On 13 July 2016, Theresa May delivered her maiden speech as Prime Minister, outlining her commitment to a union ‘between all of our citizens, every one of us, whoever we are and wherever we’re from’. She declared that her government would continue to work in the ‘spirit’ of her predecessor to ‘make Britain a country that works not for a privilege few, but for every one of us’ (May, 2016a). Such a statement typifies an ongoing discord between the political rhetoric and policy reality of regressive welfare reform and fiscal recalibration undertaken in the United Kingdom (UK). Since 2010, successive measures contributing towards the individualisation and liberalisation of welfare have shaped social inequality in new and patterned ways. Against this backdrop, this book considers the lived realities of relative deprivation and affluence that presently characterise embedded welfare austerity in the UK.

To do so, the book draws on a study of poverty and prosperity to explore the increasingly variegated status and praxis of social citizenship unfolding in the UK today. Through the voices of citizens experiencing poverty and those who are rich, the book critically examines the prevailing functions of welfare and what they reveal about the changing nature of social citizenship as a top-down status and as a bottom-up practice. The experiences, attitudes and practices of citizens are particularly important if we are to fully understand the existing citizenship configuration and its relation to welfare politics and inequality. As such, the book considers how those marginalised and validated by the prevailing welfare settlement negotiate and engage with the institutions and ideals that have come to structure their relative (dis) advantage. In particular, attention is paid to their respective political subjectivities and engagements to explore and explain the relations between welfare, inequality and citizenship.

Beyond this, by exploring the experiences, attitudes and engagements of ‘the rich’ alongside ‘the poor’, the book problematises dominant policy thinking about the ‘finite’ nature of public resources and their distribution. This is especially important in light of the ‘austerity consensus’ and ‘anti-welfare commonsense’ that has emerged in recent years (Farnsworth and Irving, 2012; Jensen and Tyler, 2015).