Abstract
In this compelling book, the author, Insa Lee Koch, casts a light on the complex and enduring relationships that play out in an anonymous social housing community, ‘Park End’. Hit by decades of a violent liberal democracy that punishes citizens who refuse to conform to the class-based logic of state control, the book highlights a divisive politics around class, gender, race and ethnicity which is typical of the politics that is unravelling in the Brexit era. The author does not exactly frame Brexit as a working-class reaction to political disenchantment—a myth which has been crushed following rigorous analyses of the middle- and upper-class factions of the ‘Leave’ voters—but uses it more as a prompt to open up a discussion about the limits of liberal democracy and the crisis in state authority.
The pertinent question that leaps out of the book is, ‘how does liberal democracy maintain its self-image of progress and freedom in the face of its own violence?’ (p. 9). The author proposes that one of the paradoxes of liberal democracy—and the suite of punitive policies that follow it—is that Park End residents perceive government and democracy as something that is ‘not for them’. Although some residents who are interpellated into the class-based logic of state control experience an intensification of the very control mechanisms and surveillance they initially supported, other residents who try to oppose local state hegemony typically experience the wrath of the local authority in the form of manipulation and exclusion from key community spaces. Whatever the political standpoint and position a resident may have regarding the local state, their experiences have the same outcome: disenchantment, disillusionment and dismay. This, the author argues, leads to a crisis in the authority of the state.
The author begins with a theoretical reflection on the punitive dimension of liberal democracy, both under the New Labour government and under the punitive anti-welfare ideology of the Coalition government. The suite of punitive strategies targeted at working-class groups has led to a dismantling of citizenship rights and entitlements. To illustrate the residents’ lived-experience of the punitive state, the book covers an ambitious range of topics, from anti-social behaviour orders, policing, welfare benefits and regeneration.
So, how do working-class residents challenge and contest this liberal democracy? And with what political apparatus? In the absence of political representation and community organizations that once underpinned working-class communities, the author explores how working-class residents reproduce and subvert this violent dimension of liberal democracy. The book shows how Park End residents exercise agency and ‘personhood’ in ways that counter the ‘self-reliant individual’ model of modern ‘personhood’. Following a group of residents around Park End, the author observes that the residents’ responses to ‘local moral personhood’ are inextricably linked to dominant discourses of ‘deserving’ or ‘undeserving’ citizens. Those perceptions, however, are not based on the state’s definition of a ‘good citizen’ —as ‘someone who deserving of rights and claims to the obligations of the state’ (p. 83)—but on the definition of a ‘good person’, that is, ‘someone who appropriately honours their obligations to others’ (p. 83). The central point that is underscored here and echoed throughout, is that residents do not exactly reproduce dominant moral discourses of the state, or passively conform to the chimerical hierarchies of deservedness. Conversely, residents ‘bring their own understandings of personhood to the table’ (p. 82) which are partly framed by the prevailing economic conditions they live in and partly shaped by the ongoing social relations and intimate bonds that function both as site of support and conflict (p. 83).
But against the backdrop of austerity, a fiscal economic programme levelled at working-class people, everyday understandings of personhood are not always congruent with dominant discourses of a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ citizen. In Chapter 3, we are introduced to several residents who are lone parents. Residents, such as Helen, Rose and Emma all express their technical and practical difficulties in navigating the benefit system in such a way that does not risk their citizenship entitlement, or compromise their independence. Unsurprisingly, they endure great difficulty in walking this tightrope. Rose complains that she is constantly made to feel as though she has to ‘prove’ her entitlement: ‘they want to know everything, down to what toilet paper you are using’ (p. 99).
Many of the women documented in the book are forced to find ways to circumvent the law, to avoid the likelihood of having their benefits transferred to their partners and lose their financial independence as a result. This is the gendered reality of (un)deservingness, perpetuated by the anti-welfare logic of the state.
Then there are residents such as Debbie and Emma who are evicted because their children have recently left college which immediately leaves them with a rent shortfall. Debbie is evicted and made ‘intentionally’ homeless, and Emma decides to leave before she is forcibly removed from her home. These experiences are representative of the hundreds upon thousands of people across the UK who are currently in rent arrears and at risk of eviction.
Throughout the book, the author makes the compelling argument that Park End residents experience citizenship and democracy as punishment. This argument is emphatically demonstrated in Chapter 5. Here the author argues that tenants’ desire for authority does not necessarily equate to how the state exercises authority- through policing and formal criminal justice sanctions. In Chapter 6, we read about the experiences of residents who exercise a more radical position as they challenge the local state. Tracey is a respected and revered member of the community who works in the local authority community centre. She writes a letter to community residents, or what seems like a sketch of a campaign letter, encouraging them to ‘revolt’. But before the campaign takes any meaningful shape, the local authority restructures the community centre and Tracey is replaced by a council-based employee. This repression and exclusion, the author argues, typifies the ‘engrained suspicion with which the authorities treated local community activists’ (p. 183).
The book is highly recommended to anyone who is looking to capture the complex realities of state–citizen relations and the multifarious ways in which dominant discourses of the state are reproduced, subverted and challenged. Reading this book, it is impossible not to think about the hierarchical power relationship that existed between Grenfell residents and Kensington and Chelsea local authority, of the insidious techniques deployed by the local authority and the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organization to exclude the voices of its residents and downplay their most basic and urgent right to live in a safe environment. For the last four decades, working-class communities have been organized and defined by their economic lack and housing decline, orchestrated by the local state and private market intervention.
These dominant discourses of decline, of so-called ‘problem estates’, have justified the solution, which broadly invovles governance through crime, regeneration and gentrification.This book covers an ambitious range of topics, but this is necessary to recognize the full reach of the local state, a limitless reach which, as the author argues, might well be the undoing of liberal democracy and legitimacy to power and authority.