Austerity Bites

Author : Mary O'Hara
Publisher : Policy Press
ISBN 13 : 1447315707
Total Pages : 292 pages
Book Rating : 4.04/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Austerity Bites written by Mary O'Hara and published by Policy Press. This book was released on 2015-04-16 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since taking power in 2010, the Coalition Government in the United Kingdom has pushed through a drastic program of cuts to public spending, all in the name of austerity. The effects on large segments of the population, dependent on programs whose funding was slashed, have been devastating and will continue to be felt for generations. This timely book by journalist Mary O'Hara chronicles the real-world effects of austerity, removing it from the bland, technocratic language of politics and showing just what austerity means to ordinary lives. Drawing on hundreds of hours of first-person interviews with a wide range of people and, in the paperback edition, featuring an updated afterword by the author, the book explores the grim reality of living amid the biggest reduction of the welfare state in the postwar era and offers a compelling corrective to narratives of shared sacrifice.

Author : Mary O'Hara
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781306823869
Total Pages : 336 pages
Book Rating : 4.62/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Austerity Bites: A Journey to the Sharp End of Cuts in the UK written by Mary O'Hara and published by . This book was released on 2014-05-31 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After coming to power in May 2010, the Coalition government in the United Kingdom embarked on a drastic programme of cuts to public spending and introduced a raft of austerity measures that had profoundly damaging effects on much of the population. This timely and apposite book by award-winning journalist Mary OHara chronicles the true impact of austerity on people at the sharp end, based on her real-time 12-month journey around the country just as the most radical reforms were being rolled out in 2012 and 2013. Drawing on hundreds of hours of compelling first-person interviews, with a broad spectrum of people ranging from homeless teenagers, older job-seekers, pensioners, charity workers, employment advisers and youth workers, as well as an extensive body of research and reports, the book explores the grim reality of living under the biggest shakeup of the welfare state in 60 years. A must-read book, Austerity Bites seeks to dispel any notion that we are all in this together and offers an alternative to the dominant and simplistic narrative that we inhabit a country of skivers versus strivers.

Author : Mark Blyth
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199389446
Total Pages : 305 pages
Book Rating : 4.45/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Austerity written by Mark Blyth and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Selected as a Financial Times Best Book of 2013 Governments today in both Europe and the United States have succeeded in casting government spending as reckless wastefulness that has made the economy worse. In contrast, they have advanced a policy of draconian budget cuts--austerity--to solve the financial crisis. We are told that we have all lived beyond our means and now need to tighten our belts. This view conveniently forgets where all that debt came from. Not from an orgy of government spending, but as the direct result of bailing out, recapitalizing, and adding liquidity to the broken banking system. Through these actions private debt was rechristened as government debt while those responsible for generating it walked away scot free, placing the blame on the state, and the burden on the taxpayer. That burden now takes the form of a global turn to austerity, the policy of reducing domestic wages and prices to restore competitiveness and balance the budget. The problem, according to political economist Mark Blyth, is that austerity is a very dangerous idea. First of all, it doesn't work. As the past four years and countless historical examples from the last 100 years show, while it makes sense for any one state to try and cut its way to growth, it simply cannot work when all states try it simultaneously: all we do is shrink the economy. In the worst case, austerity policies worsened the Great Depression and created the conditions for seizures of power by the forces responsible for the Second World War: the Nazis and the Japanese military establishment. As Blyth amply demonstrates, the arguments for austerity are tenuous and the evidence thin. Rather than expanding growth and opportunity, the repeated revival of this dead economic idea has almost always led to low growth along with increases in wealth and income inequality. Austerity demolishes the conventional wisdom, marshaling an army of facts to demand that we austerity for what it is, and what it costs us.

Author : Linnie Blake
Publisher : Manchester University Press
ISBN 13 : 1526113457
Total Pages : 241 pages
Book Rating : 4.50/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Neoliberal gothic written by Linnie Blake and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2017-07-30 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The explosion of interest in the gothic in recent years has coincided with a number of seismic political changes that have reshaped the world as we know it. Neoliberal Gothic explores that world, considering the ways in which the exponential increase in the cultural visibility of the gothic attests to the mode's engagement with the most significant dynamics of our age. These include the triumph of free market economics, the revolution in information and communication technologies, the emergence of global biotechnologies, the increasing power of transnational corporations, the US-led 'War on Terror' and the global financial crisis of 2008. Through analysis of texts drawn from literature, film, television, theatre and the visual arts (from the Europe to South East Asia, Africa to North and South America) the collection examines the ways in which the representational strategies of the gothic mode are ideally suited to an exploration of the dark side of neoliberal enterprise.

Author : Robert Kuttner
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307959813
Total Pages : 352 pages
Book Rating : 4.12/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Debtors' Prison written by Robert Kuttner and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-04-30 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of our foremost economic thinkers challenges a cherished tenet of today’s financial orthodoxy: that spending less, refusing to forgive debt, and shrinking government—“austerity”—is the solution to a persisting economic crisis like ours or Europe’s, now in its fifth year. Since the collapse of September 2008, the conversation about economic recovery has centered on the question of debt: whether we have too much of it, whose debt to forgive, and how to cut the deficit. These questions dominated the sound bites of the 2012 U.S. presidential election, the fiscal-cliff debates, and the perverse policies of the European Union. Robert Kuttner makes the most powerful argument to date that these are the wrong questions and that austerity is the wrong answer. Blending economics with historical contrasts of effective debt relief and punitive debt enforcement, he makes clear that universal belt-tightening, as a prescription for recession, defies economic logic. And while the public debt gets most of the attention, it is private debts that crashed the economy and are sandbagging the recovery—mortgages, student loans, consumer borrowing to make up for lagging wages, speculative shortfalls incurred by banks. As Kuttner observes, corporations get to use bankruptcy to walk away from debts. Homeowners and small nations don’t. Thus, we need more public borrowing and investment to revive a depressed economy, and more forgiveness and reform of the overhang of past debts. In making his case, Kuttner uncovers the double standards in the politics of debt, from Robinson Crusoe author Daniel Defoe’s campaign for debt forgiveness in the seventeenth century to the two world wars and Bretton Woods. Just as debtors’ prisons once prevented individuals from surmounting their debts and resuming productive life, austerity measures shackle, rather than restore, economic growth—as the weight of past debt crushes the economy’s future potential. Above all, Kuttner shows how austerity serves only the interest of creditors—the very bankers and financial elites whose actions precipitated the collapse. Lucid, authoritative, provocative—a book that will shape the economic conversation and the search for new solutions.

Author : Neil Carpenter
Publisher : Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN 13 : 9781984977601
Total Pages : 72 pages
Book Rating : 4.01/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Austerity's Victims written by Neil Carpenter and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2018-05-16 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are approximately 1,000,000 adults with a learning disability in the UK who have suffered because of government measures since 2010. Austerity's Victims exposes the reality, describing in detail the lives of five men living in Cornwall. Their income, below the relative poverty threshold, is compared with national/county medians and the Minimum Income Standard of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Their quality of life, as support and benefits are cut away, is also examined and shown to fall a long way short of the wellbeing defined in the 2014 Care Act. Austerity's Victims provides invaluable evidence for the fight against this injustice.

Author : O'Hara, Mary
Publisher : Policy Press
ISBN 13 : 1447349288
Total Pages : 384 pages
Book Rating : 4.80/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Shame Game written by O'Hara, Mary and published by Policy Press. This book was released on 2020-02-27 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does it mean to be poor in Britain and America? For decades the primary narrative about poverty in both countries is that it has been caused by personal flaws or ‘bad life decisions’ rather than policy choices or economic inequality. This misleading account has become deeply embedded in the public consciousness with serious ramifications for how financially vulnerable people are seen, spoken about and treated. Drawing on a two-year multi-platform initiative, this book by award-winning journalist and author Mary O’Hara, asks how we can overturn this portrayal once and for all. Crucially, she turns to the real experts to try to find answers – the people who live it.

Author : Bassel, Leah
Publisher : Policy Press
ISBN 13 : 1447327136
Total Pages : 168 pages
Book Rating : 4.34/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Minority Women and Austerity written by Bassel, Leah and published by Policy Press. This book was released on 2017-07-12 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As austerity measures continue throughout Europe, its effects are felt differently by different groups of citizens. This book looks at how minority women in France and Britain have coped with austerity. Crucially, it casts them not as passive victims, but as active agents finding ways to survive, using their race, class, gender, and legal status as resources for collective action at a moment when left-wing politics and non-governmental organizations have failed them. Making use of in-depth case studies, Minority Women and Austerity offers an unprecedented look at the changing relationship among the state, the market, and civil society, and the opportunities and dilemmas that creates for minority women.

Author : Robins, Jon
Publisher : Policy Press
ISBN 13 : 1529213126
Total Pages : 224 pages
Book Rating : 4.26/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Justice in a Time of Austerity written by Robins, Jon and published by Policy Press. This book was released on 2021-06-22 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dan Newman and Jon Robins combine investigative journalism and academic scholarship to examine how the lives of people suffering problems with benefits, debt, family, housing and immigration are made harder by cuts to the civil justice system.

Author : Mary O'Hara
Publisher : Policy Press
ISBN 13 : 9781447374527
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.25/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Austerity Bites 10 Years On written by Mary O'Hara and published by Policy Press. This book was released on 2024-09-17 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Austerity has proven to be more deadly than the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, over the last decade, the damage caused by austerity measures in the UK has had a long-lasting and profound effect on many lives. The first edition of Austerity Bites offered on-the-ground reportage of one of the most significantly regressive economic strategies of any post-war government. Over a year Mary O’Hara toured the UK to gauge the immediate impact – and expectations of people affected – and found many clinging to the hope that austerity cuts would not last long as the damage became increasingly apparent. Alas, this was not how things unfolded. Instead, much of the Welfare State had its vital support systems systematically undermined The public sector, including the NHS, is now on its knees. Schools are buckling under multiple structural and budgetary pressures. Councils – even big ones – are going broke. Homelessness is rampant. Austerity has killed. While Brexit, the pandemic, and war have no doubt impacted the economic health of the country, previous austerity cuts left the UK less prepared to weather such extraordinary events. With new commentary, Austerity Bites 10 Years On assesses on the true scale of the damage these policies have inflicted on the country’s most vulnerable groups, public institutions and on the wider society. It reflects on where we have been, where we are now and what needs to happen next to undo the damage and avoid the same mistakes again.