Abstract
This themed issue of Critical Social Policy focuses on Social Policy in an Age of Austerity. We would like to thank our contributors for their sterling and responsive work in responding to our editorial requests. While most of the articles focus on the UK, we are particularly pleased to include articles on the crises in Greece and Ireland, the two EU states where austerity measures have perhaps gone furthest so far.
The UK is witnessing the most profound assault on the welfare state (meaning the full array of public services and benefits addressing basic needs) since its inception in the middle of the twentieth century. Many of the most disadvantaged people in UK society are being targeted by cuts in income benefits, decreasing entitlements and increasing conditionality accompanied by a steadily deepening authoritarianism and criminalization of a wide assortment of groups from protestors and activists through to welfare claimants and travellers. What started as a crisis in the banking sector, has in the UK and elsewhere been transformed into a crisis of public expenditure. As highlighted in several articles in this themed issue, the notion of austerity has been mobilized to legitimate the roll-out of a further wave of neoliberal social policy and to shift the costs of the banking crisis away from the wealthy and on to the shoulders of ordinary people, particularly public sector workers and those most in need of public services and benefits.
Across Europe and the US resistance to austerity measures and cuts has been widespread, sustained and increasing in intensity. In the UK it has been marked by an amazing diversity which must include the urban unrest of August 2011 and the Occupy movement, as well as trade union industrial action against cuts in public sector pensions. Particular campaigns, notably for example against public library closures, cuts in benefits for disabled people, and cuts in Housing Benefit have had a considerable impact on public consciousness. Resistance to proposed marketization of the National Health Service in England has been led by the health service professions and unions. It has gathered pace so effectively that, at the time of writing, the government seems to be in partial retreat.
The articles in this themed issue offer critical perspectives on both the ideology and the impact of ‘austerity’, focusing on the implications for social policy and social inequality. John Clarke and Janet Newman explore several of the social imaginaries being mobilized by the British Conservatives and the UK Coalition government. They dissect the faux collectivism in the ideology of austerity and its underlying moral dimensions, the contradictions of which open up public discussion of inequality and injustice and the possibility of a new moral economy.
In her paper Ruth Levitas argues that the last thirty years have witnessed an increasingly immoral economy, with redistribution to the rich and withering social protection against risk. Yet at the same time a discourse around communitarian inspired notions of community and ‘active’ community has developed. She suggests that a radical recasting of austerity and consumption could inaugurate a discourse for a newly sustainable and equitable society.
Hancock, Mooney and Neal critically examine the Conservative big ideas – the broken society and the big society – focusing on contested and contradictory notions of ‘community’ in poor and disadvantaged communities. They argue that the notion of a broken society invokes a particular kind of ‘problem community’, both spatialized and non-spatialized. The big society, by contrast, mobilizes a very different understanding of ‘community’ in which volunteering and community provision, ‘localism’, are held to represent a more ‘responsive’ form of services provision.
Daniel Sage offers critical reflections on the political communitarianism inherent both in Conservative big society thinking and in Blue Labour’s critique of social democratic statism. Jay Wiggan deconstructs the UK Coalition government’s benefits reform proposals and compares their policy documents with those of New Labour in terms of language, visual presentation and content.
Manos Matsaganis suggests that the Greek welfare state is ill equipped to provide long-term protection in a context of seemingly permanent and sharpening austerity. Kieran Allen describes how the Irish government’s enthusiastic neoliberalism has radically exacerbated social needs and inequalities. In both Greece and Ireland it is very apparent that austerity measures, far from ‘working’, are bolstering social injustice and deepening the social malaise.
Finally, three commentary articles on Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland respectively unravel the possibilities of and limitations to the further development of autonomous social policy in those countries subsequent to the 2011 elections and in the context of the austerity crisis.