ABSTRACT
This chapter recounts how the rise of neoliberalism—from the birth of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations to the 2007-2008 global financial crisis-offered a template for the UK’s implementation of austerity since 2010. It investigates how UK politicians experimented with the austerity narrative by framing it as necessary to reduce the government deficits. The chapter then reveals how politicians misinterpreted public debts and spread fallacies about the global recession, thereby exposing austerity’s implementation as ideological, not requisite.
Austerity resulted in a 30% decline in prison staff between 2009 and 2017 and reduced the NHS’s spending on prison healthcare in real terms despite an increased burden of disease in the prison population. Beyond explaining this immediate reduction of funding, this chapter infers a longer-term welfare state restructuring-a form of political experiment-against a backdrop of increasing punitiveness, a tougher stance on crime, and privatisation of services. Altogether, these changes evidence how neoliberalism directs the current social order. The UK’s GDP spend on prisons is increasing as its spending on social services decreases compared with other European countries, and income inequality burgeoned between 2010 and 2020. Cumulatively, these undercurrents have deepened inequality, insecurity, and disparity in society.
