Austerity Fictions: Disability, Class, and Resistance in Twenty-First Century British Literature and Film

Since 2010, successive Conservative-led governments in the United Kingdom have implemented austerity measures and crafted powerful narratives to justify these policies. Right-wing politicians, supported by the tabloid press, have targeted the national welfare state and the disabled individuals supposedly abusing the system, reviving centuries-old “undeserving poor” narratives to demonise benefits claimants as work-shy “scroungers” who have “broken” Britain. But as this thesis reveals, fictional counternarratives have also started to emerge, questioning the ideologies underpinning austerity, exposing its adverse effect on public health, and imagining alternatives.

Not only has austerity led to the impoverishment, deteriorating health, and deaths of disabled people through cuts to the welfare state, it has entrenched regional health inequalities and exacerbated public health issues such as loneliness, drug addiction, and homelessness. Engaging with Robert McRuer’s ‘crip theory’, Jasbir Puar’s concept of ‘debility’, and Dan Goodley’s discussion of dis/ability studies, I examine how bodies and minds across the dis/ability divide are vulnerable to the debilitating impact of austerity.

Through my analysis of Ken Loach’s films I, Daniel Blake (2016) and Sorry We Missed You (2019), Niall Griffiths’ novel Broken Ghost (2019), novels from the emerging genre of “up lit”, and Jane Gull’s film My Feral Heart (2016), I argue that disability is uniquely placed to expose, resist, and challenge austerity politics. I explore how my chosen texts, which I refer to as “austerity fictions”, represent obstructive welfare reforms, the drudgeries of work, the lonely people behind closed doors, and the disabled individuals who have been quietly moved into remote institutions. Moments of resistance are built into these austere worlds, as sites of crip community can be found in the occupations that form in city centres, on the edge of a mountain, or in a seemingly magical barn. Analysing the deployment of embodied metaphors, generic disruptions, and crip aesthetics, I argue that austerity fictions creatively break through the social realist genre to depict the obscured human consequences of public sector cuts, countering discourses of “brokenness” and offering glimpses of crip resistance.