This book tells the story of the (all too often) voiceless, invisible people who have been the victims of one of the most radically regressive and destructive economic experiments the UK has ever seen. Drawing on interviews conducted all over the UK in 2012 and 2013 with people at the sharp end of the Conservative-led Coalition government’s unprecedented ‘austerity’ programme, it examines how savage cuts to public expenditure have been needlessly and shamelessly unleashed on the country, and the ways in which they have scarred individuals, families and communities.

The book demonstrates how, despite government claims that drastic cuts to public spending and sweeping reform of the welfare state were necessary and ‘fair’, this was, in fact, a fallacy. What was implemented was a regime that disproportionately affected the most vulnerable people in society while leaving the well-off unscathed. By examining the lived experience and ‘real-time’ reactions of those most affected by a whole raft of bruising austerity measures – the poorest and those most reliant on public services – the rest of the book lays bare the extraordinary damage inflicted during what has become known as ‘the age of austerity’. And it looks too at one of the most important factors explaining how austerity was so forcefully applied: the fact that policies were deftly propped up by a shrewd political narrative which both painted cuts as inevitable and depicted people who were living in poverty, out of work or who were victims of austerity as ‘scroungers’, to blame for their own predicament. As the New Economics Foundation (nef) succinctly put it: