Austerity blogs emerged in the context of radical reform of welfare benefits and constrained household budgets. The blogs, written by those forced to live hand-to-mouth, are a hybrid form of digital culture that merge narratives of lived experience, food practices, and political commentary in ways that challenge the dominant views on poverty and hunger. A Girl Called Jack disrupted existing hegemonies by breaking the silence that the stigma of poverty imposes on the impoverished, drew attention to the corporeal vulnerability of hunger, and invited the pity of the reader. In the process, Jack refuted individual-failure accounts of the causes of and challenged notions of welfare dependency by detailing practices to survive and eat healthily on a £10-a-week food budget. This combination of narrative and survival practices resonated powerfully, yet also polarized opinion, drawing attention to social uneasiness over growing levels of poverty and deep divisions over who is responsible for addressing these, and more fundamentally, who the modern poor are and what modern poverty is.
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The visionaries of the 1948 welfare state waged a ‘war on want’ in the belief that the state could banish hunger if not from the world, at least from Britain (Renwick, 2017). Yet on the eve of the 2019 General Election, Britain had more food banks handing out emergency parcels than McDonald’s outlets selling burgers (FullFact, 2019). A fifth of the population are living in poverty, 1.5 million are deemed destitute, Britain’s child poverty rate is expected to reach 40% by 2020 and hospital admission records have documented the return of ‘Dickensian diseases’ such as rickets, under-nutrition and malnutrition thought to have been eradicated with the welfare state (Fitzpatrick et al., 2018). The scourge of Victorian hunger and misery has returned with a vengeance, but for the better part of a decade right-wing politicians and ministers either denied the mounting evidence of hunger or dismissed claims of a link between welfare policies and growing food poverty (Howarth, 2017). In 2010, on forming a new coalition government, the Conservative Party simultaneously launched an austerity agenda intended to cut sovereign debt and initiated the most radical reform of the welfare state since its inception, intended to make it more ‘affordable’ (Howarth, 2017). Ministers curbed payments to welfare claimants, introduced a punitive sanctions scheme for minor administrative errors when applying for benefits, and depersonalized the system by replacing human with algorithmic processing of claims (Alston, 2019).
A 2019 report for the United Nations concluded that after a decade of change the ‘mentality’ informing welfare reform had ‘brought the most misery and wrought the most harm to the fabric of British society’ (Alston, 2019, p. 5). In the same year a High Court ruling drew attention to systemic inconsistencies and unfairness in the allocation of welfare when it found ‘dramatically fluctuating incomes’ between those on benefits in similar circumstances (Hughes, 2019). Later in the year ministers conceded that the system was not as ‘compassionate’ as hoped and that increased reliance on food banks may be linked to some of the government’s policies (Amber Rudd cited in Hughes, 2019). The Conservative Party manifesto published in November signaled further concessions with a pledge to end the benefit freeze and allow benefit payments to rise with the inflation rate for the first time since 2016 (BBC News, 2019). The move echoed a softening in public opinion captured in the most recent British Social Attitudes Survey, which found that 56% of respondents thought benefit cuts ‘would damage too many people’s lives’ and were concerned at the scale of poverty suggesting a ‘quiet revolution’ might be taking place in public sentiment. (The Economist, 2019).