This article is an attempt to take stock and critically reflect on the UK’s decade of austerity and social policy hostility over the past decade. It distinguishes between economic and political austerity and digs deeper into the data on expenditure in order to examine the impact of austerity on British public expenditure and politics. It argues that the decade of austerity was a hostile one for British social policy which not only undermined the financial base of key parts of the welfare state, it reshaped it and redefined its priorities, setting in train a series of subsequent events that would further change, not just British social policies, but British economics, polity and politics. And, as subsequent crises – notably Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic – testify, crisis events tend to be linked, and each one shapes and influences the ability of the state to respond to the next.

中文翻译：

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紧缩、重组和破碎：十年紧缩后的英国福利国家

本文试图对过去十年英国十年的紧缩政策和社会政策敌意进行评估和批判性反思。它区分了经济紧缩和政治紧缩，并深入挖掘了支出数据，以检验紧缩对英国公共支出和政治的影响。它认为，紧缩的十年对英国的社会政策是充满敌意的，它不仅破坏了福利国家关键部分的财政基础，而且重塑了它并重新定义了它的优先事项，引发了一系列后续事件，这些事件将进一步改变，不仅仅是英国的社会政策，还有英国的经济、政治和政治。而且，随着随后的危机——尤其是英国脱欧和 Covid-19 大流行——证明，危机事件往往是联系在一起的，