The callousness of Tory, and now Labour, attacks on welfare are revealed in this arresting and unusual exhibition, finds Cici Washburn

The title of the exhibition the ‘Museum of Austerity’ at the Young Vic (on until 16 January) suggests your visit might be to reflect on austerity of the past, under the Tory government. When you first enter the exhibition you are shown a timeline from April 2009 to November 2025. The last section of the timeline finishes with ‘similar cuts set for April 2026 are likely to have “devastating” consequences for claimants’ mental health, stressing the need to ‘draw lessons’ from ‘similar policy in the past’ before ‘repeating history’.

When you enter the gallery, you are given a mixed-reality headset which will work for 35 minutes; holograms of victims of austerity are around the room, as you walk towards them, you hear the voices of Boris Johnson, David Cameron and others, and then the stories of the turmoil and the deterioration of people’s lives while trying to receive benefits, and their eventual death while still waiting. The account of what each person went through is told by one of their loved ones. These are harrowing.

The stories repeat the disdain the victims were shown by the DWP. One man says to his brother in hospital hours before he dies that he can’t believe he’s going to die and still hasn’t received his benefits. The mother of a young man, Mark Wood, speaks of how despite him having a severe eating disorder among many other conditions, he was declared fit for work. When he was found dead, there were swarms of flies around his house. The daughter of Errol speaks of how when she found him dead, she could see the shape of his bones through his duvet. Of the coroner’s inquest into her father’s death, it says that the DWP said on the stand that they had received no information to suggest that her father wasn’t fit to work and when the daughter said, you have and I have it, the DWP woman went red in the face. The coroner’s inquest of a disabled mother, Philippa Day, who overdosed and was found in bed with a letter from the DWP found that 28 problems with the Pip system had caused her death. Her sister describes telling her son she had passed.

The stories are varied with different contexts but also have recurring elements; being told they are fit to work, filling out twelve-page forms that the DWP say are lost, being sanctioned and so forth, all highlighting the systemic cruelty of the benefits system and its design to be unreachable.

The 35 minutes the headset gives you doesn’t allow you to hear all eight stories. These and the timeline which you see as you arrive and leave are the entirety of the exhibition. We often hear about ‘Tory austerity’, but it’s important that the exhibition highlights that the current Labour government is continuing in the same fashion. The timeline points out that there were months of protests earlier this year over the huge proposed disability-benefit cuts and that, later, a backbench rebellion forced the Labour government to hold back on cuts to Pip, but cuts to other disability benefits are coming next year.

This powerful exhibition that displays the criminality and callousness of austerity in an unusual way, while reminding us that the fight against welfare cuts isn’t over.