At the same time, Loach was involved in the foundation of a new left-wing political party, Left Unity, seemingly set on the rock of that spirit. The filmmaker Ken Loach released a documentary about the last era of “austerity,” The Spirit of ’45. What opposition did emerge during this time-particularly after a brief flurry of protest in 2011 collapsed-was deeply indebted to a nostalgic rhetoric of a former period of austerity. At the same time Labour, under the hapless leadership of Edward Miliband, offered no serious opposition to austerity as either concept or policy, preferring instead the comically innocuous criticism that the carve-up of the welfare state’s few remnants went “too far, too fast.” The privatization of the railways was reinforced, and the banks nationalized at the height of the financial crisis were allowed to continue much as before, albeit lending somewhat less.Īlthough the vote of May 2015 was not some Thatcher-era swell of Tory support, something in this austerity agenda nonetheless struck a chord with people. In the National Health Service, a Health and Social Care Bill was introduced that opened up most of the NHS to private companies benefit cuts and punitive benefit sanctions led to millions using food banks. The Education Maintenance Allowance that kept many working-class children in further education was abolished. In education, tuition fees were put up by 300 percent arts funding was decimated. Given that the Conservative-Liberal Democrat government had, for the previous five years, been quite dramatic in the sweep and scale of its policies, perhaps even the most radical government since Thatcher, there’s no question of what was being voted for. In the British general election of May 2015, thirty-seven percent of registered voters who bothered to turn out voted for austerity. How had this happened? How did it manage to grow from a minor English middle-class cult object into an international brand? There are few images of the last decade that are quite so riddled with ideology, and few “historical” documents that are quite so spectacularly false. As a logo, it was nearly as recognizable as Coca-Cola or Apple. World War II propaganda image as easily identifiable as the headscarved Lily Brik bellowing “BOOKS!” on Rodchenko’s famous poster. It was now there alongside Rosie the Riveter, the muscular female munitions worker on the U.S. I was going into the flagship Warsaw branch of the Polish department store Empik and there, just past the revolving doors, was a collection of notebooks, mouse pads, diaries and the like, featuring a familiar English sans serif font, white on red, topped with the crown above the legend, in English:ĬARRY ONThis image had finally entered the pantheon of truly global design icons. I can pinpoint the moment when I realized that what had seemed a typically, somewhat insufferably, English phenomenon had gone completely and inescapably global.
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