‘The sanctions are good for some people but not for someone like me who actually genuinely does their job search.’ British Jobseeker’s Allowance claimant views on punitive welfare reform: Hegemony in action?

Introduction

Politicians seek to build support for their policies through the cultivation and dissemination of ‘common sense’ ideas. Since the 1980s, successive British governments have sought to mobilise popular support for punitive welfare reforms by constructing ‘moralised antagonisms’ between hard-working taxpayers and out-of-work benefit claimants (Gallas 2015; Lavery 2019). This draws upon a long-standing tradition of identifying the ‘deserving’ and the ‘undeserving’ poor (see Welshman 2013). Hegemonic discourses of the undeserving poor have been bolstered in recent years, as media portrayals of out-of-work claimants as lazy, feckless or immoral and emphasising the lack of effort or reciprocity of claimants have proliferated (Morrison 2019). It is in this context that the public view the unemployed as less deserving than 20 years ago (Baumberg 2012).

While British Social Attitudes surveys capture the shifting views of the general public towards out-of-work welfare provisions, few studies have examined the attitudes of those directly affected by welfare reforms in Britain (Fossati 2018; Patrick 2017). The present article addresses this lacunae by presenting evidence from the ‘Welfare conditionality: sanctions, support and behaviour change’ project (ESRC-funded, 2013–2018), which canvassed the views and experiences of over 480 out-of-work claimants in 11 locations in England and Scotland. The research explored the ethicality and efficacy of welfare conditionality in principle and practice. A key finding was that British unemployed claimants are broadly supportive of welfare reforms that have led to increased poverty and destitution; exacerbated ill health; disengagement from the social security system and movements into ‘survival crime’. This support was premised on the view that this was necessary to punish/deter migrant, fraudulent and feckless populations from making claims on public resources. The authors seek to explain this apparent contradiction by interrogating the usefulness of Marxist theories of hegemony.

The article proceeds by outlining neo-Marxist concepts of hegemony and hegemonic projects. The focus then turns towards the growing exploitation, impoverishment and punishment of the unemployed in Britain before presenting new empirical evidence of their views towards punitive welfare reforms. The contradiction between their views and experiences we maintain reflects the overall success of a ‘two-nations hegemonic project’ which seeks to regulate the inherent contradictions of capitalist societies by mobilising popular support for policies that are antithetical to the interests of working-class populations (Gallas 2015; Jessop et al. 1988; Lavery 2019). This is operationalised by constructing discursive distinctions between ‘productive’ and ‘parasitic’ groups and has been translated into a series of policies to marginalise the manufactured threat of ‘parasitic’ groups. The authors argue that a ‘two-nations’ hegemonic has been intermittently revived by successive British governments over the past 40 years. This has served to mystify and legitimise an ongoing phase of capitalist development characterised by rising corporate profitability and more intensive forms of exploitation, punishment and penury for working-class populations.

Hegemony, hegemonic projects and individual responses

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time the ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, consequently also controls the means of mental production, so that the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are on the whole subject to it. (Marx & Engels 1998: 67)

Marx and Engels’ (1998) originally conceived of ideology as a phenomenon that is generated by the capitalist class system. It serves to regulate the inherent contradictions of this system by mystifying and legitimising the exploitation of the working class. It does this by dominating the minds of working-class people, projecting within their minds an illusory relationship to their real conditions of existence to perpetuate a mistaken view of the social world known as ‘false consciousness’. It is a temporary phenomenon only surviving as long as the class system that generates it survives. However, the resilience of capitalism coupled with the underdeveloped nature of Marx and Engels’ theorisation led later generations of Marxists to show a greater interest in ideology.

Gramsci (1971) argues that capitalism is partially sustained by the ‘hegemony’ of ideas and theories of a ruling class (or classes). More specifically, Gramsci (1971) uses ‘hegemony’ to capture how a ruling class acquires consent to rule those it subjugates. This tends to be achieved when the ideas of the ruling class sufficiently displace rivalling ideas and become the ‘common-sense’ assumptions and beliefs held by subordinate classes (Gramsci 1971: 323). Common-sense ideas may present themselves ‘as the spontaneous philosophy of the man in street’ but are truly ‘the popular expression of “higher philosophies”’ (Mouffe 1979: 186). Consequently, common-sense ideas ascertain ‘a validity which is psychological’ (Gramsci 1971: 377). This makes them indispensable for organising subordinate classes and producing levels of consent necessary to preserve the power and wealth asymmetries of the capitalist class system.

Althusser (2014) argues that the hegemony of ruling class ideas is established through the seizure and conservation of state power, and through subsequent diffusion of these ideas through ‘ideological state apparatuses’. While Althusser (2014: 245) acknowledges the role of the ‘repressive state apparatus’ (e.g. police, courts, military) in pacifying groups or individuals posing a threat to the established order, he stresses that the ruling class cannot hold monopoly over state power or society more generally ‘over a long period without at the same time exercising its hegemony over and in the ideological state apparatuses’. Althusser’s (2014: 79–81, 243) definition of ‘ideological state apparatuses’ is broad, including both public and private institutions such as schools, families, churches and the media. Despite the ‘diversity’ of their individual functions, according to Althusser (2014: 245), these apparatuses are all unified ‘beneath . . . the ideology of the ruling class’, functioning collectively to diffuse common-sense ideas across social space around correct (pro-social, economically useful) modes of living within the class system. As such, hegemony is viewed as a ‘lived’ process of domination, where common-sense ideas are ‘subtly, pervasively diffused throughout habitual daily practices, intimately interwoven with ‘culture’ itself, inscribed in the very texture of our experience from nursery school to funeral parlour’ (Eagleton 1991: 114). It often remains invisible, disseminated throughout the texture of social life naturalised as custom, habit and practice (Eagleton 1991).

Poulantzas (1978) provides an important contribution to contemporary Marxist understandings of how the hegemony of the ruling class(es) is exercised through the ideological state apparatuses and over the dominated class(es). This contribution is derived from his broader theory of the capitalist type of state. Poulantzas (1973: 115, 190–192, 1978: 31) views the capitalist state as consisting of a distinctive ensemble of ‘structures’ and ‘institutions’ that do not simply act on behalf of one dominant class, but ‘within an unstable equilibrium of comprise between the dominant classes and the dominated’. This means that the state possesses some autonomy from the ruling class(es) and ‘therefore continually adopts material measures which are of positive significance for the popular masses’ (Poulantzas 1978: 31). Consequently, Poulantzas (1978: 30) criticises accounts that see the exercise of ruling class hegemony through the ideological state apparatuses exclusively in forms that only ever seek to ‘deceive, lie, obscure, hide, and lead people to believe what is false’. Rather, hegemony is also exercised through state apparatuses in ‘positive’ ways for the subordinate classes. Specifically, ideological allurements accompany material concessions which are beneficial to the interests of subordinate classes and can even contradict the short-term interests of the ruling class (although such concessions will not threaten the overall reproduction of capitalism). This can not only work to manufacture strategically significant levels of consent for the class system, but can also reinforce perceptions of the state as class neutral and acting in the ‘general interest’ of the entire body politic (Poulantzas 1973: 190–192).

Contemporary Marxists have built on Gramsci’s and Poulantzas’s ideas to demonstrate how political leaderships, at the apex of the state, deploy ‘hegemonic projects’ to produce sufficient levels of consent for and continually reproduce capitalism. Because hegemony is a dynamic process that has to be continually renewed, recreated and defended, political leaderships typically pursue more temporary ‘hegemonic projects’ rather than hegemony itself (Gamble 1988). Jessop (1990: 211–212) has distinguished between ‘one-nation’ and ‘two-nations’ hegemonic projects. Several academics have applied the concepts of one and two-nations hegemonic projects over the past four decades to make sense of how various political leaderships in Britain have continually legitimised the unstable relations of exploitation and domination intrinsic to the capitalist class system (Gallas 2015; Jessop et al. 1988; Lavery 2019). The former aims ‘at an expansive hegemony in which the support of the entire population is mobilised through material concessions and symbolic rewards’ for all sections of the body politic. Two-nations projects seek ‘a more limited hegemony concerned to mobilise the support of strategically significant sectors of the population and to pass the costs of the project to other sectors’. Political leaderships are more likely to pursue the latter during periods characterised by widening inter-class inequalities, rising capitalist profitability and fewer material concessions to working-class populations (Bates 1975; Jessop 1990). They mystify the true source(s) of class inequalities and instead seek to lay the blame at the foot of deviant ‘others’. Political leaderships tend to do this by utilising hegemonic apparatuses to ‘consciously play on’ and enhance ‘divisions in society’; discursively constructing ‘moralised antagonisms’ between groups of good, ‘productive’ citizens and bad, ‘parasitic’ citizens (Jessop et al. 1988: 163, 88; Lavery 2019: 60). The latter groups are constructed as a threat to both public resources and the interests of ‘productive’ citizenry, requiring urgent ‘containment and even repression’ (Jessop 1990: 212).

At the psychosocial level, research has shown how discourses associated with hegemonic projects secure consent and control through the internalisation of psychological myths concerning the ‘just nature’ of present affairs (Prilleltensky & Gonick 1996). Individuals occupying marginal positions at the bottom of the class system may be deferential, subscribing to myths of personal blame and natural causes (Prilleltensky & Gonick 1996). Learned helplessness which refers to passivity developed in response to repeated experiences of failure, surplus powerlessness which pertains to feelings of personal impotence, obedience to authority and the internalisation of images of authority are key psychological processes (Prilleltensky & Gonick 1996). However, consent may also be secured through forms of identity management and resistance to manage stigma and shame emerging from portrayals of particular groups as ‘parasitic’. A key development of the present article will be to show how individuals who are vulnerable to the stigmatising threat of ‘two-nations’ discourses develop ways of establishing distance between themselves and ‘parasitic’ others occupying similar social positioning (e.g. claimant unemployed, low-income). Managing stigma, we contend, is a key but largely unrecognised process in the production of consent among unemployed people for policies and practices that were openly acknowledged to inflict harm upon themselves and others.

The condition of the unemployed working class in 21st-century Britain

Two-nations hegemonic projects have been consistently redeployed during an ongoing phase of capitalist development, featuring a rise in corporate profitability and more intensive forms of exploitation, punishment and impoverishment for the most marginal fractions the working class. Since the late 1970s, Britain’s working classes have borne an increasingly precarious relationship to the economy. The labour market has seen a marked decline of stable middle-income jobs, a ‘very big increase in the number of high-paid jobs’, and a sharp rise in low-paying, precarious jobs that are more directly determined by market demand and increasingly available via temporary work agencies (Forde & Slater 2016; Goos & Manning 2007: 118; Office for National Statistics (ONS) 2020). These changes have been fuelled by a combination of globalised techno-economic developments in production, exchange, consumption and distribution (Castells 2000; Jessop 2002). They have also been facilitated by a series of state-led decisions to abandon full employment policies, prioritise inflation control and eviscerate the ability of working-class populations to protect their material interests through collective means (Coates 1989; Glyn 2006).

It is in this context that the social security system has been transformed into a lever for expanding the supply of precarious labour (Grover & Stewart 2002). This has included efforts to incentivise the uptake of low-paying jobs by reducing the real value of unemployment benefits and ‘depriving unemployed people of necessary income’, which has most notably taken shape in numerous benefit freezes, benefit caps and the more recent two-child limit (Fletcher & Wright 2018: 337). Intensified work-related behavioural conditionality policies (e.g. the introduction of jobseekers agreements, diaries and directions) to establish closer supervision of claimant behaviour and ensure they are actively seeking work have been instrumental (Fletcher & Wright 2018). Legislation requiring claimants to take jobs at greater geographical distances and the corresponding abolition of legislation which formerly enabled claimants to refuse work outside their normal occupation and pay have also been introduced (Price 2000). This has been enforced with a more severe benefit sanctioning regime for claimants and more stringent formal and informal job outcome, sanctioning and off-benefit flow target regimes for frontline staff (Redman & Fletcher 2022). Since the 1990s, aggregate annual sanctioning rates have increased over 100%, reaching a crescendo in 2013 with over 1 million sanctions sometimes for trivial reasons (Adler 2018; Price 2000). These reforms have created ‘a “flexible” pool of employees’ who not only ‘have no alternative but to accept what is on offer’ but, through increasing the competition for precarious jobs, exert a broader disciplinary effect on workers by ‘further erod[ing] pay levels and working conditions at the bottom of the labour market’ (Peck 2001: 349; 350; Umney 2018).

This has benefitted business to the detriment of the working classes in Britain. On one hand, aggregate profits have increased (Glyn 2006; Roberts 2009). This is partly because employers have managed to increase the rate of exploitation over the past 40 years, with the working classes producing more and getting less in return. This has been facilitated by major advances in information technologies (Castells 2000), state abandonment of full employment policies (Glyn 2006) and an expansion of the unemployed labour supply (Wiggan 2015) in order to simultaneously eschew basic employment securities, reduce hiring costs to the bare minimum and finely calibrate labour supplies with the vagaries of market demand (cf. Briken & Taylor 2018).

On the other hand, hardship has increasingly defined the everyday experiences of the poorer and unemployed fractions of the working class. The Welfare Conditionality (2018) project found that sanctions frequently increased poverty and destitution; exacerbated ill health and facilitated movements out of the social security system. Garthwaite (2016: 8) documents ‘an explosion in the numbers of people turning to foodbanks’, with ‘almost half of the reasons people cite using foodbanks’ being attributable to welfare reforms. There are clear racial and gendered dimensions to the enhanced hardship endured by the poor and out-of-work fractions of the working class. Dwyer et al. (2019: 145) have demonstrated how contemporary welfare reforms place further restrictions on European migrants’ access to fiscal support, ‘triggering severe financial and emotional hardship’. Meanwhile, Speake (2020: 193–199) has shown how the implementation of contemporary welfare reforms can mirror the abuse previously experienced by female victims/survivors of rape and sexual abuse, exacerbating health conditions and pushing them further away from recovery.

This connects with a wider body of research, which has shown how reforms to the operational framework governing frontline behaviour have made Jobcentres more dangerous places, as contemporary service delivery has been found to inflict a range of material and symbolic harms which sometimes have life-threatening or fatal consequences (Redman & Fletcher 2022; Wright et al. 2020). Punitive welfare reforms have been identified by family and friends of the deceased as a key determinant of a number of penury induced suicides and deaths; although policymakers continue ‘to deny a direct “causal” link between government policy and benefit deaths’ (Clifford 2020: 158, 162). Moreover, evidence suggests that those who leave unemployment to enter work are more likely to remain in poverty and/or cycle in and out of low-paid, precarious employment (Adams et al. 2012; Welfare Conditionality 2018; White & Forth 1998). Quantitative research has shown how precarious work ‘tends to reduce one’s subjective wellbeing’ (Kalleberg 2018: 163), while ethnographic research has shown how those who enter such jobs frequently endure overwork; abusive managerial practices; an income insufficient to meet basic needs; and, correspondingly, poor mental and physical health (Angry Workers 2020; Thomas et al. 2020). Consequently, Grover (2019) conceptualises British welfare reforms as ‘violent proletarianisation’. They force the unemployed into jobs in a way that is injurious to mental and physical health while ‘socially murdering’ some of its most vulnerable members.

Securing consent through mystification and division

Some argue that the hegemony of ruling ideas have mystified and legitimised the expansion of these inter-class inequalities in the minds of working-class populations (Jessop et al. 1988; Lavery 2019). From the late 1970s, the Thatcher administrations set out to restore conditions favourable to profitable investment by mobilising popular support for a radical programme of political-economic restructuring. This partially entailed the dismantling of post-war Keynesian welfare policies that had helped to significantly reduce absolute poverty, reduce class inequalities and enhance the material conditions of working-class populations (Glyn & Harrison 1980). Thatcher successfully garnered support among the working classes by discursively constructing Britain as embroiled in an economic and moral crisis fuelled by a number of ‘parasitic’ populations (e.g. benefit scroungers; recalcitrant workers) who had leached off the wealth creating, ‘productive’ citizenry (Jessop et al. 1988; cf. Golding & Middleton 1982). In doing so, strategically significant groups were pitted against one another. This strengthened ‘intra-class division whilst covering up inter-class antagonism’ and obscured the true beneficiaries of their radical restructuring programme (Gallas 2015: 146).

The New Labour administrations adopted a different approach. Substantial material concessions were made to working-class populations to secure broad-based support, as public expenditure increases were implemented alongside some significant redistributive social policies (Lavery 2019: 93–97). This notably included the introduction of a national minimum wage and in-work tax credits for low-income groups. Lavery (2019) suggests that these concessions signified the presence of a ‘one-nation’ hegemonic project, whereby New Labour sought to consolidate power by ceding to low-income groups a greater portion of the total national income than under previous administrations and incorporating them into a period of considerable economic growth. Although, the ‘one-nation’ project interpretation is complicated by several other occurrences. Notably, real-wage growth stagnated for low- and middle-income populations during a period where business was afforded a number of lucrative tax reductions to shore up confidence and enhance profitability. The political leadership advanced punitive workfare regimes to increase competition for low-wage, precarious jobs while committing to labour market policies which undermined stable, middle-income job creation by ensuring labour process control remained firmly in the hands of employers. Meanwhile, the political leadership was somewhat consistent with previous administrations in laying the blame for poverty and unemployment on the behavioural dysfunctions of a new ‘parasitic’ group which existed outside mainstream British values – specifically, the emergence of a ‘workless class’ which was ostensibly ‘playing no role in the formal economy, dependent on benefits and the black economy’ (Blair 1997 in Tyler 2013: 159). Thus, while some different policy approaches were certainly adopted, whether the New Labour administrations are best characterised by a ‘one-nation’ or ‘two-nations’ hegemonic project remains contentious.

More recently, the Coalition government once again sought to improve conditions favourable to profitable investment by constructing Britain as in crisis with ‘hardworking British taxpayers’ under threat from migrant and unemployed populations – whose supposed predilection for a better life in Britain and/or on out-of-work benefits were ‘a parasitical drain and a threat to scarce national resources’ (Tyler 2013: 9). This was reflected in declarations that migrant groups were robbing British people of jobs, as well as an intensification of negative portrayals of migrant groups as a threat to public resources and national security (Blinder & Allen 2016). Britain was also portrayed as socially broken, beset by an inter-generationally workless ‘underclass, where life is characterised by [welfare] dependency, addiction, debt and family breakdown’ (Duncan-Smith 2007: 4). These stigmatising hegemonic discourses were ‘co-produced’ by multiple ideological state apparatuses and weaved into the texture of everyday experiences and common-sense assumptions (Pattison 2022). Most notably, an explosion of ‘poverty porn’ television purporting to expose entire communities of inter-generational worklessness was accompanied by ‘an extraordinary spike in the use of stigmatising terminology’ describing claimants as scroungers, frauds, cheats (etc.) in British newspaper articles (Morrison 2019: 20–21). This legitimised the introduction of a whole battery of welfare reforms that punished these ‘parasitic’ populations and severed their dependency on hard-working taxpayers’ money:

Fraudsters from around the world targeted [UK benefits] for personal gain . . . it is not cruel to expect people to work; getting people into work is vital not just for them, but for all of us. . . . this Government is on the side of hard-working taxpayers. . . [who] have watched those on tax credits or benefits see their income rise, outstripping their earnings . . . [welfare reform] will benefit hardworking people across the country. (Duncan-Smith 2012)

The cumulative effect was to both obscure the true beneficiaries of the Coalition’s subsequent austerity programme and galvanise popular support for punitive reforms by fuelling ‘anti-welfare common sense’ among the British citizenry, further exacerbating intra-class divisions and hostilities (Jensen & Tyler 2015). This was visible in both rising levels of inter-personal violence and the reproduction of hegemonic discourses on social media sites against migrant and out-of-work groups (Burnett 2017; Morrison 2019). It was also evident in a long-standing hardening of public attitudes towards welfare provisions (Hills 2017), with the British public expressing declining support for spending more on benefits for a range of out-of-work groups.

Method

This article presents evidence from the ‘Welfare conditionality: sanctions, support and behaviour change’ study. The research sought to explore both the efficacy and ethicality of welfare conditionality in principle and practice and involved research teams at six universities in Britain. It comprised semi-structured interviews with policy stakeholders, focus groups with front-line welfare practitioners and three rounds of repeat qualitative longitudinal interviews with welfare recipients subject to welfare conditionality. Individuals were interviewed on three separate occasions over a 2-year period, focusing on their experiences of support and sanctions within the welfare system. Purposive non-random sampling techniques were used to recruit participants. This article draws upon empirical data from policy stakeholder interviews and the first wave of interviews with 64 Jobseeker’s Allowance claimants (65% men and 35% women) in Bristol, Edinburgh, Glasgow, London, Manchester, Peterborough and Sheffield. Nearly half were aged between 25 and 49 years with a further third aged 50–64 years. Almost all (95%) were unemployed. A quarter were disabled or had long-term health conditions, including some who had been transferred to Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA) after failing a Work Capability Assessment for Employment and Support Allowance. Over half (53%) had been subject to a benefit sanction with two-thirds being sanctioned once and the remainder between 2 and 5 times.

Claimants were asked a series of questions about their experiences and views of welfare conditionality. All were probed about claiming benefits; the support provided by Jobcentre Plus and their views about the balance between sanctions and support. Another set of questions explored participant views regarding the tying of benefit entitlement to claimant behaviour. Similarly, their views regarding the fairness and efficacy of mandatory work activity requirements were canvassed as well as their opinions on the causes of unemployment. A key line of enquiry focused on the purpose of sanctions; personal experiences of benefit sanctions; and the impact on their subsequent behaviour. The research team also asked a series of normative questions about whether it was fair to use benefit sanctions. All interviews were recorded and fully transcribed. A vast amount of data was produced necessitating a highly systematic and structured approach to data management and analysis (Saldana 2003). The complex multi-site and multi-team research design offered further challenges. Consequently, a framework matrix-based method (Corden & Nice 2007; Lewis 2007) with the aid of QSR NVivo 10 was employed. All researchers who conducted interviews assigned attributes for those transcripts. Then a two-tier approach to coding was used, with a team of coding officers applying the first tier of framework matrix coding across the sample. The matrix coding was assembled inductively by a working group of the project principal investigator (PI), a co-investigator (Co-I) and researchers drawn from a range of the institutional teams involved. The second tier of coding was conducted by the authors of the Jobseeker’s Allowance sub-set. Key themes were identified from a close reading of a selection of transcripts, which were then coded across the sample. This was supplemented by text searches to verify the representativeness of findings and to identify data that did not fit the main trends.

Findings: hegemony in action?

A key strength of the present research is that it considered the views and experiences of both policymakers and the unemployed towards a battery of welfare reforms. In terms of the former, policymakers seek to build support for their policies through the dissemination of (anti-welfare) ‘common-sense’ ideas. An insight into this process was gained through interviews with policymakers involved in the design of contemporary welfare reform. This included two members of parliament (MPs) and two senior civil servants in the Department for Work & Pensions (DWP). The findings begin with a brief exploration of policymakers’ views on welfare reform, before shifting towards a more detailed analysis of the views and experiences of unemployed people.

Discussion and conclusion

This article has shown how the unemployed are broadly supportive of punitive welfare reforms which have led to increased poverty and destitution; exacerbated ill health; disengagement with the benefits system and movements into ‘survival crime’ (Welfare Conditionality 2018). This has taken place in a context of concerted attempts by numerous British governments to mobilise popular support for contentious reforms through a ‘two-nations hegemonic project’ that constructs ‘moralised antagonisms’ between ‘productive’ and ‘parasitic’ populations (Lavery 2019). In light of this, we have sought to interrogate the usefulness of Marxist theories of hegemony to explain this apparent contradiction between claimants’ (mostly) positive support for, and (mostly) negative experiences of, welfare reform.

The ‘two-nations hegemonic project’ which seeks to legitimise an ongoing phase of capitalist development featuring widening inter-class inequalities has had some success with the unemployed. This has been sought by constructing a range of ‘parasitic’ groups – that is, the feckless, the fraudulent, the migrant – as a threat to public resources who require immediate action in order to protect and advance the interests of ‘productive’, hardworking British taxpayers. It is salient to note that harmful experiences of punitive welfare reform did lead some individuals into a more oppositional stance as evidenced by hostility towards mandatory work activity and the reaction of some of those receiving benefit sanctions. Nevertheless, the present research has highlighted the important role played by the media as a hegemonic apparatus that binds the unemployed to particular ideas through their consent rather than coercion. Both policymakers and the unemployed, for example, referenced TV programmes such as ‘Benefits Street’ to conjure up ‘phantom others’ in aid of justifying benefit sanctions. The research has also underlined the notion that hegemony is a ‘lived’ process of political domination, with respondents frequently drawing upon their personal experiences to legitimate ‘moralised antagonisms’ and punitive welfare reforms (see later). Consequently, we contend that there are two key reasons why the content of ‘two-nations’ hegemonic projects have resonated with unemployed people:

First, two-nations hegemonic projects explicitly produce and disseminate a ‘stigma power’ which is distinctively seductive and threatening to unemployed populations (Tyler 2020: 16–18). This is because discourses associated with two-nations projects specifically target and devalue out-of-work groups as a burden on public resources; thus posing a specific symbolic ‘threat to claimants own identities’ and their membership to the valued, ‘productive’ citizenry (cf. Patrick 2017: 161). Unemployed people frequently respond through classic forms of stigma management; dis-identifying with such discourses in their own case but concurring with and perpetuating them to censure ‘other’ groups. Interviewees frequently contrasted their own behaviour with ‘undeserving’ groups: ‘Because, well I mean for me I’d rather be out there working, doing something, rather than sitting about doing nothing all day. You’ll get some people that can’t be bothered to work and stuff like that, but I’m just not one like that’ (ED-SJ-010).

Thus, by managing the threat of stigma and attempting to establish distance from de-valued populations, the ‘stigma power’ produced within and disseminated through two-nations hegemonic projects manufactures consent for its agenda through forms of identity management and resistance. It does this by encouraging even those who are vulnerable to portrayals as ‘parasitic’ to affirm their own membership to the productive citizenry by dis-identifying with stigmatising discourses and deflecting them onto ‘parasitic’ others; which in turn works to establish, preserve and enhance divisions within groups that share common interests and common problems (Tyler 2020). The interviewees sometimes included former drug addicts, for example, who felt that ‘junkies’ should not be allowed to claim benefits. The stigma power typical of two-nations projects therefore focuses the hostilities/discontents of unemployed populations towards socially and spatially proximate ‘others’ and away from the political leadership.

Second, the power of the two-nations project also resides in its relatability to the lived experiences of the unemployed. Successful hegemonic projects largely depend on their ability to link ‘common-sense’ ideas with real daily experiences and, compared with any other social group, the unemployed are perhaps most likely to relate to the discursive content of the two-nations project. This is not only because unemployed people are more likely to experience the harshest and most impoverishing conditions, but more importantly, they tend to occupy closer spatial and social proximity to ‘parasitic’ groups; who are thus more likely to be active and visible within the social milieu of unemployed populations. Moreover, two-nations projects have been successively deployed during a period where there has been a gradual ‘withering away’ (Shildrick & MacDonald 2013: 300) of the cultural resources necessary for working-class communities to develop more politicised forms of class consciousness and establish counter-hegemonies around poverty, unemployment and their causes (see Bagguley 1991). It is in this context that ruling ideas are more able to provide unemployed people with a misleading and mis-recognisable set of proximate scapegoats through which they can make sense of, and lay the blame for, legitimate concerns about growing poverty and insecurity.

There is some evidence to support this claim. While immigration has been found to have an overall positive effect on jobs, wages and public finances (Oxford Economics 2018), it may have a negative effect on groups who are most likely to claim unemployment benefits. Dustmann et al. (2013) found that increases in the ratio of immigrants to natives among the working age population has positive effects on native wages overall, but exerts downward pressure on the wages of workers occupying the lowest paid percentiles of the UK’s wage distribution. Furthermore, a review of 12 studies conducted between 2003 and 2018 concluded that immigration is likely to have a negative effect on employment opportunities for those with an intermediate (O-level, GCSE, secondary school) education (Ruhs & Vargas-Silva 2020). When considering that increasing competition for jobs and downward pressure on wages for the poorest fractions of the working class has taken place alongside the promulgation of hegemonic discourses portraying migrating groups as a central threat, its perhaps stands to reason that such discourses are likely to hold greatest currency among those most likely to see and feel its negative effects in their everyday life. Personal narratives, for example, often referenced recruitment exercises where interviewees had lost job opportunities to migrants. A London man reported: ‘they gave me the job but then withdrew it because an Eastern European was going to do it for less money’ (LO-BW-010).

Moreover, while benefit fraud has remained consistently low, it does exist. From 2005 to 2018, fraud has fluctuated between 0.6% and 1.2% of the total unemployment benefit expenditure; reaching a peak of around £2.1 billion (DWP 2018: 3). Several studies have consistently found that various claimant groups engage in informal and/or illicit activities alongside claiming benefits to meet essential needs (Jordan et al. 1992; MacDonald 1994; Redman 2021). These studies conclude that the monetary gains of fraud are often very minor and more accurately reflect survival strategies developed in response to the increasingly punitive and impoverishing nature of welfare reform (Redman 2021). Nevertheless, they show that fraudulent activity is not uncommon in the spaces typically inhabited by poor and/or unemployed people. Consequently, hegemonic discourses portraying fecklessness and benefit fraud as a central threat to public resources are likely to be most persuasive and/or subject to direct verification with those exposed to such activity. Familiarity with behavioural adaptations to poverty can generate narrative power just as much as ignorance can.

While immigration and benefit fraud may have some negative economic effects on working-class populations, these effects are comparatively minor when compared with those posed by political economic restructuring in Britain. Since 1980, the share of total national income apportioned to unemployment benefits and wages have undergone significant declines in spite of significant increases in average labour productivity and gross domestic product per head (Lapavitsas 2013; OECD 2020; Onaran 2014; ONS 2015). At the same time, the share of national income going towards business in the form of profits has increased (Glyn 2006; Roberts 2009). The top 1% of income earners now command almost double the share of national income than they did in 1980 (Harvey 2007; Onaran 2014). Moreover, the revenue lost in corporate tax avoidance to offshore tax havens alone, a growth industry since the 1980s, is roughly six times more than revenue lost in benefit fraud (DWP 2018; Zucman 2017).

It is on the basis of such evidence that we believe the participants in this study were justified in feeling and articulating a legitimate threat to the material conditions of their lives and their communities. However, the real threat to both unemployed people and the working class more generally lies not in socially proximate ‘others’. Rather, it lies in the governments that not only continually fail to represent their material interests, but actively dismantle social protections to bolster corporate profitability and deploy punitive welfare reforms to submit the unemployed to chronically insecure poverty labour. It is, of course, the complexity and ambiguity of these processes that disguises and mystifies transfers of wealth and strengthens the power and effectiveness of hegemonic projects.