Telling stories of 21st century welfare: The UK Coalition government and the neo-liberal discourse of worklessness and dependency

Abstract

Policy documents are a useful source for understanding the privileging of particular ideological and policy preferences (Scrase and Ockwell, 2010) and how the language and imagery may help to construct society’s assumptions, values and beliefs. This article examines how the UK Coalition government’s 2010 Green Paper, 21^st Century Welfare, and the White Paper, Universal Credit: Welfare that Works, assist in constructing a discourse about social security that favours a renewal and deepening of neo-liberalization in the context of threats to its hegemony. The documents marginalize the structural aspects of persistent unemployment and poverty by transforming these into individual pathologies of benefit dependency and worklessness. The consequence is that familiar neo-liberal policy measures favouring the intensification of punitive conditionality and economic rationality can be portrayed as new and innovative solutions to address Britain’s supposedly broken society and restore economic competitiveness.

Keywords

Coalition government neo-liberalism poverty unemployment welfare reform

Our antiquated welfare system has become a complicated and inflexible mess. It has been unable to respond to our evolving job market and changing nature of our workforce. Society has changed but the benefits system has failed to change with it. So it is time to bring welfare into the 21st Century. (Iain Duncan Smith, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, 2010a)

Introduction

A discursive strategy delineates what is, and is not, socially, politically, and economically acceptable behaviour and/or feasible action, transmitting favoured assumptions and values whilst obscuring vested interests and constraining opportunities for contestation by competing social forces and alternative ideological and policy paradigms (Oliver and Pemberton, 2004). Policymakers and those advancing alternative viewpoints expend considerable energy maintaining or challenging the discursive framing of policy issues. Owing to the salience of unemployment, poverty, inequality, public expenditure and economic growth as contested public policy issues, the reform of social security and labour market programmes is a key battleground in the construction of policy discourses. Drawing distinctions between the deserving and undeserving poor and popular and elite discourses of an underclass have long been present in social policy (Dean and Taylor-Gooby, 1992: 30). The advent of the neo-liberal counter-revolution in the 1970s (Standing, 2009: 57), however, created the intellectual and policy space for supporters of liberalization to champion behavioural explanations of poverty and unemployment, reframe their popular representation and reshape the policy response of politicians. The consequence is that social security is no longer recognized as a welcome form of collective protection that ameliorates risks and/or compensates individuals for the unequal distribution of resources and opportunities within society. Rather it is recast as an active agent in the moulding of individuals to the needs of economic policy (see Rys, 2010). In the ‘liberal welfare regimes’ of the US, UK, New Zealand and Australia, in particular, this has been eased by the ongoing discursive reconstruction of poverty and unemployment as manifestations of personal failure and poor social behaviour, facilitated by expensive benefit payments that make few demands of recipients, encouraging passivity and dependency on the state (Kahu and Morgan, 2007; Cassiman, 2008; Mayer, 2008; Archer, 2009; Stryker and Wald, 2009). As Prideaux (2010: 299) has argued, such a recasting of social security has been evident in the approach of successive UK governments, be they Conservative or New Labour. Intensification of conditionality and economic rationality in welfare reinforce messages of personal responsibility, self motivation and the superiority of market rationality, which are presented as an economic and moral imperative if growth in the British economy is to be restored, the budget deficit reduced, and a broken society fixed (Conservative Party, 2010: 13; HM Treasury, 2010a, 2010b, 2011). This article contends that in a context where economic instability threatens the legitimacy of individual explanations for unemployment and hardship, the crafting and selling of a repackaged neo-liberal vision of welfare reform is an exercise in misdirection and revivification. The UK Coalition government discourse on social security, poverty and unemployment seeks to renew the validity of behavioural explanations for social problems and tie this to the supposed failure of ‘statist’ intervention under New Labour. Public attention is diverted from a failing neo-liberal model of political economy whilst long-standing elite preferences for the hallmarks of neo-liberalism – a smaller state and the market reorganization of public services – are repackaged as bold new policy developments.

To achieve this, the ‘stories’ told in the UK by the Conservative– Liberal Coalition government’s 2010 Green Paper, 21^st Century Welfare, and White Paper, Universal Credit: Welfare that Works, form a central part of their discursive strategy for establishing as accepted wisdom three themes in social security reform. First, that Britain is racked by worklessness and a lack of personal and social responsibility. Second, and revisiting a theme central to the Conservative administrations of the 1980s and 90s (see Dean and Taylor-Gooby, 1992), a culture of dependency exists that is supported by costly, yet ineffective and damaging state intervention. Together these two themes create the discursive space for the third theme to be advanced, essentially that the Coalition’s welfare reforms are a necessary replacement for the outdated statist command and control of New Labour, which will address social problems and align social security with the needs of a modern economy (Norman, 2007: 9; Duncan Smith, 2010a, 2010b). Yet, whilst there is a greater determination to reduce the value and scope of benefits paid to those in and out of work (Wiggan, 2011: 34) Coalition policy, like New Labour’s, emphasizes economic rationality and builds on New Labour’s development of a more punitive welfare system (Barker and Lamble, 2009: 330; Grabham and Smith, 2010: 85).

What’s the story? Personal and state failure as the cause of poverty and unemployment

Under New Labour, the Prime Minister Tony Blair, and his successor Gordon Brown, utilized government consultative Green Papers and policy planning White Papers to communicate a commitment to welfare reform based on the modernization of state support, so as to encourage personal responsibility and activate out of work benefit recipients into the labour market. Fairclough’s (2010a: 171–201) analysis of New Labour’s 1998 welfare reform Green Paper, New Ambitions for our Country: A New Contract for Welfare, details how language and stylistic presentation in the document convey a message that an individual’s choices affect their risk of poverty and unemployment. Individuals must be supported to overcome barriers to labour market participation, but must also take greater responsibility for entering the labour market, facing sanction if they fail to avail of new opportunities. This was a theme throughout the New Labour years and set the context for reforms enacted and speeches made by ministers late during their third term of office (see Purnell, 2008). As Kahu and Morgan (2007: 136) note, one of the key rhetorical functions of any policy text is to establish the author’s mastery of their subject and their right to speak. Achieving this implicitly gives the author’s vision authority and helps to marginalize competing voices that suggest alternative policies. The foreword to the 1998 Green Paper, for example, was provided by then Prime Minister Tony Blair, the highest political authority in the government. This served two discursive purposes. First it signalled the importance of the document and the serious nature of the reforms proposed. Second it offered New Labour the space to draw together seemingly irreconcilable concepts, such as fairness and responsibility or toughness and caring. Through this action New Labour’s unique political identity was affirmed as a departure from previous Conservative and Labour administrations’ policy positions (Fairclough, 2010b: 384). After replacing Tony Blair as leader of the Labour Party and Prime Minister, Gordon Brown continued this trend, providing the foreword to the 2008 Green Paper, No One Written Off: Reforming Welfare to Reward Responsibility (DWP, 2008a) and the White Paper, Raising Expectations and Increasing Support: Reforming Welfare for the Future (DWP, 2008a, 2008b).

In contrast the Coalition Prime Minister, David Cameron, did not contribute a foreword to the Green Paper, 21^st Century Welfare, or the White Paper, Universal Credit: Welfare that Works, despite these setting out the Conservative–Liberal Coalition’s welfare reforms. Despite the ‘decontamination’ of the Conservative Party brand under David Cameron, including acceptance of relative poverty (Lister and Bennett, 2010: 84) and the need to tackle other social problems, which received wide coverage in the UK media (Brindle, 2006; D’Ancona, 2010; Quarmby, 2010; Sieghart, 2010) Cameron was not the lead on this. Instead the ownership of Coalition welfare reform is associated with the current Secretary of State for Work and Pensions and former leader of the Conservative Party, Iain Duncan Smith (IDS). The importance of this political choice should not be underplayed. The Coalition government’s cabinet is dominated by politicians drawn from relatively narrow social strata and who enjoy high personal wealth (Wiggan, 2011: 31). The personal narrative about the awakening of IDS to the problem of poverty and the consequent transformative effect this has had on Conservative attitudes to poverty and unemployment provides a useful hook on which to sell reforms of social security. It pre-empts criticism that punitive conditionality and retrenchment in a period of austerity and rising unemployment show a lack of concern for low income families.

After being deposed as leader of the Conservative Party, Iain Duncan Smith completed a widely reported personal transformation into a champion of the poor, committed to nudging the Conservative Party into developing policies to heal ‘Broken Britain’. As a mark of this commitment and in an indication of what was perceived to be at the root cause of poverty in the UK, Duncan Smith helped establish the right of centre think tank, the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ). The CSJ has focused its attention on examining the relationship between family breakdown, poverty, crime, substance misuse, unemployment and the social security system. A series of reports have been released by the CSJ and the key themes they advance have captured media attention (Chapman, 2009) and disseminated, in terms compatible with traditional conservative approaches to the welfare state, explanations for poverty and unemployment that have proved influential in shaping the Coalition’s approach (see Lister and Bennett, 2010: 85; Ellison, 2011: 56; Wiggan, 2011). The underlying analysis of the CSJ is of Britain suffering from poor and anti-social choices made by individuals, supposedly facilitated by excessive and poorly targeted social expenditure, with social security blamed for fostering fractured social relationships, dysfunctional communities, and the transmission of poverty and unemployment across the generations. In an echo of Beveridge’s five giants, yet an inversion of Beveridge’s emphasis on the role of government in mitigating unpredictable socio-economic risk, the CSJ identifies five pathways to poverty that imply a failure of individual or family behaviour; family breakdown, economic dependency and worklessness, educational failure, addiction and indebtedness (Pickles, 2010: 162).

Financial assistance to protect against income interruption and/or to enable individuals to bring up children or care for other relatives or friends without participating in the labour market thus becomes ‘dependency’ and ‘worklessness’. Worklessness expands the purview of state activation and conditionality beyond the narrow category of ‘unemployment’ to incorporate disabled people and lone parents, justifying their re-commodification, even if only at the margins of the labour market. Meanwhile, the identification of educational failure, addiction and indebtedness as three further pathways to poverty firmly locates deprivation and marginalization as a consequence of individual actions and the quality of social relationships, rather than a feature of inadequate income and/or unemployment due to the business cycle.

The Green Paper, 21^st Century Welfare, and the White Paper, Universal Credit: Welfare that Works, explain the nature of the problem the government perceives (a broken society evidenced by benefit dependency and worklessness) and the appropriate policy response (economic rationality, flexible labour and punitive conditionality). The foreword to each paper is provided by the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Iain Duncan Smith and the release of the 2010 White Paper, Universal Credit, was accompanied by a speech given by Iain Duncan Smith as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions.

For me this programme represents much more than a Ministerial brief or initiative. My passion for welfare reform, and my desire to fight poverty within Government, has been driven by the stark reality of what I’ve encountered. As I travelled to many of Britain’s poorest communities I concluded that tackling poverty had to be about much more than handing out money. It was bigger than that. I could see we were dealing with a part of society that had become detached from the rest of us. People who suffer high levels of family breakdown, educational failure, personal debt – and at the heart of all this is intergenerational worklessness. Only in understanding this can poverty be defeated. (Duncan Smith, 2010a)

Duncan Smith’s avowed personal experiences, commitment to addressing poverty and role in seeking to develop an ‘evidence’ base through the CSJ implicitly enhance his ‘right to speak’ and strengthen the Coalition’s presentation of poverty as a costly problem resulting from the state facilitated intergenerational transmission of deprivation and personal social failure. Long held Conservative arguments that poverty and unemployment are not a consequence of inadequate resources or broader economic and political structures and opportunity sets, but individual actions and behaviour, are reaffirmed without undermining Cameron’s acceptance of poverty as a problem.

The forewords to both the 2010 Green and White Papers reiterate this central aspect of the Coalition’s story about what poverty is, why it occurs and how welfare reform will solve it.

A life on benefits is a poor substitute for a working life but too much of our current system is geared toward maintaining people on benefits rather than helping them to flourish in work; we need reform that tackles the underlying problem of welfare dependency. (DWP, 2010b: 1)

The benefits system has shaped the poorest in a way that has trapped generation after generation in a spiral of dependency and poverty. This has cost the country billions of pounds in cash payments and billions more in meeting the social costs of failure. (DWP, 2010a: 1)

Scholars, such as Connor (2010: 47), have argued that policy documents are often riddled with hidden premises that are used to underpin and reproduce ‘common sense’ notions and/or privilege favoured policy/ideological preferences of the author(s). As a consequence Connor implies that the implicit meaning of key passages of text can be revealed and overall analysis furthered through identifying the principal themes and re-writing the piece of text with these drawn to the fore. Applying this to the above sentences shows an explicit and implicit attempt to bind state and personal failure together and foreground the cause of this in a supposedly costly, ineffective and overly generous benefit system. The passages quoted above implicitly convey the message that: people claim benefits because they are rational economic actors; benefit income is more secure and attractive than employment as incentives to take and sustain paid work are weak; this has created a culture of worklessness and allowed benefit dependency to be passed between generations, afflicting whole families and contributing to excessive and ineffective public expenditure; to tackle poverty we must view benefits not as a solution to insecurity and need related to the business cycle or regional imbalances in employment demand, but as a main cause of the persistence and prevalence of poverty; changes to the balance of financial and punitive incentives in the benefits system will alter behaviour in the direction desired, driving more people into jobs, out of poverty and reducing the costs to the Exchequer.

It is not the intention to suggest reforms of social security incentive structures cannot alter behaviour. The purpose is rather to draw attention to how the Coalition’s diagnosis of the problem of poverty transforms the discourse from inviting a discussion of the adequacy, or not, of social security for raising the living standards of low income families, to one in which the cause of poverty and unemployment is portrayed as originating solely in a culture of out of work benefit dependency. The supposed laxity of state social assistance is emphasized, ignoring the role of macro-economic and political choices regarding the (mal) distribution of resources. Instead behavioural explanations for poverty and unemployment are threaded throughout both documents, with words and phrases such as, ‘trapped’, ‘generation after generation’ and ‘dependency’, deployed. The reader is invited in the 2010 Green Paper to contribute their views to the consultation on welfare reform through a series of questions set out in the document. The first question posed leaves no doubt however as to the parameters within which the subsequent discussion will be conducted; What steps should the Government consider to reduce the cost of the welfare system and reduce welfare dependency and poverty? (DWP, 2008a: 9). This implies that welfare dependency is an unproblematic and uncontested concept; that benefit receipt is inextricably associated with the persistence of poverty; that the government can and should seek to reduce social security spending; that, as a problem, dependency can be addressed whilst spending is reduced and that reduced spending should actually diminish the prevalence or persistence or poverty. The concept of fairness, meanwhile, is utilized to manufacture a dichotomy between those who are said to primarily contribute to, and those said to primarily receive, social security.

Any reforms should also establish a fairer relationship between the people who receive benefits and the people who pay for them and, as crucially, between the people on out of work benefits and the people who work in low paid jobs. (DWP, 2010a: 5)

The complexity of the social security system, with overlapping contributory and non-contributory benefits to protect against uncertainty and/or support extra costs due to specific contingencies such as ill health, disability or caring, is ignored in this simplification. To acknowledge insurance based benefits and contingency, or that these are intersected by issues of class, gender, ethnicity or disability, would undermine the artificial reductionism present in this partial account of how the tax and benefits system operates. What it does, however, is craft welfare reform as restoring a balance in favour of the ‘rights’ of taxpayers, insinuating that currently these are being abused. This recasts social protection as a generous gift from ‘us’ to ‘them’ and transforms fairness from being about the rights of those in need to access material goods or employment, to a justification for strengthening that old principle of less eligibility. Social security as source of social protection is marginalized, with the result that the Coalition’s discourse reinforces existing trends to turn social security into a mechanism for the transmission and achievement of ideological preferences for a smaller and more market orientated state, greater labour market flexibility and the portrayal of out of work benefits as morally corrosive. The meeting of immediate social need through distribution of money is thus, at best a temporary measure, ineffective in the long run, communicating the Conservative Party’s critique of New Labour’s anti-poverty strategy, whilst counter-posing the Coalition’s analysis and response as more sophisticated. A concentration on the role of the state in diminishing the economic signals about what is desirable ‘pro social’ activity permits a criticism of New Labour’s approach without threatening the broader set of neo-liberal assumptions, values and beliefs that the Coalition shares with their New Labour predecessors (see Prideaux, 2010).

Reinforcing a neo-liberal preference for a smaller, more market orientated state is aided not only by the Coalition’s construction of a discourse of dependency and its embedding in the expectations and practice of state institutions and policy, but also by the formation of a broader based coalition of advocates in the public arena. The media have a long history of stoking and reinforcing populist narratives of ‘free riding’ and fraud as rife in the social security system (see Golding and Middleton, 1982). Analysis of press coverage of disability and sickness benefit receipt in 2004–05 and 2010–11 by the Strathclyde Centre for Disability Research and Glasgow Media Unit finds the latter period marked by a hardening of press coverage of disability issues. There is some evidence of a rise in the use of stigmatizing language, particularly around the validity or not of impairments and/or health conditions thereby connecting disability and benefit receipt with notions of feckless behaviour and fraudulent activity (Briant et al., n.d.: 11). Such developments however are perhaps not so surprising given that a section of the media supportive of the Conservative Party has echoed and popularized the core Iain Duncan Smith/Coalition government analysis of Britain as marked by welfare dependency and worklessness. Nor that, in line with Coalition plans to tighten conditionality through various measures (DWP, 2010b: 24) the same sections of the press have facilitated the expression of support for ever more punitive social security reforms (O’Brien, 2010; Phillips, 2010; The Telegraph, 2011; see also Garthwaite, 2011). A discourse coalition that links disability to welfare dependency and fraud contributes to a political and social context that fosters greater public amenability to the retrenchment of support for people traditionally seen as meriting public assistance. A hostile environment is slowly being constructed for all those who find they need to rely on social security, whilst the principle of solidarity that underpins support for more expansive public expenditure and service delivery is eroded in favour of a market orientated system of punitive welfare.

Making the case for Universal Credit: The privileging of neo-liberal flexibility and rationality

Fairclough (2010a: 184) characterizes New Labour’s 1998 Green Paper on Welfare Reform, New Ambitions for our Country: A New Contract for Welfare, as less an exercise in consultation and deliberation than it was an exercise in ‘tell and sell’ about the value of employment. The Coalition’s 2010 Green Paper similarly identifies work as a central recurring theme, in its narrative of the seven principles guiding welfare reform: ensuring the social security system is financially sustainable; demonstrating to benefit claimants the financial rewards of paid work; increasing the amount of paid work undertaken; balancing support for benefit recipients with the rights of taxpayers; supporting those in most demonstrable need; promoting positive behaviour and responsibility, understood as supporting the family, incentivizing saving and tightening benefit conditionality; and improving the responsiveness and cost of the delivery structure (DWP, 2008a: 18). The 2010 Green Paper bolsters the case for its approach by drawing an affinity between its proposals and the arguments marshalled by independent social security experts such as the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the Citizens Advice Bureau (DWP, 2010a: 11).

Indeed, a section within the Green Paper is given over to discussion of possible alternative forms of tax and benefit reforms advocated by independent experts, alongside the favoured Universal Credit model. The options considered include: a Universal Credit; a Single Working Age Benefit; the Mirlees model; and a Negative Income Tax. Consideration of a variety of alternative avenues creates the impression of policy choice and deliberation, yet the space given to outlining the various options is far from equal. The Universal Credit, associated with the CSJ, is provided with just over three pages of coverage – about half of the space for reflective discussion –whilst the other options receive barely three pages between them (see DWP, 2010a: 19–26). The important point is that comparison of alternative policy options manufactures a sense of authority and common purpose. Universal Credit is effectively singled out as the most suitable of solutions proposed by high-level technical experts, cementing its favoured status. Meanwhile, as all options and deliberations are about the technical aspect of restructuring the incentive framework of tax and benefits, the reader is led to believe that it is the marginal financial value of paid work that is the most salient factor in whether or not an individual enters the labour market. Since the 1970s successive UK governments (not least New Labour), working on an implicit presumption of individual economic rationality, have sought to re-attach unemployed and/or economically inactive individuals to the labour market by strengthening the financial incentives and sanctions delivered through the tax and benefit system (see Grover and Stewart, 2002; Grover and Piggott, 2005; Grover, 2010). What the 2010 Green Paper and its White Paper counterpart offer is a restatement of why a focus on supply side tinkering with the incentive structure of social security should be the principal plank of policy for addressing unemployment and poverty. The recession brought the role of the market failure and the business cycle in shaping economic demand, unemployment and poverty very much to the fore, threatening the emphasis placed by neo-liberal political economy on supply side reform and the individualization of social problems.

It is worth noting that during the 2008–09 recession leading members of New Labour made a late conversion to a more activist state to tackle unemployment and introduced the Future Jobs Fund (FJF) (Ali, 2011: 20). A tentative shift occurred with Labour now willing to accept the state acting as guarantor of employment opportunity, rather than solely emphasizing market forces and the private sector to deliver job creation (see Labour Party, 2010: 19). Betraying their ideological preferences, the Coalition swiftly announced the end to this programme (HM Treasury, 2010a) despite evaluations suggesting the FJF had proved at least a moderate success and was popular with participants (Allaker and Cavill, 2011; Fishwick et al., 2011). Instead, the Coalition switched the focus to improving the financial attractiveness of employment through the Universal Credit reforms and improving the efficiency and effectiveness of active labour market policy by intensifying market incentives and methods of organization through their flagship employment scheme, the Work Programme (see Finn, 2011: 141).

Astutely the Coalition associates the benefit reforms they sell in the 2010 Green and White Papers as meshing with broader changes in the structure of the labour market and the economy.

Universal Credit will match more closely the structure of today’s labour market, where part time jobs and flexible working are much more common than they once were. Furthermore, this reform will increase the range of jobs in the economy. (DWP, 2010b: 55)

The Government wants to create a welfare system that provides people with the confidence and security to play a full part in society through a flexible labour market within a competitive modern economy. (DWP, 2010b: 12)

The implications here are that: competition is modern and regulation is not; people on benefits do not play a ‘full part in society’, as they are not in paid work; Universal Credit will support a dynamic economy and jobs growth, as part time employment is where new jobs are. Analysis of Labour Force Survey data by the Institute for Public Policy Research, does show that between 1984 and 2010 total part time employment increased from around 5 million to 7.7 million (IPPR, 2010: 1). The rise in total part time employment and decline in total full time employment continued into 2011 (ONS, 2011: 24) and ongoing economic instability suggests a higher level of part time employment is likely to remain a feature of the labour market. Yet flexibilization has been accompanied by a decline in the share of UK GDP going to wages, a rise in wage inequality and a failure of improvements in productivity to be matched with commensurate wage increases. Lansley (2009: 7) suggests that between 2000 and 2008 real wages increased on average by 0.9% whilst productivity improved by 1.6%. Whilst the bottom 10th percentile of the earnings distribution experienced a real earnings rise of 27% over the last 30 years, the 90th percentile enjoyed a 100% rise in real earnings (Lansley, 2009: 11). That structural inequality is embedded in the expansion of flexible labour markets, or that shifts in macro-economic demand might be responsible for unemployment and poverty rather than an individual’s personal deficit, is not dismissed but simply goes unmentioned in the Coalition’s discourse. Yet the pursuit of similar neo-liberal economic and social policies has failed to stem the rise in poverty and inequality since the late 1970s (only partially interrupted by New Labour’s investment in tax and benefits) (Joyce et al., 2010: 36) or tackle levels of unemployment, which have tended to remain above 5% since the mid 1970s (ONS, 2010). Universal Credit and flexibilization do not offer a guarantee of independence and security through employment and one consequence is that individuals at the margins of the labour market are likely to increasingly find themselves in a state of perpetual activation and persistent insecurity.

The Coalition’s Universal Credit reforms aim to free business to innovate in the type and hours of employment offered by removing existing rigidities in the social system that discourage benefit recipients taking ‘mini jobs’ of fewer than 16 hours per week.

The current system incentivises many people to work no more or less than the minimum hours required to qualify for Working Tax Credit. This fails to reflect the flexible working patterns that modern employers and individuals need. (DWP, 2010b: 8)

Marginal and ad-hoc employment potentially becomes more feasible for employers to offer and for individuals, constrained by health or caring and domestic commitments, to take. Conservative members of the Coalition Cabinet have already expressed support for proposals that facilitate more flexible, intermittent patterns of paid work by people at the margins of the labour market (see Rowan, 2010; Watt, 2010). The radical potential of this should not be dismissed as whilst the risk is that the nature of the ‘flexibility’ proposed may increase insecurity, the Universal Credit reforms may also open the door to a more progressive re-imagining of social security and what we understand as work. Jordan (2012) has argued that the Coalition’s Universal Credit reform, with its emphasis on simplification and the erosion of the difference between in and out of work state income assistance (removal of the ‘16 hours’ eligibility rule as currently applies in Working Tax Credit is one example), opens up a ‘low road’ in social security to reforms more commonly associated with proponents of a Basic Income. The integration of tax and benefits might facilitate the emergence of an implicit recognition of a post productivist economic model, where a concern with maximizing full time waged work for all is replaced by an acceptance of the importance of giving individuals, especially those who experience constraints or limits on employment, a greater autonomy over how, when and where they engage in the labour market (Goodin, 2001). Of course one challenge that would need to be overcome en route is the hemming in of this radical potential by the persistent emphasis on conditionality and individual obligation as tied to participation in paid work (DWP, 2010b: 31).

Illustrating the message: From representations of activation, personalization and inclusion, to the authority of the unadorned

The communication of change and difference in welfare reform is accomplished through language but also through visual presentation of documents. As Strangleman (2008: 1499) notes in his reflections on the visual sociology of work, what may appear initially as simply the inclusion (or not) of simple illustrations to liven up or improve the appeal of a text heavy document, is also imbued with particular latent meanings that reflect the favoured interpretations and intended message of the commissioners and their perceived audience. An examination of the imagery used for the Green Paper, 21^st Century Welfare (DWP, 2010a) and the White Paper, Universal Credit: Welfare that Works (DWP, 2010b) with the 2008 Green Paper, No One Written Off: Reforming Welfare to Reward Responsibility (DWP, 2008a) and the White Paper, Raising Expectations and Increasing Support: Reforming Welfare for the Future (DWP, 2008b), provides a means to reflect on subtle differences in how governments portray work, family, community and state services, and the likely internal reform locus of documents. Changes in the preferred presentational style and the representational images favoured may be expected to signal a change in policy and/or reformulation of the accepted stories told and messages of reform sold.

As Fairclough’s (2010a: 187) analysis of the language threaded through New Labour’s 1998 Green Paper on welfare reform showed, New Labour’s vision of what work meant was always circumscribed to mean engagement in the paid labour market. The roll out from 2007 of reforms that increasingly restricted lone parent eligibility for Income Support demonstrated that activity falling outside of paid work, such as caring, irrespective of recipients’ stated preferences and/or constraints was of secondary value for New Labour (see Rafferty and Wiggan, 2011). The covers to New Labour’s 2008 welfare reform documents make use of human action orientated photo panels that align the visual representation of reforms with New Labour’s message of inclusion through paid work and a modernized state employment service offering personalized delivery. Images of job seekers, employment advisors and workers and the corporate colours of the Department for Work and Pensions – purple and teal (Figures 1 and 2) – are all incorporated. The top left hand panel of the 2008 Green Paper contains a poster with the strapline, ‘Make a new start’ in the background to one of the six panels of the photo montage, which aligns the piece with the language and imagery of Labour’s New Deal programmes and a promise of state assisted opportunity. A vision is conjured of a modern, person-centred social security system, engaging with a range of clients, irrespective of gender, ethnicity or parenting status, as they cheerily seek a new start by taking up jobs to join the hard working families of mainstream society.

Figure 1.

New Labour welfare reform Green Paper 2008.

Figure 2.

New Labour welfare reform White Paper 2008.

The images, however, are also exclusionary in that work is associated as solely the preserve of those with paid employment. The photo montage represents individuals as seeking jobs, making work a relatively narrow activity being moved into. Individuals move from a state of ‘inactivity’ outside of the labour market to one of economic activity inside it, sidestepping a more encompassing vision of what work may entail, such as parenting. It is notable that a key image featured in the montage of each document is that of a male construction worker, redolent of a yearning for a passing era of industrial workers, with their perceived dignified commitment to hard work, independence and social responsibility. The messages conveyed echo the familiar New Labour theme of a modernized welfare state, based around supportive conditionality as the route to inclusion and out of poverty (see Purnell, 2008). The visual imagery of the welfare reform Green and White Papers published by the Coalition government in 2010 is strikingly different. The Coalition has produced comparably sparse, frugal covers in white and pale light blue with titles that are relatively concise (Figures 3 and 4). The sparse presentation and colour suggests a less overtly ‘modern’, more traditionalist small ‘c’ conservative style of governance. A somewhat sombre yet stark message that reform is taking place in difficult and austere times is signalled. The ‘humanization’ of social security evident in the covers of the 2008 documents is absent in the 2010 documents. This shift in style echoes the wider reorganization and re-branding of UK government departments following the election of the Coalition government in 2010. Taking the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) as an example, this was immediately renamed the Department for Education (DfE), clarifying its remit as a core focus on education policy, rather than a more expansive agenda that linked education with a broader social inclusion agenda. The administrative change was accompanied by a re-branding of the DCSF rainbow logo, which seemed to symbolize diversity and inclusion, replaced by a solemn dark blue DfE, again suggestive of a turn towards the traditional.¹

Figure 3.

Coalition government Green Paper 2010.

Figure 4.

Coalition government White Paper 2010.

The presentation of the 2010 welfare reform policy documents under the Coalition is a distinctive visual break with the early welfare reform Green and White Papers of Gordon Brown’s New Labour administration, thus distancing the Coalition in terms of language and imagery. Establishing such distance helps create space for constructing a narrative that whilst seemingly different from New Labour’s, similarly concentrates on individual behaviour and choices and their interaction with institutional structures of social security as the cause of unemployment and poverty. A route is cleared for a further deepening of neo-liberalization that presents conditionality, activation and private sector led delivery as a ‘radical’ departure from past policy and the most effective means for re-regulating labour to assist in the restoration of economic growth.

Conclusion: The discursive construction of welfare reform as moral and economic necessity

It would be churlish to fail to acknowledge that threaded through the Coalition’s 2010 Green Paper, 21^st Century Welfare, and White Paper, Universal Credit: Welfare that Works, is a commendable acknowledgement of the financial constraints and institutional barriers low income families experience when transitioning into the labour market. Yet the terms that dominate – worklessness and dependency – construct the persistence of poverty and unemployment as originating in the poor choices and behaviour of individuals. An expensive, well meaning system of state support is portrayed not only as ineffective, but as reinforcing social problems by permitting people to make the ‘wrong’ choices, due to poor incentives in the benefit system, with devastating consequences for poor families. This is somewhat disingenuous given New Labour’s predilection for financial incentives and extending stringent eligibility rules and sanctioning provisions to vulnerable and marginalized groups in society in pursuit of state defined optimal behaviour (Barker and Lamble, 2009: 327). A discursive construction in the 2010 White Paper of benefit rules under New Labour as complex and lax, however, means that strengthened sanctions and tinkering with financial incentives can be presented as an effective means for nudging benefit claimants into the labour market. Such policy mechanisms align with the reframing of unemployment through the use of the term ‘worklessness’ which delinks the availability of job opportunities from the business cycle and economic demand. This legitimizes the problematization of the working age population in receipt of non-employment related out of work benefits, irrespective of their current capacity for paid work, and justifies their incorporation into a more conditional activation regime. A new opportunity for the Coalition government to reaffirm their narrative of ineffectual state services and profligate spending as the source of Britain’s social decay arose in the response to the riots that occurred in major English cities in August 2011.

For years we’ve had a system that encourages the worst in people – that incites laziness that excuses bad behaviour that erodes self-discipline that discourages hard work … above all that drains responsibility away from people. We talk about moral hazard in our financial system – where banks think they can act recklessly because the state will always bail them out … well this is moral hazard in our welfare system – people thinking they can be as irresponsible as they like because the state will always bail them out. We’re already addressing this through the Welfare Reform Bill going through parliament. But I’m not satisfied that we’re doing all we can. I want us to look at toughening up the conditions for those who are out of work and receiving benefits … and speeding up our efforts to get all those who can work back to work. Work is at the heart of a responsible society. (Cameron, 2011)

The 2010 Green and White Papers, echoed in speeches given by ministers and partisan press coverage (see Briant et al., n.d.; O’Brien, 2010; Phillips, 2010; The Telegraph, 2011) of welfare reform, show how governments can articulate a ‘problem–solution’ model (Fairclough et al., 2010: 218) to construct a discourse that privileges particular policy preferences. In this case the problem of poverty and unemployment is transformed from evidence of market failure and income inadequacy under neo-liberal hegemony to one of state and personal failure. The ground is, therefore, discursively prepared for a further market orientated re-regulation of social security policy to be advocated as the solution. The commodification and flexibilization of ‘inactive’ labour together with public spending retrenchment are rehabilitated by the Coalition government as a new innovative policy approach to Britain’s ‘social recession’ (Norman, 2007: 5) and weak economy, rather than the latest affirmation of methods long favoured by advocates of neo-liberalism.

Footnotes

Notes

Author Biography

Jay Wiggan is Lecturer in Social Policy at Queen’s University, Belfast. Jay’s research is focused on the nature and implications of market orientated reforms to public employment services and social security administration. Recent publications: Wiggan, J. (2011) ‘Something old and blue, or red, bold and new? Welfare reform and the Coalition government’, pp. 25–44, in C. Holden, M. Kilkey, and G. Ramia (eds) Social Policy Review 23 (Policy Press); Rafferty, A. and Wiggan, J. (2011) ‘Choice and welfare reform: Lone parents’ decision making around paid work and family life’, Journal of Social Policy 40(2): 275–294.

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