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Islands of hope in a sea of despair: civil society in an age of austerity

Simin Davoudi, Mel Steer, Mark Shucksmith and Liz Todd

Introduction

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times … it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. (Dickens, 1859: 1)

Charles Dickens opens his most political novel, A Tale of Two Cities, with these words. Nearly two centuries later, we cannot but agree with his suggestion that, ‘In short, the period was … like the present period’ (Dickens, 1859: 1). Such entangling of hope and despair not only defines our everyday life experiences; it is also echoed in the intellectual dilemma that is at the heart of this book. From the outset, we were searching for ‘hope in the dark’ (Solnit, 2004), with the ‘dark’ being austerity policies and their implications for people and places, and ‘hope’ being civil society’s responses to them. By the time the manuscript was ready for submission (in spring 2020), the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic was in full swing. While a full analysis of its effects is premature and beyond the scope of this chapter, we cannot but reflect on it where appropriate, especially in the conclusion. The juxtaposing of hope and despair does not suggest that hope is an unqualified positive attribute. On the contrary, as Ernst Block (1986 [1954–59]: 56) suggests, ‘fraudulent hope is one of the malefactors, even enervators, of the human race, concretely genuine hope is its most dedicated benefactor’, defining the latter as ‘informed discontent’ with the status quo and a call for action. So, for us, hope is that which allows us to imagine an alternative future and strive to achieve it. This is particularly apt in relation to the COVID-19 crisis and the limited preparedness for tackling it. The aim of this chapter is to engage with a number of critical questions that arise from the interplay of hope and despair, such as:

•Should we celebrate the growing contributions from voluntary sector and charitable organisations as the best of times for a flourishing civil society, or should we reproach the decline of public services as the worst of times for a diminishing welfare state?

•Should we embrace civil society initiatives as a mark of resistance to neoliberal policies, or should we repel them for mopping up the consequences of such policies?

•Do civil society responses to austerity offer genuine or false hope?

•Will the flames of their actions burn strongly enough to withstand the harsh winds of neoliberal austerity and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic?

In engaging with these questions, the chapter unpacks two core concepts that run throughout: austerity and civil society. In doing so, particular attention is paid to the North East of England in the context of the pre-COVID-19 policy landscape in the UK. This focus provides both an illustrative example of the implications of austerity measures and civil society roles, and the contextual setting (along with Chapter 2: ‘The North East of England’) for the case-study chapters in this volume.

Neoliberal austerity as ‘the worst of times’

The collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2007 paved the way for the largest, widest and deepest financial crisis in living memory. It revealed the inherent contradictions in the global capitalist economy, as well as the drastic consequences of excessive deregulation of the financial markets for social equality and political democracy. The financial crash was followed by the bailing out of the failing banks with a huge amount of public money, and one of the worst economic recessions in Britain. The then Labour government’s response was to introduce a set of fiscal stimuli, which was promptly withdrawn by the subsequent Conservative–Liberal Democrat Coalition government in 2010 and replaced with a wave of drastic austerity policies that continued until 2020, when it was, perhaps temporarily, suspended by the Conservative government, mainly in response to the pandemic and its economic contagions.

The dictionary definition of ‘austerity’ refers to the ‘difficult economic conditions created by government measures to reduce public expenditure’ (Oxford English Dictionary). In this definition, reducing public expenditure is invoked as the only ‘natural’ solution to economic problems. Other economic solutions such as increasing corporate taxes are not considered. The definition, maybe inadvertently, depoliticises austerity as an economic necessity rather than a neoliberal political choice (Mattie and Salour, 2019) – a choice based on an economic rationality that has recently been further boosted by highly acclaimed economists (notably, Alberto Alesino). They suggest that by cutting welfare spending, taxes will go down, leading to an increase in the money available to private investors, whose increased wealth will eventually trickle down and reach everyone else. So, those who have disproportionately suffered from the cuts simply need to be patient. According to these economic rationalities, what matters is the effect of austerity on aggregate gross domestic product (GDP)¹ figures rather than the differential impact on different social groups. While they ask the question of when austerity works and when it does not, they shy away from asking for whom austerity works.

David Kynaston (2010) makes an intriguing comparison between post-2010 and post-Second World War austerity, and argues that ‘austerity was a hard sell in the 40s. Today it’s harder still.’ He argues that the four conditions that enabled popular assent to post-Second World War austerity are not present in the contemporary political climate. These conditions are: ‘shared purpose’, ‘hope’, ‘confidence in the political class’ and ‘equity of sacrifice’. While recognising the contextual differences between now and the 1950s, we argue that the presence or absence of these conditions is largely the manifestation of different ideological approaches to austerity. These conditions are discussed one by one, with reflections also made regarding the post-COVID-19 implications.

The post-war sense of ‘shared purpose’ was invoked by the necessity of fighting off fascism and collectively responding to the devastations and destructions of the war. Today, as Kynaston (2010) suggests, there is no similar ‘historic feelgood victory to look back on’. The vacuum has been filled by ‘a moralistic good housekeeping, live-within-our-means of future redemption’ narrative that is not only at odds with the dominant culture of consumption, but also an advocacy of neoliberal morality about individualisation of responsibility, privatisation of social risks and self-reliant resiliency (Bohland et al, 2018). The latter has been applied not only to individuals, but also to institutions, notably, local authorities (John, 2014). The responsibilisation agenda ignores the effects of structural inequalities and considers social problems such as low educational attainment, poor housing, low income, morbidity and premature death as consequences of personal choices and individual failings (Barry, 2005). Imposing stringent austerity measures offers the potential for a neoliberal government to sermonise on the follies of a nanny state, on individual failings and on a ‘broken society’, as the Coalition government claimed. Failure of government to meet citizens’ needs in the face of austerity is presented as a failure of the nanny state and the inherent problems associated with it, not a failure of (re)distribution and underfunding. People are vilified as being victims of their own irresponsibility rather than the collapse of the social contract. In many ways, health and economic crises resulting from COVID-19 have been exacerbated by decades of underinvestment in areas such as health, social care and social benefits in the name of austerity.

Post-war Britain was a time of grief, and also a time of ‘hope’. Based on egalitarian ideals, the state could legitimately intervene in the free market and redistribute national wealth socially and spatially. It was also expected to share with citizens the responsibility for social risks. Hope was founded on this social contract and its manifestation in the provision of free education, social housing, the national health system and lifetime social security, all of which cultivated a hopeful prospect for social mobility. According to neoliberal ideology, however, state intervention in the market is not only inefficient and ineffective, but also morally dangerous because it is claimed that providing welfare cultivates a culture of dependency and eradicates self-reliance (Davoudi and Madanipour, 2015). Former Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron’s notion of a ‘Big Society’ was indeed an advocacy of civil society assuming greater responsibility for societal problems, though without any accompanying transfer of resources. These assumptions have been called into question in response to the COVID-19 crisis, whereby the state has had to step in to provide safeguards for those affected by its economic consequences.

The ‘trust and confidence’ that was enjoyed by the post-war state and its political institutions has since been eroded. While key post-war political figures ‘attained almost surreal levels of personal popularity’ (Kynaston, 2010), the level of trust in political elites has dropped significantly, as shown in a British Social Attitudes Survey (BSAS, 2013: 16): ‘The last 30 years have seen a number of important institutions fall from grace very publicly … and there is a clear sense that people have lost faith in some of Britain’s most important institutions. This certainly applies to politicians and the political process.’ Austerity has been introduced amid ‘a growing disjunction between the stage-managed political theatres that the elites are engaged in and are projected on television screens and social media, and the reality of people’s everyday political struggles to be heard and represented’ (Davoudi and Steele, 2020: 113). Public confidence in government’s ability to strive for a fairer and better society has been gradually diminishing. While in 1986, 38 per cent of the respondents trusted ‘governments to put the nation’s needs above those of a political party’, in 2011, only 18 per cent did so (BSAS, 2013: 13, 16). In the future, a positive change depends largely on how the government handles the COVID-19 crisis. Judged by its initial laissez-faire approach and the lack of preparedness, especially in relation to testing and the provision of protective clothing for front-line workers, optimism may be premature.

Of the four conditions identified by Kynaston (2010), ‘equity of sacrifice’ is perhaps the most vivid manifestation of two ideologically driven approaches to austerity. Post-war austerity was seen as being shared by the majority of both working- and middle-class people; there was a sense of parity of sacrifice. This could not be more different from neoliberal austerity. Although the Coalition government tried to sell austerity measures through the use of rhetoric such as ‘We’re all in this together’, it soon became evident that the poor were getting poorer during austerity, and the rich were getting richer because of it (Davoudi and Ormerod, 2021). Indeed, neoliberal austerity has hit the most vulnerable people (women, children, the disabled and the sick) and left-behind places (for example, post-industrial regions in the north of England) the hardest.

Although real GDP (which takes into account changes in prices such as inflation) in the UK grew by 5 per cent between 2012 and 2018, public expenditure on low-income families and children dropped by 44 per cent: from £403 in 2010 to £222 per person in 2018 (HRW, 2019: 50). The government’s own statistics show a rise of 200,000 in the number of children in ‘absolute poverty’ compared with the previous year, reaching approximately 3.7 million children in 2018 (DWP, 2018: 8). Similarly, homelessness is estimated to have risen by 165 per cent since 2010, reaching 280,000 in England by 2019 (Shelter, 2019). As Garry Lemon, Director of Policy at the Trussell Trust (the UK’s largest national food-bank charity), puts it, the 2010 date is important because it marked a change of government from centre-left to centre-right and the introduction of ‘policies that radically cut state spending … the message was clear … we need to cut back to balance the books’ (cited in McGee, 2020).

Through a number of policies, notably, the reduction in the size of welfare benefits, the increase in the conditions attached to it and the changes in the procedure by which it can be accessed, austerity has been used to radically restructure the welfare system, with devastating effects on the lives of the most vulnerable groups, as well as on their ability to cope with the consequences of the COVID-19 crisis. For example, homeless people are struggling to self-isolate despite the fact that they are ‘three times more likely to have severe respiratory problems’ (McGee, 2020). The inequitable impacts of austerity policies are not simply the result of economic miscalculation; they are deliberately designed to achieve the neoliberal goal of reducing the social role of the state. Indeed, austerity is a key tenet of neoliberalism. As Peck (2012: 626) argues, ‘according to neoliberal script, public austerity is a necessary response to market conditions, and the state has responded by inaugurating new rounds of fiscal retrenchment’.

As Clarke and Newman (2012) suggest, austerity has evoked both the prospect of hardship and the memories of post-war solidarities. However, despite successive governments’ rhetorical appeals to the latter in order to legitimise austerity, it is the former that is prevalent in the contemporary political and cultural landscape. While hardship has been felt deeply, especially among the most vulnerable, solidarity remained a distant memory, at least until the COVID-19 crisis, when it was foregrounded partly by reference to the post-war era. As a result, people’s participation in austerity has been characterised by Clarke and Newman (2012: 309) as a ‘passive consent’ rather than a ‘popular mobilization’. However, we argue that if the outcome of the referendum on UK membership of the European Union (EU) is anything to go by, the initial ‘passive consent’ turned into an ‘active discontent’ with neoliberal austerity, which was ‘hijacked by far-right populist parties and turned into instruments of their regressive and divisive political agendas’ (Davoudi and Steele, 2020: 115). The far-right’s hijacking of the narrative has been facilitated because successive political leaders failed to condemn the market’s intensification and its pernicious, harmful effects (Shenker, 2019: 40), which were apparent even before austerity’s onslaughts. As shown in the 2019 election, the rising level of discontent with austerity could no longer be ignored by electioneers seeking to win the public’s vote. At the time of writing and in the face of the COVID-19 crisis, public spending has reached a scale never seen during peacetime.

The inequitable effects of austerity have had a spatial dimension too, with some of the poorest cities and regions of England being hit hardest, including the North East region. Severe cuts to local governments’ public spending (Bailey et al, 2015; Hastings et al, 2015) has compounded the inequitable social effects of austerity because, in these areas, disadvantage is concentrated and there is a heavy reliance on the public sector for jobs and services (Peck, 2012). The scale and severity of budget cuts, especially in the North East, has reduced local governments’ ability to deliver services and to manage the recurring crises of capitalism. Proclamations from Boris Johnson’s Conservative government to ‘level up’ the regional economic, employment and budget disparities remain exactly that, while actual actions for levelling up have become more imperative than ever as the COVID-19 crisis is widely predicted to exacerbate existing spatial and socio-economic inequalities (Partington, 2020). So far, central government activities regarding its response to the pandemic are foreboding. Critical responses – such as testing and tracing – have been centralised and privatised, against expert advice, while the role of the public sector and local public health networks has been overlooked. Furthermore, Public Health England has been effectively dismantled and the expertise and resources within local authorities and community organisations have hardly been utilised (Chakrabortty, 2020). However, amid the darkness of austerity Britain and the global pandemic, there have also been glimmers of hope in the form of a rising level of activities by civil societies.

Proactive civil societies as the ‘best of times’

The idea of civil society failed because it became too popular. (Wolfe, 1997: 9)

This provocation refers to the faith in many concepts that travel far and fast and pick up different meanings at every stop along the way. ‘Civil society’ is not an exception; its history goes back to ancient Greece and its development as a concept began with the Enlightenment thinkers (notably, Alexis de Tocqueville) and continued through the works of many scholars, notably, Gramsci, who ‘may be single-handedly responsible for the revival of the term civil society in the post-World War Two period’ (Foley and Hodgkinson, 2002: xix). Today, its widespread popularity is due to the rising presence of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) on the global stage since the 1980s. The long history of civil society is coupled with its various theorisations. According to Edwards (2014: 10), there are at least three distinct schools of thoughts about what civil society is, each of which has its own historical root, normative claims and socio-political implications.

The first one considers civil society as a part of society that is distinct from states and markets; it is a form of associational life. Its origin goes back to de Tocqueville’s view of the 19th-century US and the defence of individual freedom from the intrusion of the state. This view of civil society is particularly strong in the US and shares similar distrust of the state and desire for self-governance as that advocated by communitarians (Edwards, 2014: 7). It is, therefore, not surprising that one of its most influential contemporary advocates, Robert Putnam, has come from the US. The everyday references to, for example, the ‘third’ or ‘non-profit’ sector, which includes associations (notably, NGOs) whose membership and activities are voluntary, are often a reflection of this theory of civil society.

The second view considers civil society as ‘good society’ – as a kind of society characterised by positive norms and values, as well as success in meeting particular social goals. The third school of thought defines civil society as the ‘public sphere’. This view was first developed by scholars such as John Dewey and Hannah Arendt in their theorisations of the ‘public sphere’ as a central component of political life and democracy (Edwards, 2014: 8). It then became influential through Jürgen Habermas’s theory of ‘communicative action’ and ‘discursive democracy’. For him and other critical theorists, civil society is that which ‘is steered by its members through shared meanings that are constructed democratically in the public sphere’ (Chambers, 2002: 94). Despite the diversity of views, it is the theory of civil society as a form of associational life that has become dominant in policy discourse and popular imaginaries. As Edwards (2014: 10) puts it, ‘it is Alexis Tocqueville’s ghost that wanders through the corridors of the World Bank, not that of Habermas or Hegel’.

The understanding of civil society as associational life (that is, distinct from states and markets) resonates with the ‘third way’ politics of the New Labour government in the 1990s, which claimed to be the middle ground between the state-oriented (welfarist) and the market-oriented (neoliberalist) solution to collective problems. While, in reality, the so-called ‘third sector’ has been made financially dependent on the state and the private sector, and the boundaries between them have become blurred, it is this third sector view that is often visualised in myriad so-called ‘triple helix’ diagrams.

It is interesting to note that civil society as part of society is often conflated with civil society as a kind of society, assuming that ‘a healthy associational life contributes to, or even produces, the “good society” in ways that are predictable – while the public sphere is usually ignored’ (Edwards, 2014: 10). Such a perspective overlooks the various forms of what Chambers and Kopstein (2001) call ‘bad civil society’: although they resonate with many of the principles of what a civil society is (coherence, trust and so on), they are exclusionary of and sometimes hostile to outsiders and ‘Others’. Examples include the voluntary organisations that nurture hatred and fear.

There is another frequent conflation between civil society as an end and civil society as a means. According to Edwards (2014: 11), this is due to a number of political changes, epitomised by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, when civil society ‘became both … a new type of society characterised by liberal democratic norms and a vehicle for achieving it’. An example of such a conflation can be found in the range of civil society roles that have been identified by the World Economic Forum (2013: 9), which suggests that civil societies act as: watchdog (holding institutions to account); advocate/campaigner (raising awareness and lobbying governments for change); service provider (related to education, health, food and security, and contributing to disaster risk management and emergency response); expert (bringing in local, experiential knowledge); capacity builder (providing education and training); incubator (developing solutions that may materialise in the long term); representative (empowering the marginalised or under-represented); champion of active citizenship (motivating civic engagement and supporting citizen rights); solidarity supporter (promoting fundamental values); and definer of standards (creating norms that shape market and state activity).

Many of these roles assume more organised forms of civil society, known as ‘civil society organisations’, ‘non-governmental organisations’ or, in England and Wales, the ‘voluntary, community and charitable sector’. Perhaps arising from the conflations that Edwards (2014) identifies, the UK National Council of Voluntary Organisations (NCVO, 2019) highlights the disputed nature of the term ‘civil society’, suggesting that it encompasses a breadth of organisations extending beyond legally registered charities to include, for example, trade unions, universities and housing associations. The contention about the scope and definition of civil society makes it hard to quantify the total number of organisations. For example, the NCVO’s scope is narrower than the Charities Commission as their count of ‘general charities’ excludes independent schools, housing associations and sacramental religious bodies, and instead bases its definition of general charities on the fulfilment of criteria such as independence from government, being non-profit and working for public benefit. According to this definition, in 2016/17, there were 166,854 general charities in the UK, of which 4,450 were in the North East of England, amounting to 1.7 organisations per 1,000 population – the lowest rate in England (NCVO, 2019).

Focusing on what they do rather than who they are does not reduce the diversity either; yet, in broad terms, much of their activities are directed at improving the well-being of citizens (Clifford, 2017). Despite some serious controversies around the aggressive marketing tactics of some charities and their accountability with regard to salaries, staff conduct and disciplinary policies, charities generally attract higher public regard than many other organisations, even though confidence in them may have fallen in recent years (Charity Commission for England and Wales, 2018). Keen and Audickas (2017) suggest that the sector is predominantly focused on the delivery of social services (18.2 per cent), followed by culture and recreation (8.7 per cent), which are activities that focus on well-being.

The impact of austerity on civil society organisations

The long-term contraction of the state’s social role and its capacity to deliver social services, compounded by neoliberal austerity, has significantly reduced civil society organisations’ capacity to respond to rising demands (Jones et al, 2016). This has generated feelings of disempowerment and ineffectiveness, as shown in the following statement by a welfare adviser in Hull with 15 years’ experience: ‘A few years ago, we used to be able to help people with an answer, direct them somewhere for help, but increasingly there’s not much we can do. The safety nets to which we used to direct them, which they may not have known about, aren’t there anymore’ (HRW, 2019: 15). In the North East, nearly half (46 per cent) of the organisations completing the Voluntary Organisations’ Network North East’s survey reported an 85 per cent increase in demand for their services, a decrease in their grant income from local authorities (Meegan et al, 2014; VONNE, 2016; Clifford, 2017) and staff redundancies. The effects are variable depending on their size, activity and location, with those more reliant on state funding and operating in disadvantaged areas experiencing a larger fall in their income (Jones et al, 2016), as is the case in the North East (Chapman and Hunter, 2017). Here, smaller charities in poorer areas also lack confidence, resources and skills to apply for grants from national bodies (Pharoah et al, 2014). While the COVID-19 lockdown has further increased demand and reduced their resources, the majority of the sector have continued their support. Some of the increased pressures have been driven from the government’s attempts to redirect demand away from the public sector towards them, as is the case in the referral of patients to an already-stretched voluntary sector (NCVO, 2019).

The problem of the government offloading its responsibility onto civil society organisations’ shoulders and overburdening them with what ought to be the responsibility of the public sector came to the surface during the outbreak of COVID-19, as reported by a volunteer in an independent food bank:

The majority of our volunteers are retired. Some are not in good health because it’s hard to be when you’re over 70 ... We’ve given them the option of dropping out and obeying the government guidelines. But it does leave a hole. Now, if a family member coughs, people are gone at the drop of a hat. (Quoted in McGee, 2020)

Added to the reduced supply of volunteers was the limited amount of donated food as for the ‘people who use the food bank, it’s quite a hand-to-mouth existence. And now that food just isn’t there’ (quoted in McGee, 2020).

In response to neoliberal austerity measures, civil society organisations have stepped in to compensate for the loss of a safety net, creating a juxtaposition between the expression of solidarity (‘the best of times’) and the state’s abdication of responsibility (‘the worst of times’). Nowhere is this more apparent than in the growth of food banks in response to growing food poverty (HRW, 2019), as articulated by the Chief Executive of the Trussell Trust:

Food banks have tried to stem the tide, but no charity can replace the dignity of people having enough money to afford a decent standard of living. The failure to tackle the structural problems at both a national and local level has left people with nowhere else to turn. We have the power to tackle these structural problems as a nation. (Quoted in HRW, 2019: 9)

These accounts highlight the limit to the perceived adaptability of civil society – compared with the state and the market – and its ability to align its core activities and values to maintain integrity and mission (Corner, 2014).

Transferring what were previously government services and assets to the charitable sector undermines democratic accountability. Instead of these organisations complementing state provision, they are increasingly operating ‘as substitute for the provision of services by public sector professionals’ (Lyall and Bua, 2015: 33, original emphasis). This risks undermining the relationship between citizens and the state, and between citizens and voluntary sector organisations, increasing the stigma and shame that many people feel. The sector is also changing through undertaking target-driven, performance-managed services where the government has set the agenda. The encroachment of ‘new public management’ approaches in the voluntary sector may bring with it the neoliberal discourses of responsibilisation (Powell et al, 2017), through which benefit recipients are denigrated. Such a discourse became commonplace through popular media and television programmes such as ‘Benefits Street’ in England and ‘The Scheme’ in Scotland (Mooney and Hancock, 2010; Marriott, 2017). As Clarke and Elgenuis (2014) argue, the Coalition government’s ‘skivers v strivers message is inflaming resentments between those affected by the economic slump’, while ‘benefit crackdown leads to divide and rule within poor communities’, essentially breaking down civil society. Furthermore, the new public management approaches are changing the nature of volunteering, with negative effects on attracting and retaining volunteers, who become subject to the culture of performance indicators and an emphasis on competing with other civil society organisations to win contracts. The concept of ‘joyless volunteering’ (Dunn, 2017) has emerged, whereby volunteers are often expected to participate in strategic decisions concerning service provision and staff redundancies, and to be on the front line of hard-pressed services for citizens, bearing the brunt of expressed frustration.

Finally, we return to the idea of civil society as the ‘public sphere’, which goes beyond service delivery and focuses on the role of civil society in critiquing and shaping public policy (Williams and Goodman, 2011). This is where tensions arise in civil society organisations, whereby their role as the voice of the disempowered may contradict with their dependence on state funding and the delivery of services that are commissioned by the government. Both of these may hamper their willingness to confront and question government policy (Alcock, 2010), and compromise their autonomy and advocacy role, especially for disadvantaged communities. As a study by Hemmings (2017: 59) shows, austerity, the shift to the ‘contract culture’ (Bode, 2006), competition, professionalisation and ‘self-muzzling’ has restricted the ability of the voluntary sector to advocate for disadvantaged groups, and to challenge government policy – a role that was further curtailed by recent legislation.²

In many ways, the aforementioned empirical cases reflect the theoretical critiques of the public sphere as a static, essentialised and neutral space. Instead, scholars (notably, Chantal Mouffe) consider the public sphere as a contested space. Here, ‘passive observance of moralist comprehensive doctrines’ that underpin the liberal views of the public sphere is replaced with ‘proactive engagement and sifting of ideas and actions’ by political actors, who have ‘their own visions and versions of the common good’ (Baker, 2018: 258). This dynamic and relational perspective combines political values of agonistic pluralism with ethical values of shared civil imaginaries, which are ‘mediated through rules and norms of conduct that help create a common bond and public concern’ (Baker, 2018: 259). For us, it is this understanding of civil society as a contested ‘public sphere’ that presents hope in the dark (see also Davoudi and Ormerod, 2021).

Concluding reflections

This chapter comes to a conclusion at a time of a global health crisis – the COVID-19 pandemic. We, the authors, are self-isolated in our homes. Businesses are shut down. Shops and schools are closed. Cities are eerily empty, quiet and locked down, and ambulance sirens are constant reminders that hospital beds are filling up and many lives are being tragically lost. While everyone is exposed to the virus, it is becoming evident that some are more vulnerable than others, not just due to their age, but also because of persisting social inequalities. Those who have borne the brunt of austerity measures are also the most vulnerable to the effects of the pandemic. The COVID-19 crisis has shone a light (if we can call it that) on the plight of those in poverty, without a job, without a home, without food and with poor health. The virus has exposed the cracks in our societies – cracks that have been widened by decades of austerity measures and disinvestment in public services and social safety nets. All this makes it hard not to think that it is ‘the worst of times’.

In the midst of such despair, we look out of the window and see civil societies in action: neighbours are helping neighbours; volunteers are delivering food to families; charities have ramped up their work despite dwindling donations; and hundreds of thousands of people are volunteering to reduce the burden on essential public services, notably, the National Health Service (NHS) – the only legacy of the post-war welfare state that has not yet been fully privatised and neoliberalised. To further blur the boundaries of the so-called three sectors, businesses are providing free services to communities: laundries are washing key workers’ uniforms; restaurants are delivering hot meals to hospital staff; hotels are opening their doors to homeless people; and supermarkets are donating to food banks. Similarly, public sector key workers – notably, nurses, doctors and carers – are working around the clock to save lives, and the government is promising to ‘do what it takes’³ to protect businesses and families. All this makes it easy to think that it is ‘the best of times’.

Thus, there is no escape from the entanglement of hope and despair. And nor should there be because lying in their intersection is a political force that enables us to imagine how we might be otherwise, and engenders the condition of the possibility for alternatives to neoliberal social orders. The COVID-19 pandemic will abate sooner or later but its wider socio-economic impacts will last for many years to come. There will be a ‘new normal’ but what it will look like depends largely on the mobilisation of civil society, understood not simply as the provider of voluntary services, but crucially as a contested ‘public sphere’ infused with power and politics in which tensions and contradictions are played out, with uncertain outcomes. It is in this sense that civil society can be seen as the embodiment of hope in the midst of multiple and related crises, and the mobiliser of what Block (1986 [1954–59]: 43) famously called an ‘ontology of the Not Yet’, enabling citizens to step out of the undesirable present, rather than staying hopeful in it.

Notes

1The value of goods and services produced over a specific period of time.

2The Transparency of Lobbying, Non-party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Act 2014 (the Lobbying Act 2014).

3The phrase first used by the UK Chancellor of Exchequer when he presented the government budget in February 2020.

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