. For the political right, Lanchester explains, the 2010 election marked an ‘inflection point’: a moment in which it was judged that ‘a majority of people thought that, or could be sold the idea that, public spending had got out of control’. Austerity discourse capitalizes on this modulation in opinion, plays to a ‘negative image of welfare’, and reassures those in work that ‘those on benefits are feeling the pinch too’ (Lanchester, 2013: 6). As John Clarke and Janet Newman have argued, the financial crisis may have started off looking like an economic problem, but in the UK it has been ‘ideologically reworked’ into the political problem of ‘how to allocate blame and responsibility’. This reworking has focused on ‘the unwieldy and expensive welfare state and public sector, rather than high risk strategies of banks, as the root cause of the crisis’ (Clarke and Newman, 2012: 300; see also Guinan, 2013: 9). In the US, too, the banking crisis has been ‘transformed into a tale of slovenly and overweening government that perpetuates and is perpetuated by a dependent and demanding population’ (Robinson, 2012). Lanchester’s second point is that austerity discourse helps ‘placate’ the bond markets: for the government, talking about austerity is a ‘cheapish way of exerting some agency’ (Lanchester, 2013: 3–6; see also Blackburn, 2011: 10; Freedland, 2013a).¹ Clarke and Newman construe this dimension of austerity discourse in terms of ‘magical thinking’, or ‘the belief that if one says things often enough, they will come true’ (2012: 301).

Austerity has then come to be recognized as an ideological discourse which serves at least two objectives: it works to secure the consent of the populace to spending cuts and the rolling back of the welfare state, and it marks an investment in the discursive as a ‘strategy for recovery’ (Clarke and Newman, 2012: 301). What is perhaps most interesting about these readings is the implication that social actors who have employed a discourse of austerity can be seen to accommodate the poststructuralist notion that the economy is not ‘a world of objects and relations that exist prior to any ideological and political conditions of existence’ (Mouffe, 2000: 296; see also Hall, 1988: 41). It seems vital, then, to recognize that austerity is both an economic policy and a complex ideological phenomenon, to explore austerity’s cultural politics as well as its financial politics (Jensen, 2012: 23), and to grasp the interpenetration of culture and economy in this context (du Gay, 1997: 2). In this book, I do so within a paradigm of discourse and discursive construction.

The past in austerity culture

Historicity – a sense of history – has been a critical dimension of austerity discourse. While the present age of austerity has been compared to various historical periods (Biressi and Nunn, 2013: 170–96) and historical crises (Clarke, 2010; Kuehn, 2012), there is one era that has emerged as the central point of reference: the historical period of ‘austerity Britain’. Historians do not always agree about when ‘austerity Britain’ was, but the periodization that emerges from contemporary austerity discourse is of a broadly defined era that extends from the beginning of the Second World War through to the postwar settlement and the final years of rationing in the mid-1950s. Reference to this era has been integral to the party political discourse of austerity as deficit reduction, and to its ‘magical’ effects. Since 2009, the Conservative Party has drawn on popular historical consciousness of Britain’s war effort, and in particular a sense of the morality of ‘austerity’ and ‘thrift’ that is strongly associated with this historical period (Cameron, 2009a; Osborne, 2009). Calling forth a dominant recollection of the war as a time of ‘national unity’ (Noakes, 1998: 6), historical analogy has been used to summon up ‘a nation united in the face of adversity’ (Clarke and Newman, 2012: 303). Approving mobilizations of ‘historical lessons’ from the austerity years have informed a ‘public reassessment of citizens’ current and future prospects’ (Biressi and Nunn, 2013: 170; see also Jensen, 2012: 1). The high point of the Conservative Party’s commitment to this rhetoric was from 2009–11, but it has persisted in modulated forms, with the ‘deficit crisis’ replacing the banking crisis as the subject of the metaphor of battle. At a meeting of the business lobbying organization the Confederation of British Industry in November 2012, David Cameron, Leader of the Conservative Party and the current prime minister, asserted that ‘this country is in the economic equivalent of war today – and we need the same spirit’ (Cameron, 2012).

It is far from the case, however, that historical references have been confined to party political discourse. In a cultural context in which ‘[v]intage, nostalgia-led marketing, and retrochic’ are central (de Groot, 2009: 10), a sense that ‘austerity Britain’ offers a historical precedent for contemporary times has been very widely disseminated, and there has been a surge of popular interest in this period of history. In this book, I use the phrase ‘austerity culture’ to describe this cultural context: the historically informed practices, discourses, values, ideological elements, and representational strategies that arise in the new ‘age of austerity’, and serve to construct it. The historical analogy between past and present has been reiterated in an extraordinarily diverse range of texts and contexts – from exhibitions, television programmes and magazine articles to retail spaces, restaurants, recipe books and advertising. In these texts and contexts, the styles and iconography of the ‘home front’ – the civilian contribution to the war effort – and the postwar austerity years are evoked through the use of the modernist typography of Ministry of Information campaign posters, or by incorporating clips from period films, or black and white photographs of life in ‘ration book’ Britain. A particular feature of austerity discourse has been the extensive mobilization of key slogans deriving from the state policies, public information and propaganda of this heavily regulated society, which are long-established and ‘powerful signifiers of a shared national past’ (Noakes, 1998: 38). While a number of these slogans are highly visible in austerity culture – I discuss the revival of ‘dig for victory’ and ‘make do and mend’ later in the book – a reproduction of a simple typographic poster depicting the words ‘keep calm and carry on’ has been nominated ‘the pin-up of our age’ (Henley, 2009). One final phenomenon that has helped to define the present conjuncture is the fact that a series of national events from the first age of austerity – among them, a royal wedding, the coronation, and the Summer Olympics – have come to be repeated or commemorated in the period 2011–12. These national austerity events have been discursively worked up as doubles, reiterations, or anniversaries within the wider paradigm of analogy in austerity discourse (see for instance Fraser, 2011; Elliott, 2012), generating a sense that history is repeating itself.

Both political recourse to the austerity years and the accompanying resurgence of interest in this past historical era can be located in a longer story about British cultural memory of the Second World War and its political valences. In particular, there are distinct parallels between the Conservative Party’s use of these resources and an earlier Conservative government’s mobilization of wartime rhetoric at the time of the Falklands (Malvinas) War in 1982, under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (Davies, 1984; McArthur, 1984; Wright, 1985; Bromley, 1988; Hall, 1988; Noakes, 1998; Eley, 2001). Yet the story about this historical period that is elaborated in the present moment has a very distinct emphasis on the ‘myth of the home front’, or the notion that British citizens’ conduct during the war was ‘characterized by universal sacrifice, egalitarianism, and common purpose’ (Zweiniger-Bargielowska, 2000: 2). Interest has been organized around the policies of ‘rationing, austerity, and fair shares’ implemented during this period to manage the scarcity of commodities and materials that followed from the war effort (Zweiniger-Bargielowska, 2000: 9–59). This focus has particularly foregrounded the ‘domestic front’ (Minns, 1980) and produced a specific emphasis on women’s roles (Kynaston, 2007), reflecting their historical location at the ‘receiving end of austerity’ (Zweiniger-Bargielowska, 2000: 98). While complex imperatives have generated these emphases, it is worth noting that they reflect, in many respects, a shift of focus in historical study of the Second World War and postwar period. Beginning in the 1980s, feminists with an interest in gender politics have been drawn to the domestic front, with the ambition of both celebrating women’s contribution (Minns, 1980) and offering a critique of the gender politics of this period (Bentley, 1998; Noakes, 1998; Zweiniger-Bargielowska, 2000). An interest in ‘everyday lives’ has also been a factor in this orientation, as has a turn towards resources such as the Mass Observation Archive, which collects personal testimony (Noakes, 1998; Garfield, 2005; Kynaston, 2008a).

That this kind of shift in emphasis (in both historiography and popular culture) can occur in relation to a historical event that is rarely absent from British cultural life is significant. It draws attention to the fact that the vision of the austerity years that has dominated in the wake of the financial crisis is inherently unstable and unfinished. A number of other stories about this era are available, and do indeed compete for our attention in the present context. This period of history, and in particular a leftist conception of the conflict as ‘the people’s war’, has been highly contested (Eley, 2001). As Clarke and Newman note, austerity ‘evokes two sorts of political sensibility: the promise of hardship and the memory of postwar collective solidarities’ (2012: 307). Relatedly, the question of how this era of British history has been defined in relation to the concept of austerity has been a significant issue of debate amongst historians. It has been an established practice, and one recently observed by David Kynaston (2008a), for instance, to reserve this description for the postwar years only, and usually to describe the specific period from 1945–51. This periodization was popularized as the era began to be historicized in the early 1960s, notably in a volume titled Age of Austerity 1945–51 (Sissons and French, 1963). However, the concept of austerity was widely used during the postwar period and the Second World War years. For many ordinary people, ‘austerity’ was simply synonymous with ‘rationing’. Reflecting in 1947 on news of changes to the rationing regime, one diarist for the Mass Observation Archive wondered when austerity would cease (in Garfield, 2005: 463). He had some years to wait, as rationing did not completely come to an end until 1954. From this perspective, there is compelling logic to Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska’s long periodization of ‘austerity Britain’ in her study examining rationing ‘throughout the entire episode’ (2000: 1).

What is at stake in differing definitions of austerity Britain is the distinction between ‘wartime’ and ‘postwar’ austerity (McKibbin, 1998: 41–2), a distinction which rests on the different political and economic imperatives that motivated rationing policies during and after the war (Zweiniger-Bargielowska, 2000: 203–55; Hilton, 2003: 139). From 1940–5 Britain was governed by a Conservative-led coalition, under Winston Churchill. The policy of austerity in this period was thus an outcome of consensus politics and of a unifying war effort. By contrast, after the Labour Party’s historic landslide victory in 1945, a politics of austerity emerged. The Labour government was committed to socialist planning of the economy and to continued controls on consumption, while the Conservatives favoured ‘a return to individualism’ and to the free market (Zweiniger-Bargielowska, 2000: 207). Thus in the period 1945–51, rationing and controls ‘came to be associated with a distinctive ideological perspective’ (Zweiniger-Bargielowska, 2000: 256). Labour argued that the economic situation was an outcome of the war, and that its policies were necessary in order to maintain fair shares and deliver the ‘welfare state’, while the Conservatives held that austerity was the result of excessive state intervention and ‘government mismanagement’ (Zweiniger-Bargielowska, 2000: 254). As the diarist’s comments above confirm, austerity became ‘increasingly controversial’ (Zweiniger-Bargielowska, 2000: 9; see also Tomlinson, 2000: 58). British citizens’ changing attitudes to postwar austerity can be linked to the success or failure of the Labour government to articulate its economic policies to the benefits of welfare reform and social democracy. As Michael Sissons and Philip French put it, depending on one’s politics, the concept of austerity can operate ‘as a justification of the period or as a criticism’ (1963: 9).

In contemporary austerity culture, the historical period that is evoked is often very loosely defined. There is no question that the Second World War is a key event; many of the rich meanings and associations that inform austerity discourse relate directly to the context of war, and to the hegemony of a certain narrative about Britain at war. Yet in terms of its historical reference points, austerity discourse is not delimited by the war years of 1939–45. Indeed, the period in the past thought to be analogous with the present is sometimes identified as ‘postwar, ration-era Britain’ (Davenport, 2009). Perhaps more often, activators of this discourse seem to have in mind a period encompassing the wartime and postwar years, which is invoked via the decade in question; there are frequent references to ‘1940s austerity’ (M. Brown, 2009). Thus the question of when austerity was, and therefore of the politics of austerity to which we are being referred, can figure as another destabilizing element in contemporary austerity discourse.

Anti-consumerist and eco-austerity

Tensions and antagonisms in austerity discourse also stem from the articulation of historical material to emergent paradigms. The idea that there is an analogy to be drawn between today’s difficult times and austerity Britain began to be communicated, in fact, some years before the financial crisis. Since the early 2000s, this historical period has been an important point of reference in sustainability politics (Hinton and Redclift, 2009; Randall, 2009; Ginn, 2012), an interest facilitated by the emergence of ‘war’ – as in ‘the war on climate change’ – as a central metaphor in environmental discourse and politics (Massumi, 2009; Dibley and Neilson, 2010; Cohen, 2011). In the UK, the policy institute the New Economics Foundation has been a key actor in the promotion of this analogy, driven in particular by the work of its former policy director, Andrew Simms. Simms’s work concretizes the metaphor: the war we should be thinking about, on his account, is the Second World War. In a pamphlet titled An Environmental War Economy (2001), Simms argues that Britain’s experience during wartime is relevant to the ‘challenge of climate change’ (2001: 31). The specific actions performed in this context – the exemplar of the ‘war economy’, rationing and fair shares – are a significant dimension of this relevance. More important, however, is the availability of a certain narrative about people’s accommodation of these sacrifices – the ‘myth of the home front’ – that enables the Second World War to function as a powerful rhetorical resource:

Faced with a crisis in which individuals are asked to subordinate personal goals to a common good, they can, and do, respond. This is a lesson of the British and other war economies and it may also prove the rallying cry of a new environmental war economy. (Simms, 2001: 32–3)

Presenting the Second World War as a precedent for pro-environmental action allows Simms to assert that the policies he proposes can work, and to fend off the argument that people will not accept controls on consumption. Simms’s confidence in mobilizing this rhetorical resource is founded in his sense of the potency of this historical era in the British cultural imaginary; he describes it as ‘living history’ (2013: 13), and attributes the drawing of a connection between wartime practices and environmentalism to his mother (2001: 27). As others have put it, the Second World War is ‘the only experience within living memory of a regime resembling sustainable consumption’ (Theien, 2009).

Campaigners who have called for a return of the ‘Blitz spirit’ (Marshall, 2007) echo Simms’s sense that cultural memory of Britain’s wartime experiences represents a valuable rhetorical resource for the communication of environmental objectives. The idea that this era offers a precedent and model for the introduction of policies that involve extensive behaviour change has also had influence. In particular, ongoing discussions about personal carbon allowances have been inflected by discourses of war, rationing and austerity (Roodhouse, 2007; Nerlich and Koteyko, 2009; Cohen, 2011). In How to Save the Planet, Mayer Hillman uses the Second World War precedent to reinforce the ‘fair shares’ or ‘social justice’ dimension of carbon rationing (Hillman with Fawcett, 2004: 130). Like Simms, Hillman also uses historical analogy to establish that carbon rationing is achievable and comprehensible (Hillman with Fawcett, 2004: 143).

Relatedly, notions of thrift, frugality and austerity also resonate with ‘anti-consumerism’. This term has been used to denote ‘a widening popular discourse on the problems of contemporary consumerism’ (Binkley and Littler, 2008: 519; see also Humphery, 2010), encompassing a diverse ‘range of tendencies’ that others discuss in terms of ‘ethical consumption’ (Lewis and Potter, 2011: 4), ‘political consumerism’...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1 Introduction: Austere Times
• 2 On Being ‘Inside’ Austerity: Austerity Chic, Consumer Culture, and Anti-austerity Protest
• 3 The Past in the Present: History, Memory, Ideology, and Discourse
• 4 Dig for Victory! Eco-austerity, Sustainability, and New Historical Subjectivities
• 5 The State of Austerity: Governance, Welfare, and the People
• 6 Turning Back Time: Feminism, Domesticity, and Austere Femininities
• 7 Afterword: Austerity and After
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index