Welcome to the Austerity Audit page at Bylines Cymru.
It’s appropriate that we have launched this on Calan Gaeaf, All Saint’s Day, when we remember those we have lost. Since George Osborne and David Cameron launched their programme of austerity in 2010, it has killed hundreds of thousands of people in the UK, and created deprivation and desperation for many more. It is estimated that around 1 in every 200 people had been killed by austerity by 2019. And it hasn’t gone away since.
Bylines Cymru, encouraged by the fine writing on austerity we’ve published by Nick Shepley – a primary contributor to this index – has, like many, noted how people can’t keep up nowadays. New scandals and tragedies slip from memory as they’re instantly replaced by many more. And one terrible thing in isolation can seem less terrible when removed from the context of many other terrible things. So there’s value in putting everything we can in one place.
To make this audit of the impacts of austerity easier to maintain, more accessible, and more useful as a resource, we have converted it into a searchable database. Not only that, but you can also – after filtering if you wish – download the database as a .csv file or as a Word document. Each entry has an ‘impact date’, when a report or other source was published; a note of which UK nation was impacted, or all of them; and is categorised as to the sector impacted, such as equality or mortality. The latter may change and grow as more research is discovered or released.
We have started with 25 entries, but could have added many more, and will continue to do so weekly. If you spot a credible source of data and information about the appalling impacts of austerity that you think we’ve missed, please email Rachel Morris: [email protected]
