On September 20, 1675, the English town of Northampton burned to the ground. A spark from an open fire in a house on St. Mary’s Street caught quickly and spread through medieval lanes of wooden houses and thatched roofs. Northampton was a center of boot-making, and the fire was fed by oil and tallow and goods stacked for sale in the market square. The place went up like a candle. Six hundred houses were destroyed. But Northampton and the county around it—a thousand square miles of good farmland, seventy miles north of London—were wealthy and politically connected. Within six weeks, Parliament released funds to rebuild the town. King Charles II donated a thousand tons of timber. In gratitude, All Saints Church, the town’s most important, which was rebuilt with dark sandstone, still has a statue of the king standing on the roof. Charles is dressed as a Roman soldier, hand on hip, head flowing with seventeenth-century curls.

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In 2018, Northampton has been wrecked again. Earlier this year, the county’s government ran out of money. By law, English councils are not allowed to declare bankruptcy. They must announce a Section 114 notice instead, in which they stop spending and are given twenty-one days to pass an emergency budget. When Northamptonshire County Council issued its Section 114, on February 2nd, it was Britain’s first in almost twenty years. The county, which leans Conservative and was keenly pro-Brexit, has always favored low taxes and thrift. (The council’s first secretary died from overwork, in 1904.) An investigation of this year’s budget crisis showed that, since 2013, Northamptonshire had been engaged in a radical experiment to cut costs and outsource services, in the face of reduced funding from the national government.

The plan, a desperate thing, was called the Next Generation Council. It involved cutting the number of staff directly employed by the county from four thousand to a hundred and fifty. At the same time, officials set up a number of external companies to look after the county’s old people and neglected children. The companies would, in theory, turn a profit. The project cost millions of pounds and never got off the ground. “I can’t imagine what they were thinking,” Max Caller, the local-government expert who led the investigation, told me. After Caller’s report was published, in March, Northamptonshire officials admitted that things were even worse than they had anticipated. On July 24th, the council issued its second Section 114 of the year and disclosed that it would have to save between sixty and seventy million pounds—around fifteen per cent of its annual spending—by next spring.

No one has sent money, or timber, this time. Earlier this week, when I stood outside All Saints Church, there were three tents, pitched by the town’s homeless, in the yard. The morning was gray and chilly. The town felt dilapidated and quiet, and there were paper notices, taped onto parking meters, indicating new charges to raise funds. In August, Northampton’s branch of Marks & Spencer, the department store that is a quiet signifier of British middle-class respectability, closed down. I stopped by the Hope Centre, the town’s main charity for the poor and the homeless, which looks after a hundred and twenty people every day, and found that it was being evicted. The letter came on October 15th. It gave the charity a year to relocate from its purpose-built building, which cost more than five million pounds and opened in 2012. “A year is absurd,” Robin Burgess, the chief executive, said. “We will close.” Burgess has lived in Northampton since 1990. He used to run drug-and-alcohol services for the county. He rolled his eyes when I asked about the Next Generation Council. “It was all just bollocks, basically,” he said.

The disaster in Northamptonshire did not arise from nowhere. Since 2010, when David Cameron became Prime Minister, Britain’s Conservative-led governments have responded to the impacts of the global financial crisis with a program of austerity. In line with other European countries (but unlike the U.S. and China, which passed stimulus packages), the U.K has sought to manage its debts and repair its economy with a relentless trimming of public spending. For the past eight years, these cuts have presented a complicated picture. In some areas, like education and health, budgets haven’t actually gone down; they have just failed to keep up with the needs of a diverse, growing population. But central funding for the nation’s four hundred and eighteen local authorities—Britain’s busy quilt of local government—has fallen by fifty per cent.

It’s not always obvious, even when you live here, exactly what a council is and does. (In Northamptonshire, there are seven other local authorities.) But, across Britain, councils look after the immediate civic fabric: roads, parks, libraries, zoning. They take away the trash and subsidize the buses. They care for vulnerable children, administer welfare, support the disabled, and, with an aging population, play an increasing role in the lives of the elderly. After almost a decade of cost-cutting and redesigning how they operate, more than ten per cent of councils are expected to exhaust their financial reserves within three years. Since Northamptonshire went under, both Somerset and East Sussex have announced that they, too, will be reducing their services to the minimum they must provide under the law.

The Core Offer, as it is known, is meagre fare. In March, Northamptonshire announced that it would close twenty-one of its thirty-six libraries, a decision that has been blocked by the courts. In the council’s two emergency budgets since then, it has removed millions of pounds from its services for people with learning disabilities and young people leaving the care system. Local bus subsidies have stopped, leaving villages stranded, and grants to local charities have come to an end. The weed-killing budget has been cut in half, social workers have been made redundant, and one in three roads in the county will be salted this winter. “The vast majority of what the county council does is for people at the bottom of the vulnerability scale,” Mick Scrimshaw, a Labour member of the council, told me. “Clearly, those people who are already at the bottom of the pile are going to be most affected.” Burgess, from the Hope Centre, is now trying to organize the county’s charity sector to fill the gaps left by disappearing government services. “What you are now in is the small state,” he said.

Brexit has swamped British politics since the summer of 2016, when the nation voted to leave the European Union. But it is austerity that has been the larger force in people’s lives, informing their daily experience of the state: travelling on pitted roads, struggling to get a doctor’s appointment, chipping in for art supplies at school. As police budgets have fallen, violent crime rose by nineteen per cent in England and Wales in the past year. Jeremy Corbyn, a left-wing politician of no great gift, has gone from punchline to plausible Prime Minister (he now describes Labour as a “government in waiting”) on the simple premise that the country has had enough. Last month, cornered by fighting inside her party over Brexit, Theresa May decided that she agreed with him. For years, the Conservatives have refused to use the word, but May declared she was “ending austerity” in a speech to party delegates. “The British people need to know that the end is in sight,” she said. On Monday, setting out the annual budget for the government, the Chancellor, Philip Hammond, announced a twenty-billion-pound increase in funding for the National Health Service.

But the over-all climate remains. After eight years of retrenchment, Britain’s public finances are still fragile. The economy is haunted by Brexit. In the “giveaway” budget this week, Hammond’s gifts were targeted rather than broad. He allocated more for a one-off program to fix the nation’s potholes than to address staff shortages in schools. The really big elements in the cuts program—the decimation of local-government budgets and a freeze in welfare payments, which affects thirty per cent of British households, and is scheduled to last until 2020—went untouched. Besides the N.H.S. budget, Hammond confirmed that spending on public services would be “flat real”—in line with inflation—for the coming year, but nothing more. If Britain tumbles out of the E.U. next March without an amicable deal, the situation is likely to be much worse than that. The nation has reached the limits of austerity, and yet the policy continues.

Seven hundred and forty thousand people are experiencing the crisis in Northamptonshire. Although the county is close to London and surrounded by cities such as Leicester and Birmingham, more than half of the population lives in pastoral English countryside. Outside Northampton and Corby, a former steel-making town, the roads follow old ridges and twist through villages that the Industrial Revolution passed by. Northamptonshire was once known as the county of “spires and squires,” but the familiar fabric of landowners and vicars has all but gone. The thatched cottages are full of commuters and retirees now. In the afternoon, I visited Creaton, a village of five hundred people in the center of the county that is mentioned in the Domesday Book. Creaton has a twelfth-century church and the local hunt gathers on the village green. Because of the budget cuts, Creaton is expecting to lose its bus service and its elementary school.

I met Richard Hollingum, a former vice-chair of the parish council, in the village store. Creaton’s long-standing village shop and post office closed in August, and the community has banded together to open a new one, which is staffed mostly by volunteers. The shop is a smart, prefab building with a six-year lease in someone’s garden. “We can take it apart and move it, if necessary,” Hollingum said. Hollingum used to be a university lecturer. He wore a dark-green hoodie and carried a pair of sheepskin gloves.

We turned down Violet Lane, into the heart of Creaton. There was the smell of woodsmoke. Few things seem more permanent than the central, common spaces of an English country village. Notices stuck to a telegraph pole advertised an upcoming raffle, a talk about Lord Byron, and the campaign to save the school, which is a hundred and eighteen years old. “I have a sense there are big changes coming,” Hollingum said. “There are going to be big problems.” He talked about the warp and weft of society coming apart. When austerity ends—whatever that means—no one expects Britain’s local governments to be rebuilt the way they were or to serve their populations as they used to. In Creaton, the same group of volunteers that set up the store is thinking about taking over the playing field and the pub as well. “It offers lots of opportunity, once you get out of the mindset of ‘Shouldn’t someone else be providing this?’ ” Hollingum said. Then he asked me in for a cup of tea.