A is for Austerity
Week A | Tuesday | Levelling Down in Wales … and everywhere
It’s serendipitous that we happen to be back to Week A, because yesterday evening I published a collection of pieces I edited about austerity. Although it’s Wales-centred, there are visits to Scotland and Portugal and its message applies throughout the world.
That is, that the war of all wars, which has been fought since the dawn of human time – that of rich against not rich, and our planet – is deadly, unrelenting, and desperate. Yet still we persist, and have hope, especially when we raise our voices together.
I’ll let one of the contributors, Neil Schofield-Hughes – now editor-in-chief of Bylines Cymru – describe it in his characteristically excellent words.
“Earlier this year, my predecessor at Bylines Cymru, Rachel Morris, launched our Austerity Month - in fact the quantity and quality of the writing was such that it turned into two months of articles on austerity in Wales.
As part of the Cymru Conversations project, those pieces have now been collected into a book, Levelling Down. You can buy it at the link below - just pay what you can afford.
I have a chapter in there on the Barnett Formula, but the important parts are the pieces from people at the front line of austerity, the people living from day to day with the consequences of Westminster’s choices - choices that we can only mitigate, assuming the political will is there (and just now it clearly isn’t).
Extremely proud to have been a part of this. Austerity kills - it has caused more premature deaths in the UK than Covid and more even than WW2. The economics behind it is utterly bogus. And the Westminster government’s savage attacks on those receiving PIP will kill more. We need to understand the scale of what is being done to us.
But it is not a pessimistic book. It is based on the belief that telling truths about austerity is the first step in defeating it.”