Introduction

Debt reduction has become central to political discourse. Despite disagreements about the speed and scale required, there is a broad Westminster consensus that substantial economies are unavoidable. Those who question this paradigm are judged to have fallen into the ‘trap’ of believing another economic model than austerity is possible. Several years on from the tumultuous economic crash of 2007/08, the ‘new politics’ of coalitions necessarily committed to austerity measures, especially in the public sector, while living standards fall for the vast majority, have become a long-term reality that we are told will last at least a decade. Recent social upheavals across several European countries have resulted from the brutal results of these programmes, which have shaken many people's faith in mainstream political parties to govern in the interests of all, leading to the growth of ‘new publics’ on the extreme Left and Right who are prepared to defy market nostrums and question the necessity of austerity. Although, at the time of writing (late 2013), the UK economy has managed to halt some aspects of the decline for the last few months – with slightly improved growth and employment figures – many elements of the crisis remain.

This is not the first time that politicians have stared into the abyss of a financial crisis; one recent example was the 1976 International Monetary Fund (IMF) crisis. With hindsight, the necessity of spending cuts looks questionable: are there lessons to be learned from the last time that British government policy was dictated by international finance? What were the results of the British public choosing to accept that the crisis really meant that ‘there is no alternative’ to deindustrialisation and mass unemployment, with all the social consequences that followed over the next decade. Do today's public want to consider creating alternatives today, in the form of campaigning social movements encouraging resistance, or should we seek inspiration in more spontaneous outbreaks, such as the UK's 2011 ‘summer of discontent’ (Briggs, 2012)?

These are not merely academic or theoretical questions. Arguably, the acts of resistance to austerity in Europe have challenged the dominant mindset and slowed down the pace of a brutal economic reconstruction process that otherwise threatened to engender poverty and anomie on a scale that could melt down existing social relations.