‘Fairness’: engineering consent for welfare reform during austerity

Even before the financial crisis of 2008, European welfare systems appear to have been converging towards what some have called ‘a new welfare settlement’ in which social protection is replaced by more conditional and targeted regimes which purport to activate and empower citizens rather than passively protect them (Cantillon and Van Lancker, Reference Cantillon and Van Lancker2012: 657). It is likely that ‘austerity’ will accelerate this process. Since 2008, although outside the Single European Currency, the Conservative led Conservative/Liberal Democrat Coalition government in the UK has voluntarily embarked on a programme of public expenditure reduction which, whilst not of the same scale as that forced upon Eurozone members such as Greece and Ireland, is unprecedented in postwar Britain. The £81 billion cuts package announced in the 2010 Comprehensive Spending Review included £7 billion of welfare cuts in addition to the £11 billion already announced in the June 2010 emergency budget. Innumerable analyses have demonstrated how these cuts will disproportionately impact upon the poorest and most vulnerable (Brewer and Joyce, Reference Brewer and Joyce2010; Wood and Grant, Reference Wood and Grant2010; Reed, Reference Reed2010; Veale, Reference Veale2011; SPA, 2011).The question then, as some have recently indicated, is how political consent for such a strategy can be won (Clarke and Newman, Reference Clarke and Newman2012). This question seems not just pertinent to the UK but to other European nations where previous welfare settlements are now under threat. We suggest that in the UK the Coalition strategy has been to tackle this problem by wrapping their cuts programme in the apparently liberal and reasonable cloak of fairness.

By emphasising the unintended dysfunctions, anomalies and purported unfairnesses of the system that they inherited, the Coalition has been remarkably successful in popularising welfare cuts. In short, they have developed an ‘anti-welfare populism’, and, we will argue later, like any form of populism such politics draws upon and amplifies a particular kind of public resentment. The idea of anti-welfare populism that we will develop here is by no means confined to the UK. Indeed, it can with some confidence be claimed that the phenomenon we examine here is significant throughout Europe, North America and Australia. However existing research has tended to link such populism to processes of racialisation. In the USA, for example, anti-welfare populism now associated with Tea Party Republicanism is seen by some as a shorthand for anti-black sentiment (Gilens, Reference Gilens1999). In Europe, the concept of ‘welfare chauvinism’, that is the idea that principles of social solidarity should apply only to the so-called ‘native’ population and not to immigrants (Van Oorschot, Reference Van Oorschot2007), is strongly expressed in countries as apparently diverse as Denmark (through the Danish People's Party) and Hungary (through Jobbik). In contrast, whilst there are racialised currents within anti-welfare populism within the UK they are not pronounced. Arguably, what is primarily ‘othered’ in UK discourse is ‘the poor’, or at least certain sections of the poor, and this is irrespective of colour or ethnic origin.

At a discursive level this populism rests upon both old and new arguments. In a revival of classic aspects of Thatcherism (Wiggan, Reference Wiggan2012), the Coalition have argued that the existing system encourages welfare dependency and has been open to considerable manipulation and abuse. Regarding dependency, John Welshman's study of the history of the ‘cycles of deprivation’ thesis indicates the crucial role played by Margaret Thatcher's colleague Sir Keith Joseph (Welshman, Reference Welshman2008). Welshman notes how Joseph's speeches ‘are peppered with arguments about the deserving and undeserving poor; cases of malingering and benefit fraud; and unemployables’ (Reference Welshman2008: 4). Such behavioural models of social deprivation attribute responsibility for poverty and unemployment to the ‘negative agency’ (irresponsible and destructive choices) of individuals rather than to structural factors. Social protection merely encourages passivity and dependency, hence the shift towards ‘activation programmes’ (Cantillon and Van Lancker, Reference Cantillon and Van Lancker2012; Wright, Reference Wright2012) which make entitlement to benefits conditional upon desired behaviours such as job seeking, responsible parenting and so on. This critique of dependency has now become so established that it pops up in some unlikely places, including post-apartheid South Africa (Surrender et al., Reference Surrender, Noble, Wright and Phakama2010).

In the UK, in what might seem to be a risky strategy, responsibility for abuse of the benefits system has focused on the sick and disabled, it being alleged by the Department for Work and Pensions, for instance, that many of those claiming incapacity benefit were in fact fit for work. As Wright notes, ‘for disabled people, rules of transition from incapacity benefit to employment support allowance involved a new work capacity assessment, which led to narrower entitlement and a majority of claimants being redefined as “fit for work”’ (Wright, Reference Wright2012: 318). In February 2012, six major charities representing disabled people warned that the focus on alleged fraud and overclaiming to justify benefits cuts had led to a discernable increase in resentment towards this group with increased reports of public harassment and disability hate crimes (Guardian, 2012a).

However alongside the ‘traditional’ rhetoric highlighting benefit dependency and abuse we have seen the emergence of a new, and potentially more far-reaching argument, one which insists that needs-based benefits and services have themselves become a source of unfairness. Housing benefit, a means-tested system of cash support for low income tenants, has come to exemplify this aspect of the Coalition's discourse of fairness as politicians have sought to demonstrate how such needs-based forms of financial support discriminate unfairly against the ordinary working family. As early as 2010, this argument was used by David Cameron to justify the Coalition's cutbacks on Housing Benefit in a reply to Ed Miliband during Parliamentary Question Time:

The cap on Housing Benefit, originally announced in the emergency Coalition budget of June 2010, reduced the financial support households need to be able to afford to live in rented property by between £250 per week for a one-bedroom flat to £400 per week for a four-bedroomed property. By 2012, it was becoming obvious that this was going to make it impossible for large numbers of poor households to live in central areas of London, with evidence already accumulating of eviction proceedings being taken against tenants who had been affected (Guardian, 2012b).

Despite targetting some of the most vulnerable groups in society, the Conservative's own polls indicate the continued popularity of this anti-welfare populism (Populus, 2012). At the time of writing it therefore seems that the problem of ‘consent’ (Clarke and Newman, Reference Clarke and Newman2012) has been resolved, temporarily at least, in the Coalition's favour. To understand this achievement we suggest that a discursive analysis of Coalition policies needs to be complemented by one which highlights the role of the emotions in the formation of public policies. This is particularly the case given that political scientists have noted that at a discursive level populism is often quite incoherent. Indeed, in a review of the literature Catherine Fieschi notes that populism derives much of its strength not from ideological coherence but from an underlying mood or sentiment (Fieschi, Reference Fieschi2004). It is to this that we now turn.

Structures of feeling

The role of the emotions in the framing of welfare policies and the practices of welfare workers is still relatively underexplored in the UK, although the emergence of psycho-social studies over the last decade has begun to rectify this situation (Hoggett, Reference Hoggett2000; Froggett, Reference Froggett2002; Cooper and Lousada, Reference Cooper and Lousada2005; Stenner et al., Reference Stenner, Barnes and Taylor2008). There are many ways in which powerful public feelings impact both on the emergence of social policies and on the institutional lives and practices of those such as social workers and housing managers who deliver welfare. Although welfare research has become increasingly interested in the relationship between public fears and the management of risk in welfare (Brown and Calnan, Reference Brown and Calnan2009; Dixon, Reference Dixon2010), it has nevertheless been largely uninfluenced by what has been referred to as the ‘affective turn’ (Clough and Halley, Reference Clough and Halley2007; Thompson and Hoggett, Reference Thompson and Hoggett2012) in the humanities and social sciences. This ‘affective turn’ seeks an alternative to approaches which solely stress the role of discourse or material resources and neglect the role that human feelings play in the life of communities, institutions, social movements and governments.

Returning to the theme of anti-welfare populism, in the mid 1970s, as the economic slump that was to lead to the emergence of Thatcherism in 1979 took hold, a full scale moral panic developed about so-called welfare scroungers and the undeserving poor. The orchestration of that panic by the media and figures in political and public life was ably documented by Peter Golding and Sue Middleton (Golding and Middleton, Reference Golding and Middleton1982: 109).

However Golding and Middleton were careful not to construe criticisms of welfare dependency, the undeserving poor, etc. simply as a creation of the media or political elites. They noted that such framings could only be achieved so readily because of a ‘pre-existing and powerful set of beliefs about welfare and poverty’ (Reference Golding and Middleton1982: 109). Whilst Golding and Middleton drew attention to the role of pre-existing beliefs, we will focus on the role of what we believe to be a set of pre-existing feelings associated with ressentiment, a particular form of resentment that political scientists argue is the sentiment underlying populism (Fieschi, Reference Fieschi2004).

We argue that this form of resentment is rooted in what we will call, following Raymond Williams, a ‘structure of feeling’. Williams coined this term to refer to organised sets of feelings, operating largely at affective and pre-discursive levels, which give ‘the sense of a generation or of a period’ (Williams, Reference Williams1977: 131). For Williams, such structures of feeling typically found expression in style, tone or form. For example, Williams writes about a specifically Welsh structure of feeling, embodied in Welsh industrial novels of that period, which is informed by both the distinctive physical character of the Welsh industrial landscape and by the pervasive sense of defeat following the 1926 General Strike (Williams, Reference Williams1979). Outside of cultural studies this concept remains comparatively undeveloped, although within the social sciences related concepts have recently been proposed including James Jasper's concept of ‘abiding affect’ (Jasper, Reference Jasper1998) and Deborah Gould's concept of ‘emotional habitus’ (Gould, Reference Gould2009)

We believe that Williams’ concept of ‘structure of feeling’ can be adapted and developed in a way which provides us with a tool for understanding the organisation of feeling in society, a kind of ‘affective’ complement to discourse. There are two aspects to ‘structure’ in ‘structure of feeling’ that must be understood. First, there is the link with social structure, and specifically with class relations. Secondly, there is the internal organisation of the structure of feeling. This draws attention to how, at a societal level, our emotional responses correspond to complex configurations or organised patterns of affect and connected ideas, subject positions and identities. In other words, public feelings are not just individual feelings writ large.

The specific structure of feeling that we examine here is a particular form of resentment which, following a tradition of scholarship in European social theory, we call ressentiment. As we shall see, ressentiment occurs where grievances become blocked and turn in on themselves, leading to something more socially toxic. It has been seen as the sentiment underlying reactionary forms of populism, and in particular those underpinning extreme nationalism and racism, but in this article we will demonstrate how it also provides the affective basis for other divisions within and between social groups and classes, divisions currently being amplified by the Coalition's discourse of fairness.

Beneath-the-surface research approach

To examine such a structure of feeling empirically requires the development of research methods which are ‘experience near’ and to go beneath the surface. Such qualitative methods need to be attentive to the affective tone and dynamic of conversation as well as to the content. When the General Election was announced in the spring of 2010, we were completing a research project which involved collecting data in this way. The research (Beedell et al., Reference Beedell, Wilkinson, Hoggett and Garner2010) was conducted as part of the then Labour government's Connecting Communities programme, a national programme designed to counter the growing appeal of the far right in traditional white working class communities in the UK. To investigate barriers to community cohesion in Bristol, we were commissioned by Bristol City Council to undertake research in six overwhelmingly white electoral wards in the city with high levels of social deprivation.

The remit was to reach residents who were rarely consulted and to engage them in conversations around race and other challenging topics which previous researchers had often found difficult to broach. To achieve this, the researchers went to locations where different sections of these communities gathered – pubs, cafes, libraries, youth clubs, hairdressers, school gates and sports/recreation venues – rather than expecting participants to travel to take part in focus groups. We visited potential venues in advance to assess their feasibility as research sites, taking into consideration their popularity and footfall with our target groups, the co-operation and willingness of those in charge (a couple of pubs and cafes were singularly disinterested, others much more welcoming) and practical aspects such as the degree of privacy offered and suitable acoustics for recording purposes.

By putting up posters in local shops and dropping leaflets at chosen venues and scores of nearby residences, we invited groups of four to six participants at a time to take part in short, informal but structured focus groups. The invitation, headlined with the question ‘How is the recession affecting communities?’, made explicit the fact that we were working on behalf of the City Council. Participants were offered incentives to take part, in the form of cash or a gift voucher worth up to £15 – the maximum a benefit claimant can accept without declaring it as income – or through free refreshments. Some venues worked better than others: cafes and hairdressers were much less successful in terms of attracting participants than invitations to attend groups held at well-used local libraries, in the pubs and in youth clubs, providing evidence that familiar ‘reflective’ rather than ‘active’ spaces are best suited to this kind of research process.

To facilitate discussion, we used a laptop to present a short video composed of white working class people talking about their experiences of, and opinions on, topics such as employment, housing, debt and immigration. The video was divided into short, four-minute sections that acted as ‘triggers’ to elicit conversations between our participants about community spirit, housing availability, family, jobs, benefits, opportunities for young people and taking action locally. The visual triggers were an effective method of surfacing affectively charged narratives, a key objective in emerging psycho-social research methodologies (Hollway and Jefferson, Reference Hollway and Jefferson2000; Clarke and Hoggett, Reference Clarke and Hoggett2009).

Over two months – mid-March to mid-May 2010 – we talked to sixty-four people in seventeen groups comprising 90 per cent white British residents, 62 per cent men, 57 per cent social housing tenants, 55 per cent longstanding residents (twenty-plus years or their whole life in the area) and 50 per cent aged sixteen to thirty-five. All interviews were recorded with the agreement of participants, who were guaranteed anonymity as well as a copy of the final report if they so wished. Thirty five per cent of those sampled – a high proportion – did ask for a copy of the report. Although time was limited, we reached sectors of the population that are traditionally hard to talk to – large numbers of men, long-standing residents, young people and the unemployed.

The focus groups generated rich and fascinating data. Core themes included the following: lack and loss of security, civility and community spirit; the expression of strong feelings about particular groups that were thought to be receiving favourable treatment; shifting values around work, consumption and consideration; and peoples’ experiences of being trapped in poverty in a number of different ways. It is the first and second of these themes – loss and (un)fairness – which we focus on in this article, as it was here that respondents’ sense of grievance was articulated most strongly.

Ressentiment

Anti-welfare populism

We are aware that the kind of analysis we are developing here could be criticised for pathologising the white working class and not taking their difficulties, particularly the competition for increasingly scarce resources, seriously. Indeed precisely this criticism has been made by the authors of The New East End (Dench et al., Reference Dench, Gavron and Young2006) of similar studies to our own. In fact, there are many similarities between the views of their respondents and our own. As they note, ‘most of the respondents hostile to immigrants were no less condemning of white people – especially never-married single mothers, bogus disablement allowance claimants or long-term able-bodied unemployed and so on – whom they considered to be debasing the welfare system and living off it’ (Dench et al., Reference Dench, Gavron and Young2006: 206). However, as Robert Moore notes in his critique of The New East End, not only does Dench and his colleagues take the sentiments and attitudes of their white working class respondents at face value but they then appear to deploy these as a cipher for their own views (Moore, Reference Moore2008). So when, for instance, they say that ‘minorities represent a large and visible part of the something-for-nothing society, in which rights to receive support have manifestly overtaken reciprocal obligations’ (Dench et al., Reference Dench, Gavron and Young2006: 207), we no longer know whether they are summarising the views of white East Enders or whether these are also their views, one suspects it is both.

Similar sentiments were expressed by Cameron in a keynote speech on welfare in June 2012 where, condemning the needs-based approach, he argued:

Survey research undertaken in early 2011 by MORI for the Conservative think tank Policy Exchange confirmed support for anti-welfare populism (Policy Exchange, 2011). Whilst fairness was viewed as a very important political value, the majority of respondents construed this in terms of ‘getting what you deserve’ rather than in terms of equal treatment. This more ‘meritocratic’ approach was also reflected in views about earnings and income, with the view that rewards should be related to effort and talent predominating over more needs-based notions of distribution. An overwhelming majority of supporters of all three political parties agreed to the statement: ‘Some people who are poor are much more deserving than other people who are poor. We should focus help on people who are trying hard and doing the right thing, rather than those who have made themselves poor’ (2011: 13). In a direct echo of the political rationale of welfare cutbacks and discourse of fairness, the survey suggested a clear majority believed it was the very generosity of existing benefits that deterred job seeking and that ‘people should not be offered council houses which are worth more than the average house in their local authority area’. The survey also revealed substantial support for more conditional approaches to welfare, for example heavier sanctions for those on Job Seekers Allowance but not seeking work.

The links with the concept of ressentiment are clear. Developing Jock Young's arguments, Chris Grover (Reference Grover2010) suggests that access to social security is increasingly made conditional upon the performance of desired behaviour (the demonstration of motivation, responsibility, etc.) rather than upon need. In a way which is similar to Vron Ware, who notes that ‘the vagueness of the term “fairness” is one of the first problems that arises from misunderstanding the phenomenon of resentment’ (Ware, Reference Ware2008), Grover argues that framing policies to appease real or imagined resentments strengthens, rather than mollifies, the underlying sense of grievance. This in turn can potentially lead to a perverse cycle of increasingly vindictive forms of welfare conditionality. Language, and particularly political language, has a performative dimension to it and can create what it purports to describe.

In the UK, using the language of fairness and with the tacit support of all three main political parties, welfare reform has become associated with increasing welfare conditionality. As we noted in our introduction, in some other European countries populism has appropriated the language of ‘fairness’ into a wider welfare chauvinist discourse. Whilst there are elements of this in the UK at grassroots level, the anti-welfare populism of political and media elites is primarily non-racialised and seeks to ‘other’ the poor themselves.

While our own view is that, far from being ‘fair’, conditional approaches to welfare deepen inequalities, our interest in this paper is not so much to examine the justice of conditionality but to analyse the underlying structure of feeling that fuels all forms of reactionary populism including anti-welfare populism. We have argued that this structure of feeling, ressentiment, becomes attached to a very restricted and localised vision of injustice, a preoccupation which appears precisely at the point when individuals accommodate themselves to the idea of living in a world without justice.

We would strongly suggest that focusing on ‘fairness’ simply as a discourse whilst ignoring the reservoir of ressentiment this both draws upon and amplifies is inadequate. The spontaneous combustion of the UK riots in the summer of 2011 illustrates the powerful and unfocussed nature of this affective force. In addition, our research suggests that the ‘fairness agenda’ is one which exploits an existing ‘beneath-the -surface’ structure of feeling which is spiteful and vindictive. The ‘fairness agenda’, perhaps intentionally for some of those who advocate it, has a contrary effect, one which foments rivalries and inequalities rather than building solidarities amongst those who ‘have little’.

In this light, the comments of Prime Minister David Cameron to the Conservative Party conference in October 2010 take on new meaning:

Perhaps it is time to unpick this ‘new conversation’. If these dynamics are at play in local communities, we are rapidly heading towards a parochialised and localised ‘little society’, a society in which the big questions about real social inequalities are eclipsed by little resentments, a society where the real and continuing divisions between social classes are obscured by largely imaginary divisions between neighbour and neighbour, and where discourses of equality are sidelined and suppressed by talk of ‘fairness’.