“Austerity - A programme of government measures designed to reduce public spending and conserve resources. The term entered common use in 1942, and was freq. used in the context of rationing and other measures introduced by governments in the period during and after the Second World War (1939–45).”

Austerity, in our peacetime economy, damages the poor. Typically, I’d find it implausible to feel a grievance against an able-bodied unemployed worker, but when he intends to act against his own interests in the poll booth, he intends to muster one from me. Our Conservative/Liberal coalition seems convinced that Chancellor Osborne’s policies of stripping state assistance from the poorest in society will generate a Conservative victory in the 2015 election. But even Labour’s hints of its own 2015 election manifesto suggest they aim to win on the same policies. These policies are harsh; poor people are now dying as a result of them. On the 4th February 2015, MP Dame Anne Begg of the Work and Pensions Select Committee asked our Employment secretary, MP Esther McVey to provide evidence for why she believes that more claimants are now being sanctioned for longer periods of time than ever before, will not inevitably damage their respective healths. McVey’s line was that “the whole focus of this (harsher sanctioning program) was to make it more personalised, to understand the needs of the individual.”

David Clapson, a man who’d left a job of 29 years to care for a dying grandmother, was sanctioned for not providing adequate evidence as to why he had missed his appointment with his JSA advisor. Clapson was a diabetic, following these sanctions he could not afford to eat or put money on his electricity card to maintain the temperature and effectiveness of the insulin in his fridge. His sister found him dead, lying on a pile of CV’s in his Stevenage flat on the 20th July 2013, from diabetic ketoacidosis—which occurs during a lack of insulin. The autopsy also found him to have had a completely empty stomach when he died. Clapson’s sister was present at the WPSC inquiry, and had to listen while McVey struggled to explain to her why she still believed that extending minimum sanctions from two weeks (the time it took to kill Clapson) to four weeks, would better “understand the needs of the individual.”

The meeting heard McVey deny the accuracy of any figures claiming that these welfare sanctions were detrimental to the health of the poor saying, “they have made leaps in where they have got the facts and figures and then come to a conclusion -a conclusion they obviously wished to come to”. But by guaranteeing the certainty of destitute conditions for a month, rather than a fortnight, for those who miss appointments, McVey had undoubtedly condemned at least a certain number of the poorest unemployed members of society to starve to death. The objective of such policies seems, on the surface to be to decrease the cost to the state of unemployed people’s benefit payments. But in fact it is unlikely to save the country any money at all. When you consider that the Job Seekers Allowance is a mere £71.70 per week, while the cost of treating the starving/food poisoned individuals in NHS hospitals is an average of £255.40 per night, the evidence points to the contrary. It seems that these sanctioned poor people’s destitute conditions are considered to be necessary collateral in a policy which is in place, either to promote a culture of austerity, to excuse further cuts and privatisations in other sectors or—if such policies actually are designed to save money—by eliminating non-contributing members of the economy by causing their death.

On the 11th November 2014, The Financial Times ran a poll carried out by Populus which indicated that 41% of the British electorate hold the belief that “more austerity and cuts will be needed in the five years after the 2015 election”. The article was written by George Parker, the FT’s Political editor and he ran it with the head line “Appetite for Austerity Evaporates”. The language implies that such an “appetite” did exist in the past. But Parker also makes clear there will continue to be austerity one way or the other, presenting the decreasing public consensus for them as simply a political problem that all parties will have to work around to carry forward the “inevitable” additional cuts in the post-election term.

In 2010, YouGov carried out a survey of 4000 people for the UK housing charity Shelter. The results showed that 63% of the population of the UK are in receipt of assistance in paying housing costs. It is fair to say that this 63% are those most harshly hit by the current austerity measures and those intended for the future.

If we are to accept that the results of both the Populus and YouGov polls mentioned above are an accurate depiction of the British electorate, and we accept that a vote for austerity involves risking critical state payments required of 63% of Britain to maintain their homes: then a minimum of 4% (over 2.5 million) of our population are supporting further austerity measures directly opposed to their own interests.

The above figure is tragic but unsurprising. The actual number of deluded voters might well be much higher, up to ten times higher, comparatively; what is important to note is their motivation. We have what is still principally a two-party system, in which the parties are alleged to have contrasting ideologies, traditionally, Conservatives are right and Labour are left. The austerity scar will be smaller under Labour, for instance, they still occasionally try to pass legislation in efforts to secure the survival of the NHS as a state asset. Yet today both parties are proposing what is principally the same economic mandate (that of harsher cuts regardless of the election outcome). Normally, this kind of agreement between Right and Left only occurs under emergency situations, such as wartime—where austerity is conventionally implemented and coalition governments have been operative in the past. This can leave the voter with the impression that whatever is happening with current economic recession, it must be something equally drastic.

In reality, our economic situation is nowhere near as drastic as a wartime recession and emergency increased austerity measures are hardly our only available way out of our debt deficit. However, if we’re to believe what they’ve said so far, Cameron and Miliband claim to be in agreement on this matter and currently a minimum of 2,550,000 British people are seemingly willing to sacrifice losing their homes, and possibly, their very lives, because they believe them.