Above: Lareine Mouoguia with Mary O’Hara

Mary O’Hara is a friend of ATD Fourth World. In September 2024, Lareine Mouoguia of ATD’s National Leadership Team attended the launch of Mary’s newest publication. In the article below, ATD ally Megan Easton reviews this book.

Austerity Bites: 10 Years On, the anniversary edition of a book by award-winning journalist Mary O’Hara, gives voice to the people of the UK who have suffered, and continue to suffer, at the hands of a ruthless austerity programme. O’Hara sheds light on the experiences of the most vulnerable through interviews that document the immediate impact of austerity measures on their lives.

A decade after the original publication, this edition revisits the subject to assess the long-term effects of permanent austerity in the UK. It is revealed that the UK’s socioeconomic landscape has significantly deteriorated, with an alarming statistic of 4.3 million children living in relative poverty in the UK (2023/24).

The fallacy of inevitability

The devastating consequences of austerity on the UK explored by O’Hara include the cost-of-living crisis, homelessness, and the eradication of vital public and community services. She discusses how emergency measures, such as food banks — created to temporarily combat the initial introduction of austerity — are now becoming a permanent fixture of society.

O’Hara works to expose the dangerous narrative that politicians carefully crafted to support and justify the introduction of the austerity programme in 2010, and the announcement of its permanence in 2013. She highlights how the government justification for cuts to public spending and reform of the welfare state is a fallacy that works to make austerity appear inevitable and villainises people in poverty as supposedly causing the UK’s economic difficulties.

This book combines investigative journalism, data-driven analyses and lived experience narratives to write a compelling critique of policies that have disproportionately harmed the most vulnerable people in our society. As argued in its introduction, ‘Poverty is always a political choice. Austerity is also a political choice. Neither should have any place in today’s world.’

– By Megan Easton