Austerity as Public Mood by Kirsten Forkert

Author:Kirsten Forkert [Forkert, Kirsten]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Media Studies, Political Science, Public Policy, Social Policy, Discrimination, Human Geography, Commentary & Opinion
ISBN: 9781783481958
Google: KOHaDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2017-09-20T03:29:02+00:00

Chapter 5

Austere Creativity, Community and Impasses around the Welfare State

I ended the previous chapter by calling for a linking of anti-austerity campaigns and migrants’ rights campaigns, as well as an imaginative leap that would enable us to think of the two together. This chapter will focus more closely on anti-austerity campaigns, based on my experiences in a campaign to save five local libraries from closure in Lewisham, South London, in 2011. I will examine how concepts of ‘community’ and ‘creativity’ were mobilised by local authorities to turn the libraries over to charities (with volunteers replacing qualified librarians), and how these ideas were reflected in the reaction of local campaigners. Faced with cuts to public services, local citizens were expected to be resourceful and ingenious in adapting to them; for example, through managing and staffing libraries for free, services which were once funded by the state. The expectation for citizens to volunteer to run their own public services was also framed in terms of how it could restore a perceived lost sense of community, and appealed to the belief that austerity provided the opportunity to restore this lost community by forcing citizens to rely on each other rather than on the state. However, some of the campaigners did, at least initially, also believe that the transfer of the libraries allowed for radical possibilities to re-envision both public services and local community. The case reflects the impasses intrinsic to anti-austerity campaigns, in which one is often faced with a defence of existing public service provision which does not ultimately satisfy desires for an alternative. These impasses make it easy to claim, as will be seen, that the conversion would foster both a sense of community and creativity not possible under council1 ownership.

I will begin by examining the instrumentalisation of the concept of ‘creativity’ within neoliberal policy discourses before the financial crisis, and will consider its application within the austerity context. I will then discuss the case of the 2010–2011 campaign to save the libraries in Lewisham. The analysis will be based on three in-depth, semi-structured interviews with key activists involved in the libraries campaign (who have been given pseudonyms), as well as reflections on my own involvement as an activist. Grey literature on the outsourcing of public services and a promotional video about the volunteer-run library will also be examined.

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