Mediating the Cost-of-Living Crisis: The Meaning of a ‘Keyphrase’ in UK Contemporary Cultural Discourse

Abstract

In this article, we draw on Raymond Williams’ notion of ‘keywords’ and Neil Davidson’s conceptualisation of ‘crisis neoliberalism’ to understand how the ‘cost-of-living’ crisis has become a ‘keyphrase’ which sustains, legitimates, reproduces and provides space for a potential challenge to the current social settlement. We draw on illustrative examples from across the UK media – including the ideological construction and naming of crises, Martin Lewis as the leading cost-of-living crisis (COLC) celebrity, discourses around ‘fiscal responsibility’ and the promotion of a socialisation of struggle – to show how mediations of the COLC relate to the current conjuncture, and its priorities. Finally, we argue that because the COLC draws in those newly struggling who are used to having a public voice, the COLC opens up a potentiality in respect of challenge to the hegemonic project of neoliberalism, rather than producing a rerun of the 2007–2008 post-crash landscape in which a coherent financialised media class consolidated to close down all possible alternatives.

Keywords

news/media culture crisis neoliberalism hegemony cost-of-living crisis

Introduction

Almost as soon as COVID-19 evacuated its place as the focal point for all deliberations in the British public sphere in early 2022, a new phrase emerged as the shared lens through which current conditions and their attendant issues and challenges might be publicly understood. That is the cost-of-living crisis (COLC hereon) – a reference point for speakers at all levels and spheres of society, from schoolchildren to charities, celebrities and political actors. BBC and ITV Online dedicated whole sections to it alongside other priority news topics such as the War in Ukraine, Climate and the Israel-Gaza conflict. After criticisms from opposition parties for a failure to respond adequately to the challenges posed, in 2023, the Conservative government named a new benefit after it – the ‘cost of living payments’ directed to those on means-tested welfare programmes. In line with prominent think tanks of the left and right such as the Resolution Foundation and Adam Smith Institute, respectively, the government, however, identified reducing inflation as the key policy objective with respect to tackling the issue (Bell et al., 2022; Macdonald et al., 2022). The broader geopolitical context locates the crisis in the ‘perfect storm’ of Brexit, the post-COVID-19 landscape and the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Meanwhile financial journalist Martin Lewis, ‘the money-saving-expert’, was elevated from daytime television to primetime news broadcasts as the leading voice of the crisis offering expertise on how individuals and households might mitigate against its worst impacts with his online ‘guide to survive’ (MSE Team, 2022). Similarly, NGOs, charities and the academic community generate a significant body of COLC research showing how the crisis is disproportionately impacting those in lower income groups, and the intersections with race and gender inequalities. Here the spiralling costs of basic necessities combined with stringent welfare measures significantly increase the risk of homelessness and entrenched poverty (Edmiston et al., 2022). The term has become ubiquitous, a priority of the public, a focus of research and growing body of advice and knowledge as well as a key policy objective of all the main parties in the United Kingdom. However, a consensus on its nature, its causes and potential solutions is not as easily identifiable.

These competing explanations of the COLC and the political concerns pertaining to it have until this point been framed in largely economic terms. While the economic roots of the crisis are empirically founded, we argue the hardships imposed by the COLC on the newly and already struggling speak to continuing material injustices as well as diverse forms of representational inequality and division. The risk of reducing the COLC to a purely economic phenomenon is of ignoring the cultural dimensions of how it is understood – the ‘common senses’ – that come to explain and privilege certain readings of it, and how these might come to be resisted. In so doing, a critical interrogation of the ideological work the term does, in whose interests the causes and solutions put forward to explain and remedy the COLC operate, and how that speaks to the broader cultural politics of our conjuncture can be elided. In short, moving beyond these reductive, economistic understandings can enable a more critical, historicised understanding of the COLC as an ‘important terrain of struggle and contestation’ (Hall, 1992 in Grossberg et al., 1992: 285).

In this article we intend to sketch out an answer to what appears to be a relatively simple albeit broad question – what does the cost-of-living crisis mean in the United Kingdom? Through this question, we interrogate a complex set of interrelated yet distinctive questions. These include notions of crisis, the mediation of causes, solutions and their relation to lived experience, the practices to explain and navigate the contemporary moment, and political possibilities. Borrowing from Raymond Williams’ (1976) notion of ‘keyword’, we examine how the term COLC functions as ‘keyphrase’ that brings together distinct, interlocking global and local crises in the United Kingdom. This can be seen as a symbolic articulation of one of the ‘lines of descent’ (Virdee, 2023) into another crisis within the perma-crisis of the neoliberal settlement of the United Kingdom since 2007. As part of this, we will consider the contextualisation of COLC within the conjuncture of ‘crisis neoliberalism’ (Davidson, 2017), exploring how this ‘crisis’ shares continuities with other crises the United Kingdom has experienced since the financial crash, while also imposing distinct constraints upon on the ruling class to maintain consent of the governed. Ultimately, we show how COLC as a keyphrase works to sustain, legitimate, reproduce and provide space to potentially challenge this settlement, as something that might ultimately bring the ruptural unity of organic crisis required for systemic change (Gramsci, 1971).

To do this, we will focus on the role of institutional media and figures within it in relation to the COLC. We will use illustrative examples from the UK media to show how they name and constitute what counts as ‘crisis’ through: individualising the causes, proposed solutions and ways to navigate the crisis, and a socialisation of struggle that obscures the long-standing and multi-dimensional impacts of inequality that have been further exacerbated by the COLC. In this, we look to explore how mediations of the COLC relate to current conjunctural politics, the particularities of media institutions, and the potential ‘end’ of neoliberal hegemony (Gilbert and Williams, 2022).

Keywords/Keyphrase¹

Raymond Williams (1976) writes that Keywords is

The record of an inquiry into a vocabulary: A shared body of words and meanings in our most general discussions, in English, of the practices and institutions we group as culture and society. (p. 15)

The book traces the history of these words,² documenting the transformation of meaning over time. Williams demonstrates that language is innovated upon, can mean different things when used by different people in different contexts where ideas and meanings can also be produced in and through the experiences of ordinary people (Moran, 2021) and by those in ‘dominant’ social positions. He shows how ideas and meanings become increasingly prominent, obsolete, replaceable, reinterpreted or extended in their application to bring together converging if disparate phenomenon in a transference of understanding or masking of power structures (Brlek and Mance, 2024).

This approach foregrounds the materiality of language, its changing meanings and contestations of them within different historical contexts, who are using language and how those uses and meanings emerge out of the material conditions of a given society (see Williams, 1981a). It is a way to understand ideas as being ‘made manifest in everyday practice’ (McGuigan and Moran, 2014: 177). This approach echoes others which aim to centre questions of language and culture from a Marxist perspective. This includes, for example, Bob Jessop’s (2010: 337) work on cultural political economy, especially in his discussion that culture does ‘not only interpret actual events and processes’ but also ‘contribute to their explanation’ within concrete historical conditions which are always being made sense of.

However, Keywords goes further than this in claiming that culture is constitutive of and responsive to those conditions in material ways. So it does not simply explain and interpret the ‘extra-semiotic’, which in Jessop’s (2010) CPE approach is the ‘objective’ made meaningful. While Jessop (2010: 344) does acknowledge that the performativity of culture ‘may’ shape given social relations, Williams (1973) is unequivocal on this point – arguing culture is ‘material’. As such, Keywords demands we start from a fine-grained analysis of the ‘word’ or ‘phrase’ as it is manifest in our social world, rather than starting with a ‘field’ (in Jessop’s 2010 case, the ‘economic’) more broadly. From this departure point, we can critically analyse the work of culture through language in relation to hegemony and its contestation.

Taking a Keywords-inspired approach can enable a critical understanding of terms as they are used in everyday life and how these uses are the outcome of continuity, change and contestation between unequally positioned social groups within the ‘actual means and conditions of their production’ (Williams, 1981b: 64–65). Currently, the ‘actual’ means and conditions in which the COLC is constituted and circulated within institutional media, as we will argue, are such that meaning is more openly and visibly contested in a quicker manner. The context is a neoliberal and financialised institutional media where a click-bait fast-paced news cycle runs in parallel to social, cultural and technological changes such as the growth of social media and instant mobile access (Beer and Gane, 2008). As such, discussing the mediation of the COLC ‘over time’ takes on a condensed temporality as opposed to the broader historical etymological project Williams (1976) adopted in Keywords.

Despite this ‘sped-up’ temporality, however, taking a Keywords-inspired approach allows us to explore what the COLC specifically does as an increasingly familiar phrase whose meaning is largely taken as self-evident, and to explore how ‘such familiarity masks what is in fact a deep lexical and semantic complexity’ (Moran, 2021: 1025). In our application of Keywords as method, we broadly follow Moran (2021) in centring the following questions:

What else was going on where this change of meaning started to manifest and then? Why did a keyword emerge when it did, and what this has to do with the changing shape of capitalist societies in which it came to prominence? And what new practices and experiences are being enabled and shaped by this emergent and novel use of language? (pp. 1026–1027)

Identifying the post-COVID landscape of early 2022 as a point of consolidation, we chart the history and complexity of meanings and changes of the COLC as a keyphrase across different sites in the UK representational landscape (UK press, political rhetoric, NGO documentation, academic work, etc). An important aspect of this approach is to locate the analysis in its own socio-historic and geographical context and to set firm boundaries around the keyword in question. We are exploring here the COLC as a product of the British political culture with its own set of priorities, challenges, elite speakers and crucially its own vocabulary in a distinct time and place. As we will show, this does not represent simple continuity with the cultural politics of austerity, offering a more nuanced investigation of the relation between the economic and the cultural. This moves us beyond questions of the purely ideological functions of the COLC to examine the way in which the politics and materiality of the current conjuncture created the impetus for it to emerge and consolidate, the realities it speaks to and which groups are positioned to articulate them.

Turning Points, Conjunctures and ‘Crisis’

‘Crisis’ does not appear as a ‘keyword’. The closest it gets to being included is in the entry for ‘criticism’ – where the discipline of medicines’ use of ‘critical’ has been extended to the word ‘crisis’ to describe ‘any difficulty as well as [. . .] any turning point’ (Williams, 1976: 85). The notion of turning point expressed through resolution implies a temporally bound moment of exception (Beer, 2024). To understand the idea of crisis as a turning point or ‘decisive moment’ further, we turn to the notion of ‘conjunctures’. For Hall and Massey (2010), a conjuncture is

A period during which the different social, political, economic and ideological contradictions that are at work in society come together to give it a specific and distinctive shape. (p. 57)

Building further on this Peck et al. (2014) write that a conjuncture can be thought of as a:

[. . .] Social settlement [. . .] to designate a period in which the different instances are articulated together in a relatively stable formation. (p. 2036)

Finally, Clarke (2018: 203 in Werner et al., 2018) calls our attention to the spatiotemporal nature of conjunctures writing that they can be thought of as the:

‘condensation of multiple spatial dynamics and relations’ where ‘different temporalities [. . .] come together and are condensed in the conjuncture’.

These three quotes guide our understanding of conjuncture as where the multiple social, cultural, political and economic trends – some complimentary, some contradictory and some outright oppositional – come together. This often follows a ‘war of positions’ which gives any society its shape and feel at a given point in time and place (Grossberg, 2019). However, conjunctures cannot be reduced to a form of simple chronological ‘periodisation’ or seen as a complete break with what comes before or after (Clarke, 2010), given the ’old’ is made present, and potential ‘futures’ are or are not articulated within the present (Tutton, 2023). Nor are the local (whether regional or national) articulations of the trends that make up a conjuncture disconnected from ‘global’ trends.

A conjuncture can be long or short – and crisis is what drives the shift from one conjuncture to another (Hall and Massey, 2010). As seen above, ‘crisis’ is taken by Williams to refer to a turning point which suggests a moment of decisive intervention (Hay, 1996; Williams, 1976). In the context of conjunctural change such as the changing of one regime of governance of a ‘social settlement’ to another (Davidson, 2017) the term takes on a more precise meaning, while the underlying logic remains similar.

Framed in Gramscian terms, it is important to make the distinction between an ‘organic crisis’ which is a crisis where transformations in the economic structure are unprepared for by the political class and authority is lost, and crises that can bring conjunctural change (Gramsci, 1971; Martin, 1997). Grossberg (2019) writes that an organic crisis is a

Crisis that links the many crises and dynamics of a society [. . .]. It destabilises the most taken-for-granted terms of social reality, especially of political possibility and struggle. It generates a struggle ‘over a new reality’, calling into question the identity and purpose of the society. (p. 41)

A conjunctural shift which involves a change in social settlement is not necessarily the outcome of revolutionary change borne out of an organic crisis. The transition from the post-war social-democratic model of governance to the neoliberal model, and the growth of authoritarian populism in the late 1970s and early 1980s ushered in by Thatcher in the United Kingdom as a response to the crisis of the post-war settlement, is illustrative of this (Hall, 1988; Hall and Massey, 2010). However, both require numerous trends that exist within a given set of conditions to be in crisis simultaneously, and they also need to be actively articulated as such to overwhelm the current settlement. A crisis is not a given but is something that is constituted actively by numerous political, social and media actors (Grossberg, 2019). In turn, this opens up a ‘space’ through which articulations of what is wrong and what can be done to rectify this comes into existence, often competing against one another to define ‘the new’.

But, if ‘crisis’ signifies a temporally bound ‘turning point’, and organic crisis speaks to the coming together of multiple crises in a moment of ruptural unity (Hall and Massey, 2010), then how do we account for what is sometimes referred to as the ‘perma-crisis’ of British Capitalism, and indeed Global Capitalism, in the recent period? An important point here is that while ‘crisis’ tendencies are inherent and foundational to capitalist economic and social relations (Streeck, 2016), articulations of ‘crisis’ have their own specific ‘qualities’ and these express the relations of capitalism in that given moment (Tooze, 2018, see Beer, 2024). Fundamentally, these ‘mutations’ of ‘crisis’ (Tooze, 2018: 14) are mediated, lived, experienced and ‘managed’ through specific social formations. How then might we frame this conjunctural moment?

Crisis Neoliberalism and Regimes of Exception

While there are differing views of whether we are now in a post-neoliberal moment given the political, economic and cultural shifts of recent years (see Davies and Gane, 2021; Laruffa, 2023) we find Neil Davidson’s (2017) notion of ‘Crisis Neoliberalism’ as a ‘regime of exception’ helps to make sense of our current conjunctural moment as a specific social settlement. This is because it takes seriously disruptions to the neoliberal settlement while enabling insights into continuity and change simultaneously within neoliberalism without overstating one over the other.

Davidson (2017) argues that unlike the previous stages of capitalist development which were triggered by economic crises³ the financial crisis of 2007–2008 did not signal the end of the neoliberal settlement. This is ‘exceptional’ because unlike previous capitalist crises, it did not bring about a transformation or reconstruction of either economic or social relations in the West. This is in part a consequence of a political framing from both centre-right and centre-left of the financial crisis, not as a crisis of the neoliberal settlement but of states not living within their means (Davidson, 2017).

This lack of systemic critique is embedded in a ‘conjunctural’ politics that focusses on the ‘meaningless exchanges’ of representatives and representative institutions (Davidson, 2017: 624). This has been exacerbated by the ‘over-success’ of the financial sector and the abandonment of (Davidson, 2017: 626):

Any attempt to arrive at an over-arching understanding of what the conditions for growth might be, other than the supposed need for lowering taxation and regulation and raising labour flexibility.

In place of critique is a pre-emptive scapegoating of those positioned as outside of the ‘ordinary’ such as benefit claimants, those from ethnic minorities, refugees, migrants and more recently trans people as a means to divert from the long-term solutions which the political classes lack (Davidson, 2017: 625–631). This is coupled with an economic short-termism that represents the interests of financial capital rooted in the re-regulation of that sector of the economy and the shift away from producing value through manufacturing towards financialised value extraction (Davidson, 2017, see Hall, 2011). Taken together, this limits the potential for a genuine critique of social, economic and cultural formations (Davidson, 2017: 624).

Despite shifts away from some elements of the neoliberal status quo, and indeed the question of whether as a system it has ever been as coherent in practice as in ideology (Philo et al., 2015), its sustained success can be found in how the core tenets and strategies of neoliberalism have become ‘common sense’. These include the inalienable right to property, the assault upon and decline of organised class-based politics since the 1980s (Evans, 2023; Paton, 2024), the embedding of market logics into everyday social relationships (O’Neill, 2018), individualisation of success and failure (Littler, 2018), the modelling of public services on profit-making business (Gilbert and Williams, 2022), and the continuing entrenchment of a ‘punitive’ approach to welfare (Furlong et al., 2017). We see this as the product of the processes by which active and passive consent to power is maintained (Gilbert and Williams, 2022) and where the cultural politics of our current social settlement come to be lived, embodied and felt in the everyday.

Given the potentially emergent post-neoliberal forms within crisis neoliberalism and the intensification of the impacts of crises – and importantly their extension to newly struggling groups as we will go on to discuss – there is a need to contextualise the political reaction to this moment. Gerbaudo (2022 [2021]) characterises the current period as one where nation-states and their publics have turned ‘inwards’. This involves a combination of nationalist-populism, increased statism and desires for control and security which have intensified since the pandemic. Satnam Virdee’s (2023) analysis of the United Kingdom’s current crisis charts a series of political measures since the 1970s that have produced inequalities which are geographical, racialised, gendered and generational in nature which have atomised the working class materially and ideologically. He specifically points to the dismantling of traditional workplaces and organisations which might bring the multi-ethnic and multi-cultural working class together as one of the modes through which this has happened (Virdee, 2023).

The social, political and economic damage wrought as a consequence of the politics of crisis neoliberalism has left ‘Britain in fragments’ whereby far-right, nationalist sentiment has taken hold (Virdee and McGeever, 2022). It is in this context ‘insurgents’ such as Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage in the United Kingdom, and Donald Trump in the United States offer their own solutions to the ‘crisis’. Central to this is the promise of a return to some sort of equilibrium, with outsider groups identified as the problem (Grossberg, 2019). To gain traction, however, these insurgents on the right (as well as populists on the left) need to have their ideas heard, made sense of, represented and circulated. As such, we now turn to the role of media in shaping these current formations.

Institutional Media and Representational Repertoires Within the Current Conjuncture

As noted, while the public legitimacy of neoliberalism is diminishing, its ‘common senses’ continue to be embedded in our dominant cultural and social institutions (Gilbert and Williams, 2022). Of these, media institutions are crucial given they ‘occupy centre stage as the key nexus of engineering worldviews and political consent’ (Gilbert and Williams, 2022: 174). Consequently, the ‘agenda setting’ of professional journalists, which focuses attention and elevates issues while omitting and de-prioritising others, continues to carry considerable influence in what becomes salient in the minds of the public while constructing a shared vocabulary for expressing them (Entman, 1993; Gitlin, 1980). In the neoliberal era, this shared vocabulary has been one structured by market logics in which financialised metaphors shape understandings of what is going on in all areas of public life, and financialised solutions are proposed to respond (Berry, 2012; Happer, 2017). Most significantly, the privileged position of professional journalists regarding political access maintains the mainstream media’s influence in outcomes and decision-making.

This continuity in the ideological function of the institutional media – in sustaining and legitimising the status quo – is further compounded by its class-composition. The British media industries are dominated by white, middle-class people (Brook et al., 2020) who have a continued investment in a system which largely benefits them. With this middle-class gaze, we see structural explanations of systemic problems such as poverty giving way to representations of those in poverty from a position of particular stigma and distance (Jensen, 2014).

But while there is continuity with respect to the role and function of the institutional media, the conjunctural particularities of it must be contextualised within socio-technological transformation. Gilbert and Williams (2022) describe ‘platform power’⁴ as the ability to build and embed infrastructure to exert influence to secure goals and interests. Contemporary journalism is firmly locked into this digital infrastructure and consequently mirrors the character and goals of the attention economy platforms. As such, we have a high-speed news cycle in which clicks, sensation and personality-led news aim to capture engagement and ensure profitability (Mast and Temmerman, 2021).

We should not, however, see these changes as simply imposed by this new infrastructure, given that the norms of contemporary journalistic practice – of simplification, of shallowness and of transience (Castaldo et al., 2022; Esser, 1999; Mast and Temmerman, 2021) – have their roots in the pre-digital ‘tabloidization’ of the industry (Barnett, 1998; Esser, 1999). These processes paralleled, and to some degree reflected, the meaningless ‘exchanges’ of a PR-driven neoliberal politics which Davidson identified, but ultimately were about maintaining profit in a multi-media age. The move to digital news, which is largely accessed through social media and ‘saturated with markers of “personalization” and “proximity”’, further compounds the tendency to avoid systemic critique and demand fast, local solutions (Mast and Temmerman, 2021: 695). Consequently, words, images and the meanings attached to them circulate and are endorsed or contested in a sped-up manner.

Taken together, these processes of continuity and change, constitute and circulate the conjunctural politics of crisis neoliberalism, rendering a vision of ‘something else’ much harder to articulate (Hall, 2011). The value of applying Williams’ Keywords approach in the context of this transformed communications landscape is in allowing us an insight into the way in which the changing usage of language is bound up with cultural practices rooted in ‘the material, practical world of their use’ (Moran, 2021: 1029). Media institutions are not simply reflective of the present conjuncture, and they should be seen as a key element of it, dynamically and productively interacting with other processes. As we will now discuss, the institutional media in their present conjunctural form remain central to how the meanings that constitute a given ‘crisis’ come to be represented and circulated and should be seen as a key site through which any given crisis can become a ‘keyphrase’ that is used to make sense of the current moment.

Naming ‘Crisis’ as an Ideological Act

The conceptualisation of ‘crisis’ as a significant focal point for social and political change (Hall and Massey, 2010) implies certain limitations on its usage both in terms of frequency and nature. However, we are living in a conjunctural moment defined by a sense of ‘perma-crisis’ (Moe et al., 2024). This is facilitated by the extended period of instability resulting from a series of tumultuous global events – climate shocks, COVID-19, the war in Ukraine – which have very real significance both domestically and globally (Sherwood, 2022). However. the assignment of the term to any individual crisis within this context does not flow automatically.

How particular phenomenon come to merit the political, mediated and everyday status of crisis takes different forms. The processes which triggered the financial crisis – often referred to in mainstream media as ‘the financial crash’ – being largely ignored are well documented. This was a consequence of a narrowly drawn and inward-looking journalistic class, denouncements of ‘alarmism’ directed to those raising the problems with the predatory practices of the mortgage industry and the tendency to keep the workings of the economy ‘unknowable’ to the public (Fahy et al., 2010; Happer, 2017; Schechter, 2009). Once it became part of lived experience – when the Bank of England stepped in as ‘lender of last resort’ to save the high street banks, people use every day – a financialised media class quickly shut down solutions which tackled the structural issues made visible by the crisis. This gave way to a programme of austerity paralleled with a rhetorical sense of individualised fiscal responsibility (Berry, 2012). Conversely, climate change in spite of increasingly catastrophic impacts expressed through heatwaves, flooding and the loss of biodiversity and the efforts of NGOs, activist groups and campaigning journalists as well as shifts in public opinion, has struggled to hold the status of crisis within the mainstream media (Parks, 2020). Solutions are often posed as being in conflict with economic prosperity rather than integral to it (Philo and Happer, 2013).

Naming a crisis is therefore a highly ideological act. It is the product of struggles over representation and the shaping of public thought. Through the mechanisms of public discourse in which mainstream media play a pivotal role, issues, and the problems imagined to be integral to them, are identified as urgent, important and necessary. In an integrated circuit of media, public and decision-making, this conferring of ‘crisis’ status has significant implications for the expectation of political response and the potential policy solutions drawn upon to address them (Laffan, 2014).

In addition to questions of ideology and the shared interests of our media, political and ruling elites, we return to questions of the forms that institutions give our communications, where the norms of contemporary journalistic practice orient attention towards stories which impact immediately (Castaldo et al., 2022; Esser, 1999; Mast and Temmerman, 2021). On climate change and the continuing journalistic failure to prioritise the issue as ‘crisis’, a key aspect is its lack of fit with the norms of simplification and transience. McKibben (2022: unpaginated) articulates the problem of its temporality in the present media environment stating: ‘in geological terms, we are speeding toward the abyss [. . .]. But in journalistic terms, it happens just a little too slowly to quite register’.

Consequently, the processes through which a given crisis becomes a keyphrase is an active one which implicates and is implicated within institutional media during crisis neoliberalism. This works to embed neoliberalism’s cultural politics despite its declining legitimacy, but it also provides space to challenge it within a media context defined by speed, competition and working within the logics of a platform-driven attention economy (see Gilbert and Williams, 2022). At this point, we turn to our empirical analysis of British institutional media discourses to make sense of the COLC as a keyphrase.

Crisis Without a Cause

Where does the COLC sit in this context of ‘permacrisis’? What can be said about its naming and how does this relate to the conditions of its production? The context is the British post-pandemic landscape with the invasion of Ukraine finally shifting COVID-19 off the front pages in early 2022. Initially identifying the growing cost of energy as the main driver – an existing issue exacerbated by the war in Europe – the Conservative government introduced an Energy Bill discount in response to the ongoing ‘fuel crisis’ (HM Treasury, 2022). However, from late 2022, usage of the term COLC grew exponentially to become the dominant frame through which the current set of conditions were understood; a keyphrase which became ‘part of the vocabulary we share with others [. . .] when we wish to discuss many of the central processes of our common life’ (Williams, 1976: 11). This frame emerged from a range of voices in civil society including NGOs, charities and campaigning groups, political voices as well as stark experiential evidence – a common if highly differentiated experience of normalised ways of work and life becoming more burdensome to pay for. In 2023, after a slow and reluctant start, the Conservative government introduced a series of ‘cost of living payments’ embracing the by-then ubiquitous term.

But naming a crisis does not imply a consensus regarding an understanding of causes, effects and solutions. Ordinarily, crises are usually described by reference to their cause(s), albeit that cause and effect may be embodied in the same term. Unlike the financial crisis, migrant crisis or fuel crisis, the COLC implies no specific cause. This is in part due to its undeniable complexity. The COLC must be located in current global events with local impacts – COVID-19, the war in Ukraine, climate shocks and the resultant disrupted global food and energy supplies – as well as domestically imposed difficulties such as the ongoing economic impacts of Brexit and Liz Truss’s catastrophic mini-budget in 2022. As the Independent Food Aid Network notes, any area of struggle is part of a wider phenomenon which should be seen as:

the result of a complex set of structural issues relating but not restricted to problems of insecure, inadequate and expensive housing, insecure and low paid employment, insufficient social welfare provision, poor health, and environmentally unsustainable and socially unjust food production and distribution system. (The Public Purse, 2019)

It is a consequence of not one area of localised political decision-making but of the intersection of key sectors of public provision and need including food, housing, energy and employment which are located within global trends and flows (Clarke, 2018 in Werner et al., 2018). The mediated frames the COLC often invokes in media and public discourse ordinarily focus attention on responses where complex intersecting causes are sacrificed for singular and simplified ‘hooks’ for digital audiences and the political class. However, we also need to examine what ideological work such openness might allow.

Here it is useful to supplement our analysis with consideration of the COLC as an empty or ‘floating’ signifier; what Farkas and Schou (2018) describe as ‘a signifier lodged in-between different hegemonic projects’ (p. 298). This is a discursive space where the transformations in language that Williams highlighted might be particularly potent (Brlek and Mance, 2024). It’s worth re-emphasising the diversity of groups – from poverty campaigners to schoolteachers to the current government – who utilise this keyphrase to very different ends with very different meanings. As a floating signifier that has no clear cause identified, the COLC can be easily attached to different policy programmes or visions of change, underpinned by a range of competing ‘realities’ through which the problem is understood. Consequently, the COLC as a keyphrase becomes the battleground within which the range of actors aiming to penetrate public debate wage a ‘war of positions’ to construct a ‘problem space’ (Grossberg, 2019).

As record numbers use food banks and more than a million children live in households receiving parcels from the main provider in the United Kingdom, the Trussell Trust, NGOs and campaigning groups working in this space see this as crisis as a call to act on endemic poverty, which has as the most dramatic result the situation where thousands of people cannot afford to eat (Butler, 2023; Earwaker, 2022). Homeless charity, Crisis, highlight the role of precarious, high cost and poor-quality housing as a key trigger of the COLC (Allard, 2022). Progressive think tanks identify energy and food insecurity, with Chatham House highlighting the role of global processes and supplies (Benton et al., 2022). Meanwhile, right-wing think tanks such as the Adam Smith Institute and the Institute for Economic Affairs see excessive state spending, taxation and regulation as the problem with emphasis on efforts devoted to the energy transition (Lesh and Nie, 2022; Macdonald et al., 2022). With highly differentiated access to mainstream and other forms of media in the neoliberal era, the latter of these arguments tends to penetrate the public imagination with greater force (Misztal, 2012; Philo et al., 2015).

In the midst of these calls to action, and a budget largely framed as answering the call of the COLC, in March 2023 then new Chancellor Jeremy Hunt outlined his ‘budget for growth’. This was spearheaded by massive tax cuts for business to drive investment with the number one priority of bringing down inflation (HM Treasury, 2023). Making a fairly direct statement of COLC cause and effect, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said: ‘halving inflation is my top priority because inflation eats into the pounds in your pockets and makes everyone poorer’ (Hughes, 2023). In setting a political priority, the government provides a measure by which it can be assessed in media and public opinion. While it is the Bank of England which sets monetary policy which controls inflation and its relation to wages and prices highly complex, inflation as a target lends itself to a simple representation: a number which goes up and down.

The COLC – or what the Telegraph sometimes refers to as the ‘inflation crisis’ (Woolfson, 2023) – is reduced, simplified and most crucially responded to with priority status by decision-makers. As soon as inflation predictions become more favourable and outlets such as the Daily Mail and the Telegraph ask, ‘is the cost-of-living crisis coming to an end?’ (Heffer, 2023) attention around the COLC can rhetorically move on. This is similar to discussions of quantitative measures of the ‘standard of living’ and qualitative (and often moral) measurements of the ‘quality of living’ (Thompson, 1980 [1963]). Focussing on quantitative measurements allows for a broader discussion of the COLC to be elided as these favourable projections are drawn on by politicians and their ideological supporters in the institutional media to speak in terms of ‘improvement’. This is the case even if lived experiences do not align to this.

While defining the problem is ideological, the transient, accelerated institutional media which produces and circulates the ‘conjunctural’ promotes a fast, shallow politics and a highly reactive political class. In this way, we can see how COLC functions as a keyphrase that operates as a cypher which facilitates a reductive transference of meaning onto other causes. This obscures the multiple and converging ‘crises’ or problems contained in this shared vocabulary and allows for the promotion of a narrow range of policy solutions. In doing so, it becomes a ‘crisis’ with no cause which works to simultaneously make visible a set of workable solutions while obscuring how the COLC is embedded within broader forms of capitalist crisis more generally. As such, the COLC is made present both rhetorically in the media alongside its impacts in everyday life as something requiring actions, while its causes are made distant, unexplainable and unpredictable (Beer, 2024).

Individualising the Causes, Solutions and Responsibility: Beating the COLC

A leading voice to emerge in the coverage of the COLC has been MoneySavingExpert Martin Lewis. Lewis is one of the United Kingdom’s most recognisable and valued brands – his website is visited by more than 16 million people every week. His trajectory from private school to the City of London and then into the media profession is pretty standard for financial journalists and speaks to the highly exclusive classed nature of the industry (Brook et al., 2020). He is also the product of an era which has seen the transformation of financial journalism from one which played a traditional watchdog role to corporate insider (Berry, 2012) and from niche to mainstream in the context of an increasingly financialised media sector in both ideology and practice (Happer, 2017; Mills, 2016). This is underpinned by the penetration of markets into all areas of public and private life (Santos, 2017), through which the public has increasingly become a ‘nation of shareholders’ (Mills, 2016) with ‘personal responsibility’ for household and public debt (Clark et al., 2004; Santos, 2017).

This ideological construction of individuals and households as financialised subjects has been accompanied by a well-documented discursive shift which has seen social class distinctions ‘codified, displaced and individualised’ where the most disadvantaged are seen to be lacking in ‘personal skills and moral responsibility’ (Gillies, 2005). This shift peaked in the period following the introduction of austerity in 2010. It culminated in the production of ‘poverty porn’ where the government’s rhetoric of ‘shirkers versus strivers’ was embodied (Jensen, 2014). If the neoliberal period saw a progressive dismantling of the welfare state, here, the welfare state was the subject of its own ‘crisis’ whereby welfare dependency was the problem to be tackled (Jensen and Tyler, 2015). In a media environment where elites are kept out of view, a perhaps inevitable corollary is that middle class becomes the normative position (Benedictis et al., 2017; Savage, 2000). The middle classes are cast as ‘strivers’ – the sensible financial subjects who manage their budgets effectively – while the working-classes are cast as the ‘shirkers’ – feckless, irresponsible and to blame for their own hardships.

Lewis emerged in this context as a source of accessible and valuable information in essence functioning as an old-fashioned consumer champion. A key strand of his money-saving tips is advice on how to save on energy bills by strategically and frequently switching providers. When the crisis was initially framed as one of energy, he was very well placed to respond with many people reliant on the stream of information coming from his website and TV show to find ways to manage. His website added a COLC ‘guide to survive’ with over 90 examples rooted in the most mundane but quickly and easily implemented everyday changes designed to significant savings (MSE Team, 2022).

From early 2022, Lewis was welcomed onto a range of mainstream broadcast and press titles such as This Morning, Good Morning Britain, The Independent and The Guardian to disseminate his advice amid the widening crisis. He sat at the heart of an increasingly present media framing of ‘coping’, ‘managing’ and, in the early phase of the crisis at least, ‘beating’ the COLC with sensible budgeting (BBC Online, 2022; Birtles, 2022; Flanders, 2022; Jones, 2022; Lovelace, 2022). His ubiquity and authority, and his contribution to the circulation of individualising discourses around ‘coping’, illustrate two things. First, it reproduces key tenets of neoliberal cultural politics which work to articulate one set of meanings around the COLC as a keyphrase. Second, similar to Kirstie Allsopp and Jack Monroe representing the cultural politics of austerity (Martin, 2021, 2022) in the context of an increasing personalisation of politics (Langer, 2012 [2011]), Lewis here embodies a particular articulation of the COLC’s politics and its relationship to crisis neoliberalism as a COLC celebrity.

Notably frequent among the coverage have been media representations of the particular hardships of ‘squeezed’ middle-class families struggling to keep up with ‘appropriate’ status consumption – holidays abroad, private schools and property ownership (Butterworth, 2022; Clarence-Smith, 2023; Howell, 2022; Topham, 2022). Here, the COLC is understood as a question of personal responsibility and effective ‘life admin’. The corollary, if not implicitly stated, is that those who cannot manage are somehow responsible for their or their families’ failures. This shared experience is responsibilised in an individual manner, with highly differentiated and unequal impacts masked and obfuscated. Here, there is continuity with the discourse in the aftermath of the financial crisis in the United Kingdom with respect to the kinds of solutions that might be considered – primarily measures to tackle and manage the price of things in the marketplace (Happer, 2017).

In these narratives, we also see continuities with attempts to win consent, which work to obfuscate and displace the structural problems of neoliberalism onto the public. During the financial crisis and its aftermath, it was a socialisation of debt, a blaming of ‘greedy bankers’, ‘shirkers’ and a profligate public sector. In this case, we see a socialisation of struggle in which the public is being warned of more necessary hardship to make way for a recovery. When articulated like this, the COLC as a keyphrase works to further distance the complexity of structural causes, whist bringing the management of those causes closer to the individual. In what might be described as ‘saying the quiet part out loud’, on 21 June 2023, an economic advisor to Chancellor Jeremy Hunt openly stated on Radio 4’s Today programme that the Bank of England should ‘force’ a recession to curb inflation and tackle the COLC. Meanwhile, Labour’s economic policy – currently being implemented following the general election – is repetitively framed in terms of ‘ironclad’ fiscal responsibility and limited public spending (Reeves, 2023). The COLC is not given solutions but is instead proposed to be managed and minimised through the political, economic and cultural strategies of neoliberalism.

A War of Positions: Contesting Proposed Solutions

If the new government does not look poised to deliver a distinct new social settlement, how might we see COLC as a distinct cultural moment? Is there the opening of a space which may lead to new forms of ‘common sense’ which could contest what is being offered by the political class? Importantly, the communications system does not simply cohere around state or market objectives and should always be seen as a site of conflict (Philo et al., 2015). In the contemporary media landscape, these discourses of individual responsibility run parallel to a set of competing narratives, which are produced through the dialectic between lived experience and communications systems (Williams, 1976). Some of these give voice to a more diverse range of actors and discourses other than those that reproduce dominant cultural politics as part of the broader war of position, and it is here we can see most clearly the ways in which the discursive landscape around the COLC is distinctive.

Sitting alongside stories of the ‘difficulties’ of sending the third child to a lesser fee-paying school, this personal testimony from a Guardian article about ‘one family’s struggle’ is illustrative of the narrative of ‘coping’ and its limits:

[Family names] now use their car as little as possible and, having dropped their Tesco trips, are running out of budgeting rope and are having to knock items off their shopping list. They scour forums on parenting and budgeting sites for money-saving ideas but at this rate will have little option but to skip meals or eat smaller portions [. . .]. They are not alone. (Wood, 2022)

This draws in a broad strata from the aforementioned ‘squeezed middle’ to what is sometimes called the ‘newly hungry’ (Cohen, 2020; Lambrou, 2022). At the furthest end, we have also seen representations of agonising material hardship. Coverage of the unprecedented extent of foodbank usage by those in and out of work, and charities such as the Trussell Trust have become more prominent in the media. Discursive framings of ‘hard working families’ and pensioners ‘who have worked hard all their lives’ forced to join foodbank queues expose the inadequacy of the narrative of ‘coping’ in the current climate (Annett, 2023; Barre and Sharman, 2023; Butler, 2022). If the mass nature of the COLC experience offers one explanation of why such reporting takes hold, another relates to the forms of contemporary media: these stories are simple, they are emotive, they are personalised and they are immediate, they are not the ‘slow’ and complex catastrophe of climate change.

In what might be seen as a pivotal moment, in March 2022, Lewis broke with his model of uncontroversial consumer-focused advisor to become an active political actor, telling the BBC’s Sunday Morning programme:

I need to say, as the Money Saving Expert who’s been known for this, I am out of tools to help people now. It’s not something money management can fix, it’s not something that for those on the lowest incomes telling them to cut their belts will work, we need political intervention. (Duffy, 2022)

He later confessed that he felt that a section on his COLC guide called ‘Heat the Human, Not the Home’ was ‘tragic’ if essential (Williams, 2022). It is notable that this discursive moment took place in a context very different from the post-crash period. Then, there emerged a broad political consensus on the need for reigning in public spending in the programme of austerity. More recently, we have heard increasing cross-party demands for government to act beyond the COLC payments. Attempts to focus efforts on welfare recipients, the financial burden of payments and/or to amplify an anti-welfare discourse have not been effective. This in part reflects a lack of consent given by the political and media class to reductions in benefits in the post-pandemic landscape – an example being a suggested cut in the £20 uplift to universal credit which was resisted by voices from all sides of the political spectrum (Stewart, 2021; Yorke, 2021).

Similar political efforts to position the growing number engaging in industrial action to demand wage rises in the COLC period as exacerbating the problems – primarily as part of a ‘wage price spiral’ narrative with inflation taken as the key reduction target – did not take hold in spite of Sunak himself repeating the claim (Culbertson, 2023). Rather, Mick Lynch, General Secretary of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT), developed a reputation for ‘owning’ the mainstream media as he patiently explained the causes of inflation, role of taxation and nature of employment law. As he did, he clearly exposed the ideological construction of strikers in conflict with working people as opposed to strikers being working people. A poll undertaken by GMB at the end of June 2022 in one of the most intense phases of the COLC, when many of these interviews took place, revealed support for the RMT strike had increased (Tingle, 2022).

Conclusion: The COLC as a Keyphrase, Institutional Media and Crisis Neoliberalism as a ‘Decisive Moment’?

To understand why attempts to fully individualise the COLC and to stigmatise those who are struggling to cope have failed where previously they succeeded, we must locate them in the present conjuncture. This phase of crisis neoliberalism might be described as the period in which the current hegemonic project is slowly being weakened and where the groundwork for what comes ‘next’ is being laid (Gilbert and Williams, 2022). Most significantly, COLC as keyphrase shows the interactive relations of consent between political decision-making, media, public belief and outcomes as disrupted. If we return to Williams’ (1976) dialectic between communications as a system and the everyday experience of those it influences and represents, we see continuity with the growing ‘disconnect’ between neoliberal institutions like the media as the rhetorical promises of the latter are exposed in the material reality of everyday lives (Happer, 2024).

But there is something culturally distinctive too. The COLC, understood as the normalised ways of work and life becoming more burdensome to pay for, is experienced by an unusually broad and diverse group in society. It is a common experience. Given consent for neoliberalism is garnered through the assuaging powers of consumer choice for the middle classes in exchange for a lack of democratic rights (Gilbert and Williams, 2022), the COLC represents a widespread loss of this as a lever. Complimenting this trend, a growing group – the ‘newly hungry’ – are exposed to hardships they previously looked upon from the outside (Butler and Elgot, 2021). These groups are not traditionally excluded from representation in the public sphere, and unlike the most marginalised, are too sizable to identify and re-direct blame and anger onto; they are not the ‘shirkers’ who are the typical objects of the middle-class gaze of journalists. The recognition of their struggle tends to obscure the most devastating impacts of our current crisis on the most marginalised – exacerbated by longer-term austerity policies which have brought ‘social murder’ to thousands since 2010 (Walsh and McCartney, 2024). However, the proliferation of ‘struggle’ from the margins to the mass (Hoff, 2022; Hoff and Happer, 2024) shows how the COLC can open a unique space for potential coalition building across social classes in the United Kingdom. There are the foundations for the formation of new social blocs using the common experience of struggle articulated through the COLC as keyphrase to mobilise around. This can be the basis of an alternative politics as a means of accelerating the hegemonic crisis of neoliberalism more broadly (see Gilbert and Williams, 2022).

A further notable dimension is a conflicted political class. We noted the cross-party divergences in respect of questions around welfare, which extend to conflict over broader questions of government intervention itself. This also reflects a breakdown of the traditional parties of business and capital in the UK context. Even without COVID-19, the Johnson government was unusually interventionist in approach in relation to trade and industry. He promised to ‘build back better’ seeing no contradiction in his articulation of ‘active government within a market economy’ (Pickard, 2021). In this, he sat not too uncomfortably alongside the global moves towards statism, protection and security identified by Gerbaudo (2022 [2021]) and others who have questioned whether we are in a post-neoliberal settlement (Davies and Gane, 2021).

Most importantly, while more government intervention remains relatively out of step with many in Johnson’s party, the right-wing think tanks that get heard in the institutional media and the now Labour government, with its commitment to ‘fiscal responsibility’ (Reeves, 2023), it is in step with popular opinion. Polling from 2023 shows a majority supporting government action to reduce income differences between the rich and the poor, which represents significant growth within the post-2007–2008 period (Curtice and Scholes, 2023). The need to represent these cultural shifts leads to a more diverse range of speakers and agencies which political players draw on to support their claims where foodbank charities, academics and more progressive think tanks can more easily access a media platform.

Returning to the question of what category of crisis the COLC is, it is perhaps obviously not an organic crisis. Nor do we understand it as the kind of crisis or ‘decisive moment’ that brings on a change in social settlement, though it may or may not be one of many phenomena named or unnamed as crises which may steer a transition. In this respect, it could be argued that the COLC as a ‘moment’ within the broader conjuncture represents another mutation of capitalism’s general tendency to crisis (Tooze, 2018). However, given its constitution and representation as a crisis without an identifiable cause, the more open contestation of those converging causes and solutions, and elements of what point towards a ‘post-neoliberal’ settlement, we instead position this moment as one of potentiality.

This potentiality is borne out of the opening up of a cultural space, as the result of a war of positions in which those who might be drawn on to care are in a position to speak (Gilbert and Williams, 2022) and through which a clearer understanding of the reality of struggle and its systemic roots may be articulated. This lies in the striking lived experience of widespread struggle and the emergence of a diverse set of voices in line with a conflict-ridden political class, whose legitimacy has been in gradual decline since 2019 solidifying around the disaster of Liz Truss’s brief premiership. Emergent evidence-based arguments contrast with and expose a shallow short-termism which cannot grasp the scale of the converging crises that the COLC as a keyphrase acts as a cypher for, let alone address the cost-of-living solely.

Fundamentally, media should be seen as a constituent part both constructing and amplifying financialised solutions, while producing forms of resistance and alternative solutions in reflection of their position in relation to power, and to the public who they claim to both speak to and for. If any emerging resistance is usually shut down very quickly by institutional media, we suggest that the new digital landscape is a space in which it can be amplified. While platform power largely operates in alignment with state and market power, it will ultimately prioritise generating the engagement that delivers profit. Contestation and division, albeit in a condensed temporality, do exactly that. In this, platforms can promote disunity in the political and media class, as well as a growing public disaffection, which reflect each other in a circular way. It is the way in which these inter-connections open up new possibilities for social change which the Keywords approach illuminates so uniquely. These are the openings that have, thus far, been ripe for narratives of right-wing populism, but we would argue this distinctive and significant constituency of resistance around COLC as a keyphrase also offers the possibility of something more positive.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We both would like to thank Matt Dawson and Alison Eldridge for reading earlier drafts of the piece.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Isaac Hoff

Notes

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Mediating the Cost-of-Living Crisis: The Meaning of a ‘Keyphrase’ in UK Contemporary Cultural Discourse

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Keywords/Keyphrase 1

Turning Points, Conjunctures and ‘Crisis’

Crisis Neoliberalism and Regimes of Exception

Institutional Media and Representational Repertoires Within the Current Conjuncture

Naming ‘Crisis’ as an Ideological Act

Crisis Without a Cause

Individualising the Causes, Solutions and Responsibility: Beating the COLC

A War of Positions: Contesting Proposed Solutions

Conclusion: The COLC as a Keyphrase, Institutional Media and Crisis Neoliberalism as a ‘Decisive Moment’?

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

ORCID iD

Notes

References

Keywords/Keyphrase¹