This chapter investigates the policy’s ideational foundations by perusing economic theories and determining which would recommend its provisions. According to some scholars, austerity theories, based on Ricardian equivalence, rational expectations, and perfect capital markets, have inspired its design. For other scholars, these rules reflect neoliberal ideas in support of small government and rejection of Keynesian demand management. The chapter argues that these claims are unconvincing. Austerity theories suggest a diminished effectiveness of expansionary fiscal policies and would recommend looser oversight. Since 2005, policy provisions have accommodated business cycle fluctuations, major structural reforms, and public investments. There are no provisions about the size of governments. The chapter shows that these rules are designed to prevent negative cross-country externalities arising from expansionary fiscal policies adopted by authorities with short-term incentives to boost output at the expense of inflation. This reasoning is based on standard macroeconomic theories and the more realistic assumptions of fiscally illuded voters and policy- and office-seeking politicians.

Washington’s abrupt cancellation of Lend-Lease after World War II accentuated Britain’s chronic indebtedness to the United States. Redressing Britain’s balance of payments deficit required the orientation of much domestic production for export. Textiles lay at the heart of this export drive. But workers in the cotton and woollen industries, as in the garment sector, were lacking. This chapter analyses the campaign to encourage women to enter the mills of Lancashire and Yorkshire, exploring why women resisted official entreaties. With tens of thousands of Britons emigrating annually, the government turned to displaced persons (DPs) in occupied Germany and Austria. In 1947, the Ministry of Labour launched ‘Operation Westward Ho’ to recruit DPs as so-called ‘European Volunteer Workers’. The majority of female recruits were channelled into textile work. The chapter concludes by exploring the tensions surrounding these female migrants, including a perception that they received too many perks and anxieties over women’s reproductive agency. Unmarried pregnant ‘volunteers’ risked deportation if they sought terminations, or invasive attempts to compel them to marry.

The history of postwar clothing can be understood only with prior reference to wartime conditions. The reorientation of civilian industries (including textiles and garment manufacture) towards military production, severance of prewar shipping routes and supply lines and redirection of millions of workers into uniform all contributed to a chronic shortage of garments and footwear available for civilian purchase. Civilian scarcity existed alongside, and largely because of, a surfeit of military apparel. Clothes rationing and campaigns to ‘make do and mend’ were introduced both in Britain and in Nazi Germany. Wartime planners in Britain and the newly formed United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), set up in 1943, anticipated that the end of hostilities would leave millions of people in areas hitherto occupied by Axis forces in dire need of fundamental human necessities. Along with shelter, food and medicine, humanity in extremis would need clothing and footwear. ‘Postwar’ efforts to recirculate secondhand garments, manufacture civilian apparel and repurpose military surplus all began before fighting ceased, forcing us to rethink conventional periodization of when, and how definitively, World War II ended. Victory’s texture was extremely uneven.

Making Do unpicks the devastating impact of World War II by focusing on fabric. As the war ended, a ‘textile famine’ loomed. Carruthers argues that material stuff – garments and footwear, as well as blankets and bedding – was critical to how Britons refashioned relationships within Britain and with allies and former enemies. Clothing lay at the heart of an interlocking series of postwar entitlement struggles. Clothes rationing, introduced in 1941, lasted until 1949. With clothing and shoes chronically scarce, policymakers, military commanders and humanitarians had to adjudicate whose needs to prioritize as uniforms were discarded in Britain and abroad. Service personnel, prisoners of war, former inhabitants of Axis camps all required ‘civilianized’ clothing as they reconstructed postwar lives. Making Do foregrounds mobility as central to the history of postwar adjustment, as millions of people and garments changed places and shapes. Military surplus found myriad new uses with people continuing to ‘make do and mend’. Carruthers offers an intimate portrait of everyday life in postwar Britain – and in transient spaces inhabited by veterans, relief workers, displaced persons and ‘GI brides’ – as they attempted to reconstruct new relationships in an age of persistent austerity shadowed by catastrophe.

No single garment attracted more attention in the late 1940s than the wedding dress of Princess Elizabeth, who married Philip Mountbatten in November 1947. This chapter places royal bridal attire at the centre of its analysis of postwar marriage and transatlantic conjugal connections. The Royal Wedding occurred against a backdrop of acute austerity, sparking debate on the ethics of regal pageantry during a severe cost of living crisis. Mass Observation exposed Britons’ conflicted responses to the wedding and the myth of royal ordinariness in terms of rationing and coupons constructed by the Palace. Austerity and monarchy proved difficult to reconcile. American observers took especial interest in Britain’s royal wedding, which underscored how relations between the wartime allies had been reconfigured by tens of thousands of marriages between GIs and British women. The chapter concludes by exploring the experiences of ‘GI brides’ and Americans’ preoccupation with what they wore, first as brides, then as newly arrived migrants. Judgements about dowdy, threadbare British women underscored altered power dynamics between two great powers following different postwar trajectories.

Making Do unpicks the devastating impact of World War II by focusing on fabric. As the war ended, a ‘textile famine’ loomed. Carruthers argues that material stuff – garments and footwear, as well as blankets and bedding – was critical to how Britons refashioned relationships within Britain and with allies and former enemies. Clothing lay at the heart of an interlocking series of postwar entitlement struggles. Clothes rationing, introduced in 1941, lasted until 1949. With clothing and shoes chronically scarce, policymakers, military commanders and humanitarians had to adjudicate whose needs to prioritize as uniforms were discarded in Britain and abroad. Service personnel, prisoners of war, former inhabitants of Axis camps all required ‘civilianized’ clothing as they reconstructed postwar lives. Making Do foregrounds mobility as central to the history of postwar adjustment, as millions of people and garments changed places and shapes. Military surplus found myriad new uses with people continuing to ‘make do and mend’. Carruthers offers an intimate portrait of everyday life in postwar Britain – and in transient spaces inhabited by veterans, relief workers, displaced persons and ‘GI brides’ – as they attempted to reconstruct new relationships in an age of persistent austerity shadowed by catastrophe.

Chapter 2 expands on economic drivers of welfare nationalism, the long-term structural trends that produced a “toxic mix of immigration and austerity,” which in turn drove exclusion of migrants in Europe and Russia after 2000. It identifies causes for the post-1990 explosion of international migration in both regions: the collapse of communist governments, rapid expansion of the European Union, and multiple crises in the Middle East and North Africa. The motivations and scale of the three major exclusionary migrations to Europe and Russia are covered. The chapter then turns to structural decline of labor markets and welfare states over recent decades. It tracks growing labor precarity s because of increases in non-standard and informal employment, growing exclusion of nationals from social insurance systems, and welfare state retrenchment. The 2008 global financial crisis, the 2011 Euro Crisis, and the recessions in Russia after 2012 are shown to further drive austerity. The chapter connects nationals’ welfare losses with grievances and appeals that are prominent in welfare nationalist discourse. . Declines in social security and welfare of nationals are shown to affect politics, alienating European electorates from mainstream parties and leaving postcommunist societies disillusioned with the West.

‘Language policy’ is a highly diverse term, encompassing all attempts to purposefully influence language use. Government language policy is broadly considered to have originated as a distinct field of research and policymaking in the 1970s, but we begin the chapter with a historical review of its precursors dating back several centuries. We trace the roots of contemporary language policy to two broad historical developments: Bible translation and universal education. These laid the foundations for what would become language policy. In the contemporary language policy period, we divide our discussion across three fields: modern foreign languages (MFL), indigenous languages and community languages. These categorisations come from policy, not linguistics or sociology. These groups of languages are treated differently in policy, so we divide them accordingly and trace their origins and developments in three political eras from the 1970s onwards: neoliberalism (1970s–80s), New Public Management (1990s–2000s), and austerity (2008 onwards). We show how each field of language policy has been indelibly shaped and contoured by changing political conditions and priorities. Lastly, we consider forms of language that tend to fall outside the scope of government policy, and what extra this reveals about language policy.

Britain is not a good place to be poor. That has become even more true over the last fourteen years. Our justification for that statement is that, in Britain, the health of the poorest people, always lower than that of the average person, declined since 2010. Regional inequalities in health also increased with the ‘Red Wall’ north falling further behind. There has also been stagnation in the UK’s average life expectancy – and we have dropped down the international rankings. Please let the implications sink in: the health of the poorest people and places got worse; life expectancy went down; living with illness went up; and thousands of families lost loved ones before their time. It is an unprecedented calamity.

Any fair evaluation of the Conservative effect (2010–14) must be cognisant of the context. Tom Egerton’s chapter will place the Conservative premierships in the six external shocks Britain faced, beginning with the Great Financial Crash and the Eurozone Crisis, before the impact of Brexit (and a debate over its external and structural causes), Covid, the Russo-Ukrainian War and the inflation crisis. How did each government succeed or fail in the face of compounding shocks? What opportunities and constraints emerged as a result? Only through an analysis of a decade of poly-crisis, and in the perspective of wider political change, can we make a conclusion on the question of ‘fourteen wasted years’.

Paul Johnson began his relationship with the series with his analysis of Conservative economic policy in The Coalition Effect and will return, with his team, to his conclusions then, analysing not just the first period of austerity but also how Conservative economic policy has evolved through the post-referendum premierships of Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak.

Chapter 7 shows that EU leaders had already started in the 1980s to steer the trajectory of national public services in a commodifying direction. The commodifying pressures from direct EU interventions reached a peak in 2004 with the Commission’s draft Services Directive, which failed to become law because of unprecedented transnational protest movements. After the financial crisis however, the EU’s shift to its new economic governance (NEG) regime empowered EU executives to pursue public service commodification by new means. Our analysis reveals that the NEG prescriptions on public services for Germany, Italy, Ireland, and Romania consistently pointed in a commodifying direction, by demanding both a curtailment of public resources for public services and the marketisation of public services. Although our analysis uncovers some decommodifying prescriptions, namely, quantitative ones calling for more investment at the end of the 2010s, they were usually justified with policy rationales subordinated to NEG’s commodification script.

City institutions engage with language provisions in order to ensure equal access to services. Global provisions are intertwined with local knowledge resources introduced by individual agents. As UK austerity measures post-2012 led to a reduction of resources and specialised provisions, institutions began to rely more and more on the deployment of local individualised knowledge in response to communication challenges. Multilingual spaces became in some areas improvised and driven by the agency of both institutional agents and clients. The city’s day-to-day operations can be seen as a space of resistance to monolingual ideologies, born out of the necessity to provide front-line services to all and tightly embedded into the shared experience of a multilingual reality. But city-based institutions have limited powers to legislate or to fund operations.