Polluter pays

Understanding austerity through debt advice in the UK

Dados Bibliográficos

ID2247759
AutoresRyan Davey (0000-0003-4965-5924, Post‐doctoral research fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science, researching personal debt and class inequality in the UK., autor correspondente)
Ano2017
Volume33
Fascículo5
Páginas8-11
Data de publicação2017-10-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoAnthropology Today (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0268-540X • E-ISSN: 1467-8322
EditoraWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/1467-8322.12377
OpenAlexW2762565252
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas11
Referências citadas10

Taking the case of funding models for free debt advice in the UK, this article argues that the anthropology of austerity has much to gain by asking what survives, or even thrives, under conditions of austerity. Beginning in the 1990s, flows of money from the retail financial industry to free debt advice organizations proliferated, generally upon an identified mutuality of interests between the two. This culminated in the establishment by the UK government of a bank levy in 2012, said to operate on the principle of 'polluter pays', replacing general taxation as the main source of funding for public debt advice. Yet as it stands, the bank levy fails as a potential alternative to austerity because it taxes the institutions that issue debt to the poor at high rates of interest in order to provide the poor with advice that increasingly cannot solve their problems

Austerity · Debt · Economics · Political science · Homelessness and Social Issues · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism · Law · Political and Economic history of UK and US · Finance