The Tories’ plan for austerity was always severely skewed towards adversely affecting the poorer and more vulnerable parts of society. It involved a dereliction of social and ethical duty right from the onset; the creation of a hostile environment for anyone who might require help — refugees; victimised black and minority ethnic people; unfairly treated workers seeking proper working conditions, contracts of labour and unionisation; the depressed and anxious too poorly to work trying desperately to claim benefits; the sick and injured awaiting health care and beds and medical attention from staff whose numbers have plummeted since the Brexit referendum; young women seeking care, advice and legal representation in order to move on with their lives following traumatic violation; the list of those for whom the search for appropriate care was made stressful and hopeless is endless.
The withdrawal of safety nets, social systems of basic bio-economic security, indeed the near destruction of any principle of social security itself, obscured behind an ever-present malignant cloud of ‘undeserving’ and ‘entitlement’ talk from a deeply aligned media that, from the decks of yachts, wrote off starving populations visiting food-banks: this was a highly toxic and damaging side to the ‘hostile environment’ philosophy — a ‘nudge-theory’ philosophy, an unsanctioned mass social experiment with devastating and counter-humanitarian results flagged even by the UN.
This way of thinking held that if the government made it difficult, indeed often extremely emotionally draining, for citizens to obtain the help they were entitled to, then they would simply manage to do without. Unfortunately many have learned a far more tragic lesson: it is often simpler to die than to be put through the humiliating and costly mill of endless assessment, refusal and appeal. The emotional labour expected of the vulnerable merely in order to qualify for what should already and inalienably belong to them was too intense, too unrewarding and unremittingly bleak for many.
In our times, Malthus was resurrected before our eyes, preaching everyday from the tabloid stand, and from the conservative government’s own adopted flagship, the BBC and its perennial Tory guests. Poverty, illness, exclusion, existential flight from war and danger; all of these were recast as resulting from the population’s own moral failings, never from the astronomical gulfs opening between rich and poor and everyday increased by policy. Maybe this Tory government has not held guns to citizen’s heads and pulled the triggers. However, the effect has been the same. The conservatives, secure behind their daisy-chains of subcontracted agencies, have the cosiness and comfort of deniability and yet all the power of an arms-length social cleansing outfit. A highly selective, social-Darwinian drone warfare upon the populace; Malthusian eugenics by other means.
Theriomorphous 