Austerity is in the air again – from ‘overdiagnosis’ to the benefits bill. Here is what's at stake | Zoe Williams

A mindblowing new show reveals the human cost when the political system turns against the people, putting stories and faces to the hundreds of thousands of citizens thought to have died due to austerity

The Museum of Austerity, which has just arrived in London having toured Manchester, Newcastle and Bristol, is such a simple idea: you put on a headset, and walk into an empty room. As you walk around, holograms appear; a man about to collapse, clinging to a wall with one hand; a woman leaning on a desk, such a plain image it could be any desk, but you know it’s a benefits office by her look of beseeching desperation; a man who has died in the street, his dog waiting for him to wake up. Approach any scene from the right angle, and the testimony of one of their relatives will start playing through the headset

In 2022, a study in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health estimated that there had been over 330,000 excess deaths caused by austerity, one way or another, between 2012 and 2019. It was public knowledge and yet it was somehow too large to wrap your mind around: did it mean the coalition and then Conservative governments knowingly let people die? Or was it more a case of, modern life was different, and governments no longer took responsibility for whether or not people died? That seemed like a narrative everyone was more comfortable with, that these were straitened times, and the state no longer made health and life its core business. But how is that different to letting people die? And how is it comfortable?

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