ABSTRACT
This chapter recapitulates the concept of revanchism in its original form, summarises some recent critiques and discusses its later extensions. It discusses the emergence of revanchist political economy in Britain, with particular reference to what Hodkinson has helpfully called 'the return of the housing question'. In order to explain how revanchism has become so ingrained in British society the chapter focuses on the production of ignorance via the activation of class and place stigma. The criminalisation of squatting was just one of a series of punitive measures directed at people at the bottom of the class structure in David Cameron's Britain, justified by those at the top of the class structure as being in 'fairness' to 'hardworking' families/taxpayers/homeowners. In austerity Britain, a similar revanchist dynamic is visible in the form of the heightened stigmatisation of working class lives, and of the places where working class people live.
