Advice & Support
These groups can advise on financial and legal problems relating to austerity and cuts.
Citizens Advice Bureau
“We help people resolve their legal, money and other problems by providing free, independent and confidential advice.” Website lists local branches.
Law Centres Network
Search for your nearest law centre.
Benefits and Work
Subscription service (£19.95/year) for detailed and up-to-date guides on how to make effective claims and appeals.
Counselling & Crisis
Samaritans
08457 90 90 90 (UK only)
Email jo@samaritans.org
Samaritans youth project: 020 8692 5228
Confidential helpline open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. “Talk to us any time you like, in your own way, and off the record – about whatever’s getting to you… Please don’t suffer alone.” Website lists local branches.
Turn to Me
Online mental health support community, where you can remain anonymous. Valuable resource in times of real crisis and whilst feeling suicidal thoughts.
Campaigns
The People’s Assembly
A national forum for anti-austerity views to bring together campaigns against cuts and privatisation with trade unionists in a movement for social justice
Disabled People Against the Cuts
Direct action for justice and human rights for all disabled people
In Actual Fact [website now defunct]
Anti-propaganda site of actual facts about cuts and claimants
Contact your MP
Identify your MP and write to them free.
They Work for You
Find out what your MP, MSP or MLA is doing in your name, read debates, written answers, see what’s coming up in Parliament, and sign up for email alerts.
Register to Vote
Register online or by post to be able to vote. Takes about five minutes.
Reading
Fiscal Fallacies: 8 Myths about the ‘Age of Austerity’
Debunks 8 of the big claims made for austerity.
Stuckler, D & Basu, S (2013)
The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills, Penguin Books
Looking at the human costs of austerity policy.
Clark, T & Heath, A (2015)
Hard Times: Inequality, Recessions, Aftermath, Yale University Press
Analysis of the social consequences of the financial crisis in an already-unequal society.
McRuer, Robert (2018)
Crip Times: Disability, Globalization, and Resistance, NYU Press, ISBN: 9781479874156
How disability activists, artists and social movements generate change and resist the dominant forms of globalization in an age of austerity, or “crip times.”
O’Hara, M (2014)
Austerity Bites: A Journey to the Sharp End of Cuts in the UK
A 12-month journey around the UK chronicles the impact of austerity at the sharp end.
Orton, M (2015)
Something’s Not Right: Insecurity and an Anxious Nation
Crow, L (2015)
Summer of 2012: Paralympic legacy and the welfare benefit scandal, Review of Disability Studies
Crow, L (2020)
Figures: An artist-activist response to austerity, The Routledge Handbook of Disability Activism