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The General Election on 6 May 2010 put an end to 13 years of Labour government and brought David Cameron’s coalition of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats to power. The British deficit had been represented as the crucial problem of the country in the Conservatives’ election campaign (cf. Clarke et al. 3), and consequently the Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne introduced an ‘emergency budget’ on 22 June 2010, which comprised a number of measures to reduce the debt purportedly incurred by the previous government and win back the confidence of the global markets (cf. Osborne). The approach of reducing welfare spending and public expenditure in general, freezing public sector pay for two years and raising VAT, quickly came to be subsumed under the label ‘austerity’ – a much disputed concept that has been defined as “a form of voluntary deflation in which the economy adjusts through the reduction of wages, prices, and public spending to restore competitiveness” (Blyth 2). Researchers have not only been critical of whether such measures make sense for achieving economic recovery (cf.e.g. Blyth 4f.; Clarke et al. 36–40), but austerity is frequently understood still more negatively as a discursive “excuse to engineer a fundamental restructuring of the public sector” (Atkinson/Roberts/Savage 10), challenging the basic understanding of welfare and the state’s relationship with its citizens (cf. Farnsworth/Irving 2, 36). In this way, the status of the concept in British politics of the early 2010s approaches that of a “myth” (ibid. 14), hiding its ideological implications under a surface of “‘simple’ economics” (ibid. 35). Such mythical naturalisation processes (according to Roland Barthes’ understanding of the term) were also supported by the “progressive mathematicisation” (Atkinson/Roberts/Savage 6, emphasis in original) of economics, which gave austerity a seemingly objective foundation in figures. What this veiled and what researchers were quick to point out, however, is the concept’s close link with existing social power structures. Kevin Farnworth and Zoë Irving have emphasised the “hegemonic qualities” of austerity, which are intensified by the ambiguities associated with it and succeeded in making it “the organising logic of public spending” in Britain from 2010 onwards (12–3). Similarly, Mark Blyth has stressed the close relationship with power by calling austerity an “ideology immune to facts and basic empirical refutation” (226, my emphasis). Indeed, it is easily possible to understand austerity as part of the much broader ideology of neoliberalism, which increasingly gained ground in the UK and beyond in the 2010s (cf. Atkinson/Roberts/Savage 4–5; Harvie 192).

The actual austerity policies as well as the power structures which this concept supported entailed an intensifying sense of alienation among those who felt (and often were) excluded in Britain (cf. Clement 121). Large-scale protests first flared up in November and December 2010 with the National Campaign against Fees and Cuts, as students unsuccessfully tried to oppose the increase in the maximum tuition fees implemented by the coalition government. However, as the rhetoric of the Conservative government built on the 1990s underclass debates (cf. Atkinson/Roberts/Savage 10), prominently establishing metaphors of breakdown as a way of referring to sections of society which were perceived as problematic (cf. McKenzie 9–11), even more violent opposition made itself felt in inner-city areas. The widespread anger caused by the web of austerity measures and by discursive exclusion erupted most notably in the riots of August 2011 (cf. Clement 118–20). Initially triggered by the shooting of Mark Duggan in Tottenham and the perceived reluctance of the police to provide information, rioting and looting spread to further parts of London and to other cities between 6 and 9 August 2011. Far beyond their factual consequences, these events deepened the general ‘unease’ highlighted in Michael Billington’s review of 13, “a sensation that we are sleepwalking into some kind of disaster”. In October 2011 the sense that something needed to be changed then crystallised in the Occupy movement. The ‘Occupy London’ protests were sparked off by ‘Occupy Wall Street’ in the US and led to the setting up of a camp next to St. Paul’s Cathedral on 15 October, as protesters were prevented from camping outside the London Stock Exchange. Further camps followed in different parts of London, with the last site being cleared in June 2012, while the camp at St. Paul’s Cathedral had already been closed down in February 2012. Again, the significance of these events as both an expression of and a contribution to a deep sense of unease went far beyond their actual scope and duration.

Apart from austerity and the policies related to it, the widespread dissatisfaction with established political institutions and procedures was also connected with a fundamental discursive shift that predated the 2010 coalition government by some 15 years. From his party leadership in 1994 and especially from the 1997 election campaign onwards, Tony Blair and his ‘New’ Labour Party had continuously moved political rhetoric away from the discussion of real issues and from any structured, argumentative approach. Instead, the focus was on a fairly limited set of isolated keywords which constantly recurred in speeches in ever-varying combinations and absorbed the listeners’ attention (cf. Fairclough 17–9, 40f., 58–60). This effect of veiling any potential political content by an impenetrable discursive web was supported by the destruction of syntactic complexity through ellipses and the overwhelming predominance of paratactic constructions (cf. ibid. 28). Moreover, the striking combination of terms which would traditionally have been associated with Labour (like ‘community’ or ‘together’) with others which had pronounced Conservative connotations (for instance ‘choice’, ‘strength’, and ‘Britain’/‘the nation’) most effectively contributed to evacuating any remaining meaning from these words.

This rhetoric became more and more widespread in Britain throughout the first decade of the 21^st century, influencing the discourse not only of the Labour Party but increasingly of the Conservatives as well. Thus, it does not come as a surprise that Cameron as the new Prime Minister used the same discourse as his predecessors, also suspending structure and logical cohesion in his speeches by prioritising very small syntactic units which are apparently randomly strung together. He also employed extremely simplified vocabulary and often reproduced typical Blairite keywords. This is for instance demonstrated by the added italics in the following excerpt from Cameron’s 2010 “Big Society Speech”, where he juggles especially with Blair’s well-established semantic fields of ‘newness’ and ‘community’:

You can call it liberalism. You can call it empowerment. You can call it freedom. You can call it responsibility. I call it the Big Society.

The Big Society is about a huge culture change… […]

It’s time for something different, something bold – something that doesn’t just pour money down the throat of wasteful, top-down government schemes.

The Big Society is that something different and bold.

It’s about saying if we want real change for the long-term, we need people to come together and work together – because we’re all in this together. (Cameron, my emphases)

If anything, the sense that real problems like deprivation and growing social unrest were not addressed by politicians but instead hidden by a smokescreen of rhetoric thus intensified at the beginning of the 21^st century, and the change of government did not seem to help at all, on the contrary. On the whole, it was thus a rather fraught situation to which Bartlett’s play responded in October 2011 – premiering literally just a few days after the beginning of Occupy London and staging events which evince striking similarities with actual reality (cf. Megson 53–4).