Britain is being stalked by a zombie elite – time to take them on | Aditya Chakrabortty

What to do when our economy benefits only the few, but politicians seem powerless to change it? This new series, called the Alternatives, follows communities who are working out their own answers

This is the age of the zombie. The undead maraud around our popular culture. Stick on the telly, and they're attacking Jon Snow in Game of Thrones. At the cinema, reanimated carcasses lurch through everything from Resident Evil to World War Z. The headlines might burst with blundering boastful strongmen, but our nightmares are full of blank-eyed walking corpses.

Unthinking, unquestioning, neither alive nor dead, the zombie is horrific. It is also us.

What is austerity?

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The nurse at the food bank, the council employee in a homeless shelter: these political actors are new