In austerity Britain, an embattled Prime Minister is forced to live on the very benefits she imposed. What begins as a political stunt spirals into a crisis that shakes her family, her government, and the nation's economy.

genre: Political comedy / economic satire

On the eve of a knife-edge election, Prime Minister June Fox walks into a live television debate hoping merely to survive the night. Cornered over her own government’s “fair and generous” Standard Benefit, she accepts a challenge to live on it herself if she remains in office. When she scrapes back into Downing Street with a majority of one, the promise becomes impossible to wriggle away from.

As protesters besiege Westminster and a reality series called Shoestring turns her family’s private humiliation into national entertainment, June’s husband Douglas is forced into supermarkets, food banks, rice, beans and the terrifying business of cooking. Their seventeen-year-old son Justin, much sharper than the adults around him, becomes an unlikely moral compass, pushing his parents to confront what poverty actually means.

Meanwhile, a second disaster is gathering in the City. A crypto-backed scheme called NorthSea, shadow banks, German money, a failed outsourcing company and a modern South Sea Bubble threaten to blow up Britain’s finances. June must choose between the brutal politics that kept her in power and a stranger, riskier possibility: telling the truth, changing course, and trying to build something better.

Shoestring is a fast political comedy about food, money, family, media spectacle and the strange things that happen when the people who make the rules are forced to live by them.