Because of academic divisions of labor, anthropologists have come late to the study of the changing landscape of welfare and advice provisions in Euro-America (and beyond). However, this study is crucial to understanding contemporary economies. Attention to the increasing informalization, hybridization, plurality, and complexity of welfare-care-advice provisions in the context of 21st-century austerity in Europe challenges the widely held view of how state bureaucracies operate. The corollaries are the difficulties in accessing what help is available (hence the increasing need for advice) and an increase in grass-roots mutual aid and activism to supplement, and in some cases even supplant, state advice provisions.

This chapter examines how intensifying inequality in the UK plays out at a local level, in order to bring out the varied ways polarisation takes place ‘on the ground’. It brings a community analysis buttressed by quantitative framing to the study of economic, spatial and relational polarisation in four towns in the UK. We distinguish differing dynamics of ‘elite-based’ polarisation (in Oxford and Tunbridge Wells) and ‘poverty-based’ polarisation (in Margate and Oldham). Yet there are also common features. Across the towns, marginalised communities express a sense of local belonging. But tensions between social groups also remain strong and all towns are marked by a weak or ‘squeezed middle’. We argue that the weakness of intermediary institutions, including but not limited to the ‘missing middle’, and capable of bridging gaps between various social groups, provides a major insight into both the obstacles to, and potential solutions for, re-politicising inequality today.