Speaking at the Conservative Party conference in 2012, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne sought to reflect upon the moral underpinnings of the ‘age of austerity’ introduced by his government. Specifically, he attempted to justify a swathe of cuts to social security, welfare payments, the public sector and local government by invoking a moral notion of work:

For Osborne and his government, it is work that qualifies a person as a citizen of a nation ‘working together to get on’. The figure of the ‘worker’ is variously depicted as ‘the owner of the corner shop staying open until midnight to support their family’, ‘the teacher prepared to defy her union and stay late to take the after-school club’, and ‘the commuter who leaves home before their children are up, and comes back long after they have gone to bed’. In each iteration, it is the self-sacrifice of the worker that distinguishes them from the abject Other ‘sleeping off a life on benefits’. This opposition is central to the cultural political economy of austerity (Jensen and Tyler, 2015), through which the population is divided into ‘workers and shirkers’ and ‘strivers and skivers’ (Valentine and Harris, 2014). Such an account not only conflates ‘worklessness’ with failure: it also positions work as the primary route to social citizenship at a time of austerity (Barchiesi, 2011; Edminston, 2017).

By foregrounding a particular understanding of work, Osborne simultaneously invokes an idea of non-work as indolence. In the Chancellor's pronouncement, those who receive benefits – those unemployed, sick and disabled, and/or with caring responsibilities – are positioned as static, aimless and confined to private space. They are at once both hyper-visible through their moral failure, but menacingly concealed through the closed blinds of their homes.