The term ‘Cost of Living Crisis’ gets thrown around a lot within everyday discussion, often with little reference to what it means to live under a Cost-of-Living Crisis and how such a crisis is constituted and compares with crises globally. In this blog, I will unpack these questions.

The 2008 Global Financial Crash served as a moment of rupture caused and exacerbated by a series of mini events that unfolded on the world stage…. This partly led to the rise in an annual deficit impacting national growth and debt recovery. Then we entered 2010 when the Coalition Government led by David Cameron and Nick Clegg in the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties implemented a Big Society Agenda, underpinned by an anti-statist ideology and Austerity politics. The legacies of austerity have extensively been highlighted in my own research as communities faced severed cutbacks to social infrastructure and resources, many of whom utilised these resources as a lifeline. Moving forward to the present day in 2024, austerity continues to be alive and well and the national debt has continued to rise…. Events including the Corona Virus Pandemic that started in 2019, Brexit and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have amongst other events served as precipitators to an already existing economic downturn. The rise of interest rates and inflation have been partly led by disruptions to global supply chains, particularly essential and often taken for granted food resources such as wheat and grains. So too has political instability hindering opportunities to invest and grow the local economy contributed towards this economic downturn.

As inflation and interest rates rose, so too did the average cost of living in terms of expenditure and disposable income for both the Working and Middle-Classes. At this point, one can begin to see the emergence of the cost-of-living crisis as being constituted as an issue affecting social class.

The cost-of-living crisis is inherently a term deployed by the Middle Classes as some faced an increase of interest rates on their mortgages in addition to rising costs in the supermarkets. These are valid concerns and the reality and hardship produced under these conditions is not being contested. However, we must not lose sight of the fact that economic downturn and the reality of poverty is nothing new for many working-class communities, who have suffered from disinvestment and austerity, long before the term Cost of Living Crisis came into being.

Equally, we can understand the Cost-of-Living Crisis as being a construction led by Western states, as part of a wider Global North. The separation between the Global North and Global South is bound by geography, but economic growth and its globally recognised position as an emerged or emerging economy. Note that such constructions within themselves are applied by the Global North. Similarly, the Cost-of-Living Crisis is nothing new for these states. The reality of living below a breadline is faced by many of these countries in the Global South and should be understood as a wider systemic and global issue that members of the International Community have a moral obligation to address.

So, when applying terms such as the Cost-of-Living Crisis under every-day discussion, it is necessary to contemplate the historicisms behind such an experience and how life under poverty and hardship is experienced globally and indeed across our own communities. This will enable us to think more critically about this term Cost of Living Crisis, which as it is widely used, faces threat of oversight as to the prevalence and effects of global and local inequalities.