Gerry Mooney | ukwatch.net

Resisting New Labour’s ‘hard labour’

Ellie Keen — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 21:48:15 +0000

Few readers of Variant will be unaware of New Labour’s welfare ‘reform’ and public sector ‘modernisation’ agendas. Since 1997 the restructuring of welfare and public services has been a central component of the government’s political project. Welfare reform was viewed by Blair and is presently by Brown as contributing to a neoliberal vision of the UK as a modern, lean, flexible and competitive economy. Much has been written about the many and varied forms that privatisation has taken, of the contracting-out of public services, of Public Private Partnerships/Public Finance Initiatives (PFI/PPP), and of the increasing encroachment and indeed take-over by the private sector in the delivery of many key ‘heartland’ public and social services. In contrast, there has been much less concern with how these reforms are impacting on the workers involved in delivering services. Our concern here is to draw attention to some of the many ways in which welfare workers are being adversely affected by the restructuring of the welfare state and, more importantly, how they are resisting New Labour in new and significant ways.

Welfare Workers on the Frontline

Our focus is on workers in what we call the ‘welfare industry’ – that is, workers who are involved in diverse ways in both the production and delivery of social and welfare policy and practice. In short, ‘welfare industry’ is not just an umbrella label for those six million or so workers employed in what’s left of the welfare state in the UK – such as NHS workers, teachers, university workers, social workers and care workers – but it also includes important sections of the civil service, in areas of criminal justice and public administration. Beyond a narrow focus on the traditional institutions of the welfare state, the notion of a ‘welfare industry’ also encompasses non-state sectors, chiefly the voluntary sector and private provision. Speaking of a welfare industry also helps to focus attention on the specific way that welfare functions are being further industrialised and degraded using technological systems, such as call centres, and centralised managerial commands and targets to restructure the welfare labour process. This has involved the flexible intensification of worker effort during working time. Work time has also been elongated in a variety of ways with the loss of ‘porous time’ and breathing space in both worker-worker and worker-user social interactions. Additional duties have been imposed on welfare workers, especially administrative burdens, creating tensions with their core duty for the care and well-being of welfare users. That this is having morbid consequences is amply testified by the scores of deaths¹ in British hospitals as a result of the managerialist obsession with cost-cutting and targets.

Many workers in the welfare industry deliver services to some of the most vulnerable and disadvantaged groups in society. However, what is also significant is that such workers, themselves often low waged, are central to the delivery and maintenance of public services, in the process supporting other disadvantaged groups, including those who struggle to survive on what the state provides through benefits. Public sector workers, and in particular those involved in the welfare sectors, are not simply delivering services, administering benefits and managing poor people. They are also tasked with the delivery and implementation of government social policy initiatives, such as workfare/work activation programmes which force those in poverty into low paid employment and vulnerable forms of work. ‘Work’, understood as paid employment, underpins New Labour’s vision. Public services are central to achieving the goals that this vision generates. Public servants are therefore critical to delivering not only services but also central to implementing New Labour’s political and ideological objectives.

Work, Work, Work! – The World of New Labour

‘Work’ lies at the heart of the entire New Labour project. With Gordon Brown’s new found ‘Protestant ethic’ being rather self-consciously aligned to the ‘spirit of neoliberal capitalism’, work is seen as the most morally elevating means through which poverty can be alleviated. Work represents the ‘best’ form of welfare! Work is central to ‘social inclusion’. Work is salvational; its morally uplifting properties enables the ‘socially excluded’ to be transformed into model citizens, exercising the opportunity to make choices and consume as part of ‘respectable’ or ‘mainstream’ society. However, at the very time when New Labour has sought to valorise work as a central dimension of daily life and personal existence, what is going on in the workplace, the site where society’s ills are going to be cured, has, with a few honourable exceptions, been neglected across large swathes of academic, media and political discourse. This, despite the fact that much welfare work is carried out in full view of the public.

In the meantime, waged work has not stopped being an exploitative social relation. For many groups of workers in the welfare industry things have, if anything, deteriorated in the last decade. But this also throws up its own contradictions as it rubs up against certain limits to how far services can be degraded, not least the permanent tension between the depreciating nature of the welfare labour process and the end product of enhancing the capacities of welfare users.

Public sector workers and the services they help to provide have undergone profound changes in recent decades. To name only some of the more obvious forms that this has taken: Privatisation, Marketisation, Contracting-out, Outsourcing, Profit centres, Competitive tendering, PPP/PFI, ‘Best value’, Managerialism, Targets, League tables, Performance indicators, Audits.

The consequences of these ‘reforms’ for welfare workers has been far-reaching. Workers now fear that the loss of a contract will lead to redundancies or a wage cut or both. Private companies attack collective bargaining and place constraints on effective trade union organisation. Against employer and government hostility to collective organisation is their preference for exercising ‘control at a distance’ to advance the project for the individualisation and atomisation of the workforce. This works through pseudo-market mechanisms, performance related pay, increased pressures to ‘self-manage’, a greater emphasis on ‘emotional’ skills wage and qualities, regrading and reclassification, casualisation, increased workplace regulation, and inspection, and flexibility in its various guises. In the process, work intensification and extensification is advanced, in some cases to breaking point. Job devaluation, a declining sense of personal worth and job insecurity leads to increasing levels of workplace stress and related illnesses. Alongside deskilling and the loss of autonomy there is also employer-led demands for reskilling and upskilling, often leading to ‘qualification inflation’ and therefore a loss of market value for credentials, directly contradicting claims that engagement in lifelong learning will equip workers with the human capital so as to make them into highly marketable assets. And then there are the growing numbers of cases of the substitution of labour through the use of new technologies and ICTs (Information and Communications Technologies), from NHS call centres to online educational packages.

New Labour’s social policy agenda demands ‘more and more’ from public sector workers as they struggle to meet the bewildering myriad of targets and strategies that have been deployed since 1997. As Fairbrother and Poynter argue:

“State employees are increasingly entreated to take on tasks that their occupation previously did not require – teachers are engaged in health promotion activities, university lecturers are encouraged to ensure the employability of their graduates and doctors are called upon to advise on healthy life styles rather than specifically treating illnesses….In this sense, the social and moral dimensions of the customer-oriented approach have been deployed to reform the relationships between professionals and their various publics and erode the monopolies of skill and discretion over decision-making and job content that professional staff traditionally exercised.”²

Market modes of delivery along with aggressive and pervasive managerialism are restricting the ‘space’ that many welfare professionals once enjoyed to provide the services and support that service users require, resulting in a significant deskilling of work tasks. Routinisation and work degradation is contributing to what Richard Sennett calls “the spectre of uselessness” that is now gripping increasing numbers of professional workers in the welfare industry.³

Work intensification under New Labour has led to millions of workers facing increasing demands on their work time. Successive and multiple policy measures – ‘initiative-itis’ – has led to already hard pressed workers undertaking additional responsibilities. In some local authority nurseries, for instance, nurses find themselves taking on additional tasks to meet newly implemented nursery curriculum targets, regular inspections and workplace audits. Such examples prove that New Labour has today made satire seem superfluous, since these very same low-paid, over-worked female workers are also expected to play a strategic role in ‘helping’ young unemployed mothers back into the labour force – often in low paid childcare work! The story here is all too often one of more-and-more for less-and-less pay. In other areas of the public sector, for example in the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP), maintaining service provision against a background of large scale redundancies has been achieved only by fewer-and-fewer workers doing more and more. The DWP has struggled to achieve the same level of service provision with less and less of a workforce.

It is important to recognise, however, the unevenness of reform and modernisation (and worker unrest and resistance) that exists across different sectors, for instance in relation to the use of PPP/PFI or the vastly different levels of contracting out and redundancies. This awareness, however, does not detract from the point that public sector work in the UK is a world that has undergone far reaching change, change that has all too frequently been detrimental to and at the cost of the workers delivering public services. Managerialism and the drive to restructure and intensify work while curtailing wages and worsening conditions is a self-contradictory process that relies on the emotional, intellectual and bodily creativity of the labour that it attempts to dominate through managerialist regimes and controls held at a distance. Degrading the work process also invites resistance at the point of welfare production in ways that cannot be captured by even the most strenuous supervisory regime. Workers may elect to mechanically follow orders to protect themselves from managerial opprobrium. In which case, the affective embodied side of worker interaction with user groups like patients, clients or student, suffers. Measuring output in the form of targets and internal audits gives little indication that worker commitment has been withdrawn and disaffection increased. So long as boxes are ticked and numbers are massaged then managers are protected and the embodied nature of the welfare labour process becomes a matter of mutual indifference.

The changing nature of public sector work is part and parcel of New Labour’s Third Way/Neo-Liberal reconstruction of the idea of the ‘public’ itself, a process that crucially involves blurring the boundaries between public and private forms of provision. This involves a shift towards the privatisation of public goods and services and the greater involvement of the private sector in ‘public’ service provision. Neither should we forget that much welfare work, particularly caring work, is dependent on unpaid forms of labour in the private realms of family, household and community, overwhelmingly carried out by women, many of whom are also providing paid labour in public and welfare services outside the home.

Co-existing with the emphasis on paid work this there is also an attempt to reconstruct the ideal citizen both as a citizen and a consumer.⁴ Here the overarching context is one of consumerism and the extension of ‘choice’. Under Blair and Brown ‘consumer choice’ had something of an occult quality about it – the more fervently it was invoked the less its ideological magic worked! To quote Blair:

“In reality, I believe that people do want choice, in public services as in other services. But anyway, choice isn’t an end in itself. It is one important mechanism to ensure that citizens can indeed secure good schools and health services in their communities. Choice puts the levers in the hands of parents and patients so that they as citizens and consumers can be a driving force for improvement in their public services. We are proposing to put an entirely different dynamic in place to drive our public services; one where the service will be driven not by the government or by the manager but by the user – the patient, the parent, the pupil and the law-abiding citizen.”⁵

The promotion of choice reflects a desire to reconstruct the role of the state, no longer always and everywhere the provider of services – except at times as a last resort – but as an ‘enabler’ and regulator of services provided by other ‘partners’ and ‘stakeholders’. In repeated speeches and announcements the emphasis on choice at the heart of New Labour’s project contained a sometimes implied and sometimes explicit threat of dire consequences for public sector workers. Public sector workers often exist as an ‘absent presence’ in political discourse. It is noticeable, for instance, that Blair’s ‘belief’ about ‘people’ wanting ‘choice’ that other ‘people’, namely welfare workers, are curiously absent at a denotative level while they are clearly present at the connotative level. Implicit in this comment is a stark warning to public sector workers that they have to become more customer focused, and this requires far reaching changes in the working lives of those concerned.

It is well understood that New Labour views public sector workers as an outdated obstacle to modernisation and reform, therefore undermining social policy objectives. At Labour’s Spring Conference in Cardiff in February 2002, Blair drew a distinction between ‘reformers’ and ‘wreckers’, the latter category referred to public sector workers and unions who were resisting ‘modernisation’. Speaking to the British Venture Capital Association in London in 1999, Blair also talked of the bearing “the scars on my back” from trying to reform welfare. This was followed up at the Labour Party Conference in 1999, where Blair made his now infamous “forces of conservatism” speech in which he identified some groups of education and health professionals as holding back the government’s reform programme. And again in 1999 Blair attacked what he saw as a “culture of excuses” among school teachers who were resistant to aspects of his reform agenda. Such views played a significant role in helping to ferment the growing disillusionment with New Labour among public sector workers, fuelling continuing and growing resistance.⁶

Welfare Workers: Resisting New Labour

Increasing numbers of public sector workers are challenging the government’s reforms. In the process they are contesting some of the core ideological assumptions of New Labour. Opposition to New Labour’s policies varies considerably across different areas of the public sector and within hierarchically-organised welfare sites, for instance, between different groups of workers in the NHS. However, since the mid- to late-1990s, there has been continual and recurring episodes of industrial action of various kinds involving social workers, teachers, lecturers (both in further and in higher education), nurses, hospital ancillary staff, nursery nurses, home helps and care workers, and local authority librarians among others. Welfare delivery has become a central point of industrial relations disputes across the devolved UK.

Few would have predicted that New Labour’s reforms would have met with the levels of resistance from across the public and welfare sectors that have been witnessed since 1997:

Selected Industrial Action in the Welfare Industry 1998-2007:

• Library Workers -1998

• Social Workers – 1998, 2004, 2005
• Care Workers – 1998, 1999, 2000, 2007
• Teachers – 1999
• FE College Lecturers – 2001, 2006
• Local Government Workers – 2001, 2006, 2007
• Hospital Ancillary Staff – 2002
• University Lecturers – 2004, 2006
• Civil Servants (PCS) – 2004, 2005,2006, 2007
• Nursery Nurses – 2004
• Housing Association Workers – 2006
• School Ancillary Staff – 2006
• NHS Logistics Workers – 2006
• Local Government Workers – 2006, 2007

Highlighted are some of the key disputes and struggles in the ‘welfare industries’ that have featured since 1997, but this list is by no means exhaustive of all forms or instances of resistance to New Labour’s reforms. What is notable is the ways in which groups of workers, once often viewed as ‘passive’ or unlikely to take action, have found themselves under attack and have organised to fight back and challenge New Labour head on. The case of librarians in Glasgow in 1998 is one example of this, as are strikes among university lecturers and nurses. A particularly important example is the Scotland-wide local authority nursery nurses strike in 2004 which saw around 5,000 mainly female and relatively low paid workers take action to preserve conditions while challenging employer demands for local pay agreements.⁷ In the case of lecturers, nurses, social workers and other ‘professionals’ – that is, those often classed and sometimes dismissed as middle class, white-collar workers – organising to contest welfare restructuring has also become a permanent feature of working life.

As was widely documented at the time, during its first two years in government New Labour remained committed to the tight public sector spending constraints put in place by the previous Conservative administration. That this did not lead to widespread resentment and anger among public sector workers is largely due to the ‘honeymoon’ period that Labour enjoyed during the first few years in office, subsequently helped by the easing of public sector spending restrictions from 1999 and after. The promise that New Labour would deliver, however, was soon followed by a growing disillusionment with the New Labour Government among some groups in the public sector workforce, traditionally among Labour’s core voters. It was to become increasingly evident that although there would be considerable increases in public expenditure, especially for education and the health service, this would not signal an end to privatisation. Instead it would be accompanied by the increasing penetration of the market (and in some cases also by the voluntary or ‘third sector’) into heartland areas of public and welfare services provision, moving well beyond the role accorded to the private sector even by the Tories. Pay would increase for public sector workers, that is for those that were not transferred to private firms through outsourcing. However, the growing pay differentials of the 1980s and 1990s between public and private sector employees was largely unaffected. The public sector has become a central battle ground of New Labour under Blair. It is already shaping up in similar ways to characterise the Brown administration.

New Labour’s celebration of choice and of the consumer-citizen is likely to remain central to the ongoing programme of welfare reforms; not least that such a figure is central to the government’s vision of a ‘modern’ welfare state. The government has sought to legitimate this on the grounds that it will deliver ‘better’ services and more customer orientated services. Such thinking informs much of the rhetoric that accompanies announcements of ‘modernisation’. However, it is clear that under Brown New Labour is seeking to develop this much further, in no small part through its ‘personalisation’ agenda. Personalisation is now informing important areas of government policy making, taking the emphasis on the individual as consumer to a new level. Perhaps not surprisingly this allows for a greater role for private providers and firms in the development of more personalised services. So, on the one hand, decentralisation and personalisation and, on the other, the further centralisation and concentration of impersonal corporate control over welfare production. This is radically at odds with the demand for ‘bottom-up’ involvement as advanced over the past two decades by service user movements.

The Re-emergence of ‘Political’ Trade Unionism?

In many of the disputes that have taken place in recent years the struggle to preserve wages and conditions, and also for better pay and conditions, has at the same time folded into campaigns to protect public services. Public sector workers and trade unions have played a leading role in campaigns against privatisation, against hospital closure, cuts in local services and so on. In organising to defend the integrity of the NHS, for example, or to save hospitals and other amenities up and down the country, workers and other campaigners have sought to make direct links between privatisation and profits from illness and disadvantage, the erosion of services and attacks on workers pay, employment conditions and jobs.

There are a growing number of examples we can use here to illustrate this. The Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) run a high profile ‘public services not private profit’ campaign (http://pcs.org.uk) while Unison (www.unison.org.uk) have been at the forefront of contesting PFI/PPP projects. Both have involved non-union members and users groups as well as the wider public. Keep our NHS Public (www.keepournhspublic.com) brings together NHS workers, unions and the users of NHS services. Defend Council Housing (www.dch.org.uk) has also mobilised tenants and public sector unions in defence of state provision of affordable housing to rent. ‘Privatisation’, in all its guises, has worked to re-energise debates around health and other public services over the past decade and this has given rise to a large number or more localised campaigns and organisations that fight to prevent hospital closures or reductions in health and other public services.

There is a further dimension to this. As with the Tories, New Labour has inadvertently repoliticised the whole question of welfare and public sector provision in a multitude of ways. One of the most important aspects of this is that the increasing use of PPP/PFI alongside welfare provision by the market, often involving large multinational firms, has brought the question of ‘profits from illness’ onto centre stage. For-profit forms of provision remain highly unpopular. This has contributed to the re-emergence of political unionism, challenging in the process the ‘division’ that has existed until the early 1990s at least between a trade union concern only with ‘bread and butter’ issues such as pay and conditions and not with more ‘political’ matters. Such a divide – which was often more apparent than real and which tended to characterise the union bureaucracy more than ordinary members on the ward, the office or the classroom – now looks seriously dated in the face of New Labour’s political agenda of the past decade. Trade union leaders have also been driven to question the continuing funding of the Labour Party from members’ contributions. We do not have to look far to see union leaders and union-sponsored campaigns making direct links between pay and conditions; of the importance of good quality services for those in need; for a well funded and free at point of delivery NHS and issues of progressive taxation, pensions; and, in not a few instances, between ‘cut-backs’ and service withdrawals alongside massive expenditure on wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Campaigns for global social justice and for environmental sustainability similarly fold into the opposition to public sector modernisation.

New Labour is being challenged ‘head on’ here: its entire social and economic agenda is under serious dispute and questioning. The challenge here is also to the Third Way project itself and New Labour’s neo-liberal underpinnings. Such campaigns frequently bring together the ‘producers’ and ‘consumers’ of welfare in ways that are far removed from claims of an unbridgeable gulf between the demands of each. Among New Labour politicians and not a few policy makers and academics, the idea that public service workers may take action to defend both their jobs as well as services to a wide spectrum of UK society including the most impoverished is something that is all too readily ignored or otherwise obscured from view. It also overlooks the point that public sector workers and their families are also themselves consumers of welfare. In another sense the growing campaigns of resistance to New Labour’s public sector modernisation and welfare reforms also illustrate that far from being ‘passive recipients of welfare’, clients and users can and do take action to both defend and to fight for public service provision.

The Shape of Things to Come?

The significance of the struggles that have taken place across the public and welfare sectors since New Labour came to power in 1997 should not be underestimated – though all too often this is exactly what has happened. Against the general downturn in strike activity and in other forms of ‘industrial action’ during the past twenty or so years, the re-emergence of widespread, large-scale and continuing action in the public sector shows that oft repeated assumptions and claims that workers would no longer struggle or resist in the ‘new’ conditions of the early twenty first century to be very wide of the mark. This is not to be taken that we are implying that there is a return to the heady days of the 1970s and 1980s but simply to counter the general rejection of the capacity of labour to resist that has been a stock in trade for much academic and wider commentary in recent years.

The important point of all of this for us is that contrary to the myriad of assorted ‘end of class’ or ‘death of class’ proclamations of the past few decades⁸, public sector workers in the UK today now comprise some of the key sections of the working class. Our image of the working class is constantly changing as the workforce is replenished as more ethnically diverse, with more recognised women workers, and from recent movements of migrant labour. Welfare workers are just as representative of this shift, indeed more so as it employs women in greater proportions and traditionally recruits from abroad to occupy positions in the welfare state that are difficult to fill from the local labour market. Women, migrants and ethnic minority groups are of course often found at the very bottom of the welfare industry hierarchy.

Finally, and against much of the doom and gloom that pervades the discussion and analysis of neo-liberalism and of New Labour there are different ways of thinking about the developments and events which are unfolding and of the potential opportunities for the future. Against neo-liberalism’s central drive to corrode and erode social and political solidarity, new forms of struggle and resistance have emerged and are emerging – locally, nationally and multinationally. Certainly this is not undertaken in conditions of their own choosing but in active response to welfare restructuring. Welfare workers and their unions are challenging the fundamental neoliberal premises advanced by New Labour using tried-and-tested forms of action as well as new, imaginative participatory strategies with their allies in the wider social and welfare movements.

Alex Law is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Abertay Dundee; Gerry Mooney is Senior Lecturer in Social Policy and Staff Tutor, Faculty of Social Sciences at The Open University. They are editors of ‘New Labour/Hard Labour? Restructuring and Resistance Inside the Welfare Industry’, Policy Press, 2007, available from www.policypress.org.uk

Notes

1. Healthcare Commission (2007) Investigation into outbreaks of Clostridium difficile at Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHSTrust, London: Commission for Healthcare Audit and Inspection: http://www.healthcarecommission.org.uk/_db/_documents/Maidstone_and_Tunbridge_Wells_investigation_report_Oct_2007.pdf

2. Fairbrother, P. and Poynter, G. (2001) ‘State Restructuring: Managerialism, Marketisation and the Implications for Labour’, Competition and Change, 5: 311-333, p. 319

3. Sennett, R. (2006) The Culture of the New Capitalism, London: Yale University Press.

4. Clarke, J., Newman, J., Smith, N., Vidler, E. and Westmarland, L. (2007) Creating Citizen-Consumers: Changing Publics and Changing Public Services, London: Sage.

5. Blair, T. (2004) ‘Choice, Excellent and Equality’, Speech at Guys and St Thomas’ Hospital, London, June 23.

6. See Chapter 1, Mooney and Law (2007) New Labour/Hard Labour? Restructuring and Resistance inside the Welfare Industry, Bristol: Policy Press.

7. Mooney, G. and McCafferty, T. (2005) “Only looking after the weans’? The Scottish Nursery Nurses Strike, 2004’, Critical Social Policy, 25, 2: 223-239.

8. See Ferguson, I., Lavalette, M. and Mooney, G. (2002) Rethinking Welfare, London: Sage.

New Labour Reframes Poverty

Tim Holmes — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 19:59:06 +0000

New Labour and the Politics of Aspiration

Speaking at a one-day conference of the Social Market Foundation in London on April 30, 2007, Jim Murphy, New Labour MP for East Renfrewshire and Minister of State in the Department for Work and Pensions talked of the need to ‘reframe the poverty debate’.(1) In this speech and in a related pamphlet and newspaper article(2) Murphy strives to forge a distinction between what he terms ‘conservation’ on the one hand and ‘aspiration’ on the other. Aspiration, he claims, is the key to forging a new era of social progress and political change. Further public services ‘reform’, the promotion of ‘choice’ and developing ‘personalised’ services are all pinpointed as key elements in this process. For Murphy this politics of aspiration is key to developing New Labour’s approach to poverty which, to use his terms, must replace ‘the politics of charity’ which he sees as dominating the discussion of poverty in the UK today.

We will return to Murphy’s arguments a little later but it is highlighted here to draw attention to some of the ways in which the question of poverty is being reconstructed by New Labour and an assortment of journalists, academics and social and political commentators today. Without wishing to give this reconstruction a sense of coherence and organisation that it hardly merits, nonetheless it is increasingly evident that poverty is back on the agenda, but back on it in particular and very worrying ways. Of course at one level poverty has, with the exception of the period of Tory government during the 1980s and 1990s, rarely been removed from the political agenda – even if this is overtaken under New Labour with an emphasis on ‘social exclusion’. In addition, arguably there is little that is new in this the latest ‘rediscovery’ of, and rethinking around, poverty. ‘Poverty’ is one of those issues that is always present, even if it often takes the form of an ‘absent presence’, that is an existing reality but one that does not always merit the attention it deserves. Despite repeated efforts by some anti-poverty campaigners, activists and academics,(3) the question of poverty did not feature prominently in the recent Scottish Elections for example, largely sidelined along with many other important social and economic issues by the overwhelming and at times stifling debate on the question of ‘the constitution’.

Poverty has long been an ‘essentially contested’ notion provoking numerous debates, arguments, controversies over definition, measurement and meaning as well as around the policy responses to it. Running through all of these debates one maxim tends to stand out: how poverty is defined, understood and talked about says much about the shape and nature of any policy and political response to it. And there is mounting evidence, both at UK and at Scottish levels that there is a coming together of some very regressive ideas and arguments which are helping to ‘reframe’ the poverty debate today in ways that should concern all of us who are interested in pursuing a more socially just agenda in contemporary Scotland. By this I mean not the New Labour neo-liberal vision of social justice premised on a celebration of the market but an entirely different conception and understanding of social justice that argues for social and economic equality through an attack on wealth and vested interests.

‘The Poor’ as a ‘Problem Population’

The assumption that many readers of Variant will surely share – that discussions of poverty and inequality should start from questions of social justice, of fairness and of compassion – is often far removed from the tone and approach that some academics, social commentators and politicians (and not always right-wing politicians at that) bring to the debate. Alongside campaigning groups from the poor, activists, trade unionists, academics and socialists have long had to battle the idea that the poor are a ‘problem’ population, a population that is in some way out of step with the ‘mainstream’ of UK society. Such sentiments have long featured in accounts and explanations of poverty and, arguably, since the 1980s in particular, there has been something of a shift in political attitudes to poverty, both across different countries and at a global level, which regards poor people in some way as deficient, as contributing to their own precarious situation. While the nature, extent and intensity of such views vary between place and over time, we do not have to look far to find claims that ‘the poor’ represent a ‘danger’ not only to themselves, but also to ‘wider’ society. In each period over the past century and a half, when poverty and inequality has increased, as since the late 1970s and early 1980s not only is poverty rediscovered, but this is accompanied by attempts to construct ‘the problem’ not as one of poverty but of poor people, their behaviours, lifestyles, cultures and inadequacies of a multitude of differing kinds. How the question of poverty is understood and how poor people are talked of and labelled says everything about the policies that will be developed in response. Seeing the poor and disadvantaged as ‘at risk’ or as ‘vulnerable’, requiring (more) state support stands in sharp contrast to viewing the poor as some kind of ‘problem’ group or ‘underclass’ that necessitates strict management.

It is important to be aware that the history of the study of poverty is characterised by the use of a language that has tended to describe ‘the poor’ often in the most condemning and derogatory of ways. From a concern with the ‘dangerous’ and ‘disreputable’ poor in the nineteenth century through to ‘problem families’, ‘dysfunctional families/communities’ and the ‘underclass’ and ‘socially excluded’ of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, poor people have all too frequently been talked about (and rarely talked with) in the most derogatory of ways.(4) Labels such as ‘underclass’, ‘hard to reach’, ‘welfare dependent’ as well as some uses of the notion of ‘the socially excluded’ are stigmatising and mobilise normative ways of thinking of poverty and inequality that constructs ‘the poor’ and disadvantaged almost as a distinctive group of people living ‘on’ or ‘beyond’ the ‘margins’ of society. In the process this language works to distance ‘them’ from ‘us’, the ‘mainstream’ of society, ‘normal’, ‘hard working’, ‘responsible’ citizens.(5) Such language has become a stock in trade for many New Labour and Conservative politicians today – and not a few academics and journalists also!

The Re-emergence of ‘Culture’-Centred Explanations of Poverty

There are a number of different ways of thinking of poverty that rely on what we could generally term a culture-centred perspective, that is an account that starts from and revolves around the individual and or which focus on the production and reproduction of particular cultural and behavioural norms and ways of living that work in some way to keep poor people in poverty. Among the most well known of such ways of thinking are explanations which focus on ‘cultures of poverty’ or ‘cycles of deprivation’.(6) Culture, in this context, is being used to refer to a system of values, norms and attitudes that are regarded as normal for a particular group. The culture of poverty thesis claims that a set of values are being passed through families and across generations that prevent poor people and poor families ‘escaping’ from poverty. This approach became influential among both politicians and policy-makers in the United States during the 1960s and early 1970s as a means of explaining the persistence of poverty among black Americans. But it is a discourse that has travelled far and wide, albeit with some modification. It was popularised in the UK as a ‘cycle of deprivation’ in the 1970s by the Conservative politician, Keith Joseph, who argued that the persistence of poverty in the context of general economic growth, as in the 1950s and 1960s, was the consequence of the ‘dysfunctionality’ of the poor family. In an argument that was to foreground much of the Conservative thinking that was to emerge later in the 1970s and 1980s such poverty, Joseph claimed, would not be addressed through increased benefits, but by a transformation in the values and behaviour of the poor. Such thinking has also been developed and further popularised by the American social commentator, Charles Murray, in his account of ‘welfare dependency’ and a developing ‘underclass’ in the United States and in the UK during the 1980s and 1990s. While the idea of an underclass has been around for some considerable time in the UK, having being used in the mid-1960s and early 1970s to refer to poverty among ethnic minority groups in some of Britain’s urban areas, it re-emerged in a new and more potent form in the 1990s thanks largely – though not exclusively – to the work of Murray. When visiting Britain in 1999 as a guest of The Sunday Times to investigate if an underclass existed in this country, Murray left readers in no doubt of the ‘problems’ that the underclass posed for UK society:

“I arrived in Britain earlier this year …a visitor from a plague area, come to see whether the disease is spreading and (my) conclusions were as dramatic as they were predictable: Britain has a growing population of working-aged, healthy people who live in a different world from other Britons, who are raising their children to live in it, and whose values are now contaminating the life of entire neighbourhoods.”(7)

While widely criticised during the 1990s and to some extent overtaken by the idea of social exclusion, the ideology of an underclass has not disappeared without a fight and indeed has re-emerged of late in different contexts. Following the impact of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans in late August 2005, for instance, Murray once more takes the opportunity to highlight what he sees as the most pressing ‘social problem’ in the contemporary United States, the ‘underclass’:

“Watching the courage of ordinary low-income people as they deal with the aftermath of Katrina and Rita, it is hard to decide which politicians are more contemptible – Democrats who are rediscovering poverty and blaming it on George W. Bush, or Republicans who are rediscovering poverty and claiming that the government can fix it. Both sides are unwilling to face reality: We haven’t rediscovered poverty, we have rediscovered the underclass; the underclass has been growing during all the years that people were ignoring it, including the Clinton years; and the programs politicians tout as solutions are a mismatch for the people who constitute the problem. ... Other images show us the face of the hard problem: those of the looters and thugs, and those of inert women doing nothing to help themselves or their children. They are the underclass.”(8)

In this one quote many of the recurring features of underclass explanations are laid bare: a distinction is drawn, in a language not too dissimilar from Blair and New Labour, between the ‘hard working’ and the ‘inert’; crime and disorder are flagged as particular concerns; inadequate parenting (on the part of mothers if not fathers) is given attention and implicit here, if not in other responses to Katrina that mobilised underclass ways of thinking,(9) state policies (and in particular welfare policies) are viewed as an important part of ‘the problem’ in that they contribute to the ‘growth of the underclass’.

Reframing Poverty in Scotland Today

While explicit references to the existence of an underclass rarely feature in discussions of poverty in Scotland today, we should not be mistaken in believing as a result that the influence of such thinking has completely waned. Indeed, as highlighted at the outset of this article, we can only too quickly locate ‘underclass’ and other cultural-based ways of thinking. To illustrate this let us first of all return to Mr Murphy and to his politics of aspiration and his view that we need to ‘reframe the poverty debate’:

“If we are to continue to make real progress we need to reframe the debate on poverty. We should also reflect on whether government should approach poverty differently. In the past we sometimes spoke of the politics of aspiration as though it was distinct from the politics of poverty, but the politics of aspiration and the politics of poverty are two sides of the same coin. ….There has been real and significant progress in tackling poverty in our society. …. Despite this improvement, entrenched pockets of deprivation still undermine the progress we have made. We have not yet managed to crack the cycle of intergenerational poverty. Inequalities in aspiration of parents drive inequalities in attainment for their children at schools. The aspirations of poorer children differ from those who are better off – from the presents children ask for on their birthday, to the careers they want when they grow up. If a boy’s parent is convicted of a criminal offence, he is twice as likely to be convicted himself. Relative generational mobility has fallen over time….. Today we are paying the price for the policy failures of previous decades. The cycle of mobility, even as its peak, has been painfully slow.” (emphasis added)(10)

Elsewhere he argues that the task for New Labour is to anticipate

“…the almost limitless aspirations of the many and lifting the near-fatalistic intergenerational poverty of aspiration of the few. We should also have a renewed confidence in eradicating poverty by transforming and reframing the consent to go further. And we must not falter at the thought of further transformation of public services.” (emphasis added)(11)

I hope that readers will forgive the inclusion of a lengthy extract from Murphy here(12) but these do show in stark terms some of the important ways in which poverty is now being approached by the emerging post-Blair new New Labour leadership. Murphy proceeds here to talk of the need to develop a ‘modern form of social solidarity’ ‘based upon a renewed sense of progressive self-interest’.(13) There are some significant pointers here to the likely future direction of New Labour policy-making in relation to poverty. ‘Traditional’ (for which read Old Labour/post-War social democratic) approaches to social solidarity are immediately ruled out in favour of a ‘modern’ approach that focuses on ‘aspirations’ and attitudes. In turn any sense of redistribution as a means of addressing poverty and inequality is also ruled out. The idea that we can have something called ‘progressive self-interest’ (or even ‘growth with fairness’) must surely compete with ‘competition and cohesion’ for the top slot in New Labour’s ever lengthening list of contradictory ‘buzz-phrases’. But this must send a shudder through those who are campaigning to have poverty, understood in relation to wealth and inequality, at the centre of social policy making.

Murphy’s arguments might be dismissed as mere pamphleteering, as blue (as opposed to red!) -skies thinking, ideas that will not be reflected in policy outcomes. But there are two responses to this which means that we should take his ideas seriously. The first is that New Labour is already processing apace with ‘personalisation’ agendas which are increasingly informing social and public services delivery across the UK now.(14) In other words further ‘reforms’ of public services and the even-greater emphasis on the consumer (‘progressive self-interest’!) and on choice is happening now! The second reason for being cautious in simply dismissing such thinking is that it shares in important respects what I would call here ‘ways of thinking’ about poverty, disadvantage and inequality which are emerging in other social commentary in Scotland today; ways of thinking that echo in some respects the cultures of poverty theories of the 1970s and other ‘culture-centred’ explanations. These overlap to some extent with the growth in socio-psychological explanations of ‘well-being’.

Regular readers of Variant will have come across critical examinations of the growth in the ‘happiness’ industry and emerging ‘therapy’ culture in Scotland in previous articles by Alex Law and Colin Clark in 2005 and 2006.(15) Among other developments Clark notes in particular the growing influence, at least on the ex-First Minister Jack McConnell and the previous Scottish Executive, of ideas generated from the Scottish Centre for Confidence and Well-Being which would have us believe that it is a ‘crisis of confidence’ (reflected in the prevalence of a ‘dependency culture’ across parts of Scottish society) which is holding ordinary Scots ‘back’ from achieving their potential and therefore from prospering like the ‘rest of us’!(16) In such thinking any idea that inequalities of wealth, income, power and life chances play a role in shaping people’s lives is immediately kicked into touch. As Law has powerfully argued, this reflects the neo-liberal agenda which is being rolled out in the devolved Scotland.

It would be mistaken to think that there is no awareness at all on the part of New Labour and among politicians of the other main political parties in Scotland that structural factors contribute to the production and reproduction of poverty. However, in some respects these are acknowledged but then immediately dismissed or at best ‘sidelined’ as factors ‘beyond’ the control of politicians and of the government (both in Scotland and at UK level), such as long-term social, economic and demographic change or, more often, ‘globalisation’. A focus on individual deficiencies, family ‘dysfunctioning’ and assorted behavioural traits of one kind or another immediately becomes central. Adopting a structural approach of the kind that locates poverty in the context of class inequalities, exploitation and oppression does not even begin to feature in many of the dominant understandings of poverty.

Some examples of the way in which structural factors are recognised but simultaneously relegated have emerged in recent months each privileging ‘non-material’ factors! Reflecting on a Report from the Office of National Statistics that showed Glasgow men to be twice as likely to die from the effects of alcohol compared with anyone else, broadcaster and journalist Lesley Riddoch in a commentary in The Scotsman in February 2007 speaks of the “problems of working-class Glasgow” and of a culture of excess enjoyed by “a demoralised underclass.”(17) Again in February at conference on ‘Transcending Poverties’ in Glasgow, organised by the Royal Society of Edinburgh (and supported by the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland), previewed in a special edition of The Herald’s Society supplement which was entirely devoted to the theme of poverty, there is repeated references to the need for the poor to take ‘responsibility’ for their own well-being, to spend their money on things other than cigarettes and alcohol. Prominent Scottish historian Tom Devine captured the thrust of this conference arguing that,

“This conference is important because it moves outside the orthodoxy of improving aspects such as employment, area regeneration or health campaigns and tries to look at the extent to which there must be cultural and indeed even spiritual underpinnings for this malaise.”(18)

He continues:

“We can examine why the majority with means are unwilling to be taxed. If you are dealing with a straightforward transfer of surplus from the better-off to the less well-off there is always the possibility of dependency. Redistribution of wealth in itself might not be the cure and simply perpetuate the malaise. I don’t think the old methods of taxing the rich to help the poor will really work.”(19)

In a related article on February 23, Herald journalist Alf Young, alongside castigating what he termed the ‘poverty industry’, chimed with Devine’s arguments by claiming that:

“Redistributist fiscal policies have their part to play. But we also need to rebuild the non-material pathways that were open to people like me nearly half a century ago. Otherwise the poor will always be with us.”(20)

Another Kind of Reframing is Possible – and Urgently Needed!

It is deeply worrying that after decades of important research and much debate around the underlying causes of poverty that anti-poverty campaigners across the UK today find themselves once more facing deeply regressive ideas and thinking, some example of which have been highlighted above. Claims of a ‘malaise’ (and why is it that the poor are regarded as a malaise – are the rich not a ‘malaise’?) – or of suggestions that ‘the poor will always be with us’ echo 19th century commentary on poverty; ideas of ‘dependency’ (again of the poor not of the wealthy) as well as reflecting cultural and underclass thinking. However, this shift to a more explicit individual and cultural focus fits well with the renewed claims of New Labour Ministers that “only work ends poverty” and that “benefits do not lift people out of poverty in this country, and it has never been the case that they do.”(21) And such thinking also finds a ready home in the celebration of the market that lies at the centre of the entire New Labour project. Jack McConnell, in his final weeks as First Minster spoke of his “top 10 challenges” to “accelerate progress to end poverty.” There will be no prizes for guessing what was number one on the list – “we must continue with a stable environment for business to prosper…We need a stable, growing economy, with minimum risk, for business to flourish”!(22)

The challenges facing poverty campaigners are arriving from different directions as we have seen and these are coming together in a queasy mix of neo-liberal, individual, cultural centred and pseudo-psychological ramblings. Against this we do need to reframe the poverty debate, yes once again, by emphasising the structural factors that generate poverty and disadvantage; by highlighting at each and every opportunity the class inequalities and unequal and exploitative social relations which so permeate Scottish and UK society today. This also involves ‘moving upstream’ in both our focus and analysis to concentrate more on the reproduction of wealth and power among a privileged minority of the rich. It is shameful that in a period when the gulf between rich and poor is reaching levels unsurpassed for well over a century that so little attention is devoted to the activities of the rich. This means, above all, analysing the class dynamics of society today,(23) challenging the uncritical celebrations of market-based economic and social policies and fighting for a more socially just Scotland.

Gerry Mooney is Senior Lecturer in Social Policy and Staff Tutor, Faculty of Social Sciences, The Open University in Scotland. He is co-editor with Gill Scott of Exploring Social Policy in the ‘New’ Scotland (Policy Press, 2005), co-editor with John McKendrick, John Dickie and Peter Kelly of Poverty in Scotland 2007, London Child Poverty Action Group 2007 (available from www.cpag.org.uk/publications) and with Alex Law of New Labour/Hard Labour? Restructuring and Resistance Inside the Welfare Industry (Policy Press, forthcoming October 2007).

Notes

1. For speech access www.jimmurphy.labour.co.uk

2. ‘Jim Murphy, ‘Progressive Self-Interest – the Politics of Poverty and Aspiration’, in Social Market Foundation, The Politics of Aspiration, London, SMF, 2007 available at www.smf.co.uk see also James Purnell and Jim Murphy, ‘The battle lines are aspiration versus conservation’, The Times, March 26, 2007.

3. See for example John McKendrick, Gerry Mooney, John Dickie and Peter Kelly (eds) Poverty in Scotland 2007, London: Child Poverty Action Group.

4. For a general discussion of these issues see Dee Cook, Criminal and Social Justice, London, Sage, 2006.

5. See Jock Young, The Vertigo of Late Modernity, Sage, 2007.

6. See Ruth Lister, Poverty, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2004 and John Welshman, ‘The Cycle of Deprivation and the Concept of the Underclass’, Benefits, 3, 1, October, 2002, 199-205.

7. Charles Murray, The Emerging British Underclass, London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1990, p.4

8. Charles Murray, ‘The Hallmark of the Underclass’, The Wall Street Journal, October 2, 2005, www.opinionjournal.com (accessed January 16, 2007).

9. For a comprehensive and well argued discussion of neo-liberal responses to Hurricane Katrina see Jamie Peck, ‘Neoliberal Hurricane: Who Framed New Orleans?’ in Panitch, L. and Leys, C. (eds) Coming to Terms with Nature: Socialist Register 2007, London: Merlin Press: 102-129.

10. ‘Jim Murphy, ‘Progressive Self-Interest – the Politics of Poverty and Aspiration’, in Social Market Foundation, The Politics of Aspiration, London, SMF, 2007, p.14-15.

11. Ibid. p.19

12. An extract which contains some very contentious claims regarding New Labour’s success in tackling poverty and addressing inequality. See McKendrick, Mooney, Dickie and Kelly, 2007 op cit, for a more ‘measured’ assessment.

13. Ibid. p15.

14. For a critique of such agendas see Iain Ferguson, ‘Increasing User Choice or Privatizing Risk? The Antinomies of Personalization’, British Journal of Social Work, 2007.

15. Alex Law, ‘The Conformist Imagination: Think-Tankery versus Utopian Scotland’, Variant, 23, Summer, 2005 and Colin Clark, ‘From Self to Structure: challenging the ‘happiness industry’, Variant, 27, Winter, 2006.

16. Carol Craig, The Scot’s Crisis of Confidence, Edinburgh, Big Thinking, 2003.

17. Lesley Riddoch, ‘A City Revelling in Denial and Altered Reality’, The Scotsman, February 26, 2007.

18. Tom Devine, ‘Glasgow could be a laboratory to test how we tackle the ills of modern society’, The Herald Society, January 30, 2007, p.10.

19. Ibid.

20. Alf Young, ‘A paucity of ideas for how to tackle poverty’, The Herald, February 23, 2007. See also response by Peter Kelly of The Poverty Alliance, ‘Low pay and predatory lenders are the power behind the real poverty industry’, The Herald Society, March 6, 2007. Both can be accessed at: http://www.povertyalliance.org/html/publications/pressReleases/press.asp

21. Jim Murphy, speaking at a DWP organised international conference on welfare reform, London, March 26, 2007. See Nicholas Timmins and Andrew Taylor, ‘Only work ends poverty, says minister’, Financial Times, March 26, 2007.

22. Jack McConnell, Speech on Poverty in Scotland at the Launch of Poverty in Scotland 2007, Glasgow, March 2, 2007.

23. See for example Alex Law and Gerry Mooney, “We’ve Never Had it So Good’: The ‘Problem’ of the Working Class in the Devolved Scotland’, Critical Social Policy, 26, 3, 2006, pp.523-542.

Smoke and Mirrors

Alex Doherty — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 18:13:14 +0000

Smoke and Mirrors: Fighting Housing Privatisation, Edinburgh Against Stock Transfer (EAST) (2006) (DVD: 45 minutes) Edinburgh: Pilton Video (Cost £5 plus p & p available from Pilton Video, 30 Ferry Road Avenue, Edinburgh, EH4 4BA, www.piltonvideo.org)

Have no fears! This is not another expensively produced housing stock transfer promotional film but a film that captures the resistance of tenants in Edinburgh to housing privatisation in 2005.

Regular readers of the Scottish Left Review will know that privatisation has figured prominently in a number of previous issues, especially in recent years. And a key plank in the Scottish Executive’s privatisation programme has been it’s commitment to housing stock transfer across Scotland. Housing stock transfer, that is the transfer of council owned and managed housing stock (what used to be called ‘council houses’) to ‘registered social landlords’ has been the main component of Executive public housing policy since 1999. Arguably the drive to remove what remains of Scotland’s depleted council housing stock, which has decreased by over 65 per cent since 1979, from councils – and public political accountability – has surpassed a similar programme of transfers across England and Wales which serves to remind us, if indeed we need more reminding, that ‘Scotland’ is not being ‘protected’, as some would have us believe, from the more radical aspects of Blairite and Third Way ideology.

Housing has long been central to political and social agitation in Scotland. From the Clydeside Rent Strikes of the First World War and early 1920s, through to squatters and other struggles in the post-1945 era, housing – and the demand for decent and affordable public housing to rent has been to the fore in Scottish politics. Housing stock transfer, in some respects, represents the latest episode in this long history. It has re-ignited the politics of housing in Scotland; it has refocused attention on the question of affordable housing provision for a sizeable proportion of the population of Scotland today. It has also called into question once more the nature of New Labour’s UK-wide programme of public sector ‘modernisation’ and the wholesale restructuring of welfare provision. And let’s make no mistake, council housing has played a crucial role in the development of state welfare/social policy in Britain during the course of the twentieth century.

These issues provide the background context for this excellent film which explores opposition to Edinburgh City Council’s plans during 2005 to transfer 23,000 council houses to the City of Edinburgh Housing Association (CESA). Focusing on the campaign by Edinburgh Against Stock Transfer (EAST) to defend council housing in Edinburgh, the film presents many of the key issues that lie at the centre of the stock transfer debate across the country. Not only is it in Edinburgh that tenants and other campaigning groups have argued that the case for transfer has often been high on expensive and glossy promotion, usually involving well known ‘media personalities’ (and in Edinburgh Sally Magnusson joins the list of those who have featured on promotional films), and low on making open to public scrutiny many of the key funding and other policy implications of transfer. ‘Smoke and mirrors’ neatly describes not only how housing transfer has often been promoted – but also privatisation in all its diverse forms.

Much of the focus of housing policy and housing debate in Scotland has focused on the particularities of Glasgow and its acute housing problems. That this film focuses on Edinburgh gives it added weight, I feel. Coming on the back of the decision by Glasgow tenants to vote for transfer in 2002 there was expectation, not least at Scottish Executive and local government levels, that tenants in Edinburgh and elsewhere in Scotland would follow suit. However, the ongoing controversy around transfer in Glasgow was an important factor in persuading Edinburgh tenants to reject transfer. They voted by 53 per cent to 47 per cent to reject transfer in a ballot in December 2006. The ‘Glasgow Factor’ features strongly in this film and incidentally this was identified by Edinburgh Council’s housing department following a post-ballot survey as a key issue in the no-vote.

Since the Edinburgh no-vote, two other ballots of tenants, in Stirling and in Renfrewshire, have resulted in no-votes. In each area the same issues prevail: that transfer is privatisation in all but name, it removes public housing from local democratic political control and leads to higher rents (and profits for financial institutions!) (see Defend Council Housing, 2006 – www.defendcouncilhousing.org.uk).

This is a partisan film and is all the better for it. It does not offer some kind of bland ‘balanced’ account of transfer but it clearly on the side of those rejecting transfer. Having seen many of the promotional videos produced at great cost by local authorities up and down the country, this DVD offers a range of different and crucially important insights on the transfer process. In this respect it has relevance well beyond Edinburgh and Scotland. If I had one criticism to make it is on the Edinburgh ‘context’. It is clear from the film that transfer in Edinburgh would have seen valuable chunks of council owned land sold off to the private sector for next to nothing (and each housing unit was only valued around £900). In places such as Leith, where there is great demand for land for expensive ‘upmarket’ housing, there are obvious attractions to developers here. Yet that Edinburgh currently represents a ‘boomtown’ for property developers, banks and financiers remains somewhat implicit. The declining quality and poor conditions of the council-owned stock stands in increasingly sharp contrast to the accumulation of wealth not least in terms of property elsewhere in the City. Edinburgh’s tenants, in rejecting stock transfer, were not only putting one over on the Scottish Executive in its own ‘backyard’ but also drawing attention to the yawning gap that New Labour is presiding over across the UK. This film is a must for all of those who are resisting New Labour’s privatisation agenda across the UK.