‘Austerity’ has defined British political debate since the end of 2008, when the Conservatives abruptly abandoned their support for Labour’s spending levels and constructed a new narrative that the country had been plunged into disaster by overspending. In the ‘age of austerity’, the nation’s books were to be balanced on the backs of working, disabled and unemployed people. By 2014 – in the aftermath of the weakest economic recovery since the Victorian era – the Conservative-led coalition government was lauding the return of economic growth as vindication of its assault on public spending. But while it certainly was boom time for the rich – the Sunday Times Rich List recorded a doubling of the wealth of the richest 1,000 Britons between 2009 and 2014 – working people suffered the longest fall in living standards in well over a century. Disabled people faced the slashing of benefits, and the indignity and stress of appealing to win back their desperately needed support; workers enduring plummeting pay packets had their in-work benefits cut in real-terms; while no private pensions, no paid leave or no set hours became the reality for workers driven into zero-hour contracts or bogus self-employment.

And yet, as working-class Britain was expected to pay for a crisis caused by powerful elites, the voices of those punished by austerity were all but airbrushed from existence. No wonder: according to a government report published in August 2014, over half of the top 100 media professionals are privately educated, while the number of working-class MPs shrinks with every general election. The rise of unpaid internships and the weakening of trade unions and local government have helped turn the media and political worlds into closed shops for the privileged, ensuring that working-class voices are ever harder to come by. That’s why a book like this is so important: because it allows intentionally ignored people to speak on their own terms about their experiences and their lives.

It is not simply that large swathes of Britain have been airbrushed out of existence, of course. What is even more convenient for the defenders of austerity is that the reality of life for many Britons has been replaced by demonised caricatures.