The 2010 austerity program made crisis victims pay for the crisis’s authors’ failures

Evidence

If there’s denial, it’s happened in the last two years, and on the part of the neoliberals and their friends in the business elite, who — after demanding at gunpoint unprecedented sums of public money — are now brazenly continuing to peddle the story that they are the friend of the taxpayer and that it is welfare claimants, not them, who are the scroungers who have brought the country to the “brink of bankruptcy”. In what must surely be the most astonishing bait and switch in British parliamentary history, the victims of neoliberal policy — public services and the poor — are now being asked (or rather forced) to pay for the manifest and total failure of that policy. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1466

Categorization

• XREF: Direct historical instance of the pattern Fisher names capitalist realism; could enrich a piece on how blame for a manufactured crisis gets redistributed downward. — connects to: Post-2010 austerity made the poor pay for a banking crisis they did not cause — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1820; The crisis-as-government-fault narrative was engineered to justify austerity — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 950; Victims of failed neoliberal policy are forced to pay its costs — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1466

Broader Connections

• Post-2010 austerity made the poor pay for a banking crisis they did not cause #corroborates (0.95) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1820
• Victims of failed neoliberal policy are forced to pay its costs #expands (0.90) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1466
• The crisis-as-government-fault narrative was engineered to justify austerity #expands (0.85) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 950