Critical Social Policy

Ideas that the quality of parental nurturing and attachment in the first years of a child’s life is formative, hard-wiring their brains for success or failure, are reflected in policy reports from across the political spectrum and in targeted services delivering early intervention. In this article we draw on our research into ‘Brain science and early intervention’, using reviews of key policy literature and interviews with influential advocates of early intervention and with early years practitioners, to critically assess the ramifications and implications of these claims. Rather than upholding the ‘hopeful ethos’ proffered by advocates of the progressive nature of brain science and early intervention, we show that brain claims are justifying gendered, raced and social inequalities, positioning poor mothers as architects of their children’s deprivation.

David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ agenda is best understood in terms of ideological and policy continuities with earlier Conservative and New Labour governments. But where previous post-1979 governments have sought to renegotiate the role of the state mostly through privatisations and marketisations of public services, the ‘Big Society’ agenda also proposed the replacement of the state by individual voluntarism and community enterprise. The accompanying political narrative portrays an atomised ‘broken Britain’ but at the same time insists that untapped community spirit can take the place of the state. This article examines the disjuncture between Big Society narratives and urban policy responses to the 2011 Tottenham riots. By comparison with previous local regeneration initiatives in Tottenham there was very little emphasis on community development. Instead explicit goals of gentrification in the Plan for Tottenham echo Thatcher-era approaches to ‘place shaping’ and exemplify a wider re-emphasis on property-led regeneration.

Many critical studies have warned that government–nonprofit partnership in welfare provision can lead to the marketisation of the nonprofit sector. However, this article contends that the adoption of market-like approaches does not necessarily result in the complete marketisation of the sector. Through a case study of Korean nonprofits engaged in a workfare scheme, this article reveals how nonprofits manage to safeguard their reciprocal culture and solidarity by strategically appropriating the methods of the capitalist market. By outlining these street-level activities, this study aims to underline the persistence of cooperative traditions in the nonprofit sector even within a competition-driven policy environment.

In July 2012 the Conservative–Liberal Democrat Coalition government introduced a new set of family migration rules. These rules set a sharp increase in the minimum income threshold for people sponsoring partners and children to join them in the UK. Consequently, there has been a significant reduction in the number of visas granted through the family migration route. This article explores the themes of class in connection to transnational relationships and citizenship in the formulation of the new family migration rules, in the justifications that have been made for the rules and in the impact of the rules on applicants. It is argued that in the context of international migration and transnational relationships, class-based moralism and regulation has been entwined with exclusionary discourses on ethnicity, national belonging and citizenship and has been extended beyond the nation-state border towards the governing of particular kinds of international family.

This article discusses the findings of a study tracing the incorporation of claims about infant brain development into English family policy as part of the longer term development of a ‘parent training’, early intervention agenda. The main focus is on the ways in which the deployment of neuroscientific discourse in family policy creates the basis for a new governmental oversight of parents. We argue that advocacy of ‘early intervention’, in particular that which deploys the authority of ‘the neuroscience’, places parents at the centre of the policy stage but simultaneously demotes and marginalises them. So we ask, what becomes of the parent when politically and culturally, the child is spoken of as infinitely and permanently neurologically vulnerable to parental influence? In particular, the policy focus on parental emotions and their impact on infant brain development indicates that this represents a biologisation of ‘therapeutic’ governance.

Banks in Spain are receiving millions of euros of taxpayers’ money, while hundreds of home owners are being evicted. Unable to continue paying their mortgages because of unemployment or insecure employment, people are chaining themselves to their houses or other symbolic buildings; embarking on indefinite hunger strikes; and suing banks for contract abuse. In effect they are responding to the crisis by claiming and affirming their right to decent housing. Using media, legal-judicial and activist discourses, this commentary investigates the innovative political and legal tactics of the Spanish anti-eviction protests regarding: legal claims, court mediation, dation in payment (full cancellation of mortgage debt when a property is returned to the bank) and the right to relocation. It is argued that, in response to their being constructed by the state as legally incapable, evicted families and individuals are enacting themselves as activist citizens when (re)claiming their right to decent housing.

Public services are being increasingly outsourced across Europe, and especially in England. This trend raises the question of how to deal with ‘market failure’ where outsourced providers are no longer able or willing to continue with provision. The case of social care and health care in England is a critical policy arena. Following the collapse of Southern Cross – a major care provider – in 2011, policies on stronger provider regulation have been put in train in an attempt to forestall potential service failure. This commentary examines these proposals, concludes that they are insufficiently robust and suggests some alternative measures.