A World Laid Waste?

Responding to the Social, Cultural and Political Consequences of Globalisation

Francis Dodsworth, Antonia Walford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367886028
• eBook ISBN: 9781351996495
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Globalisation and neo-liberalism have seen the rise of new international powers, increasingly interlinked economies, and mass urbanisation. The internet, mobile communications and mass migration have transformed lives around the planet. For some, this has been positive and liberating, but it has also been destructive of settled communities and ways of living, ecologies, economies and livelihoods, cultural values, political programmes and identities. This edited volume uses the concept of waste to explore and critique the destructive impact of globalisation and neo-liberalism.

By bringing to bear the distinct perspectives of sociologists of class, religion and culture; anthropologists concerned with infrastructures, material waste and energy; and analysts from accounting and finance exploring financialization and supply chains, this collection explores how creative responses to the wastelands of globalisation can establish alternative, at times fragile, narratives of hope. Responding to the tendency in contemporary public and academic discourse to resort to a language of the 'laid to waste' or 'left behind' to make sense of social and cultural change, the authors of this volume focus on the practices and rhetorics of waste in a range of different empirical settings to reveal the spaces for political action and social imagination that are emerging even in times of polarisation, uncertainty and disillusionment.

This inter-disciplinary approach, developed through a decade of research in the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC), provides a distinctive perspective on the ways in which people in very different social and cultural contexts are negotiating the destructive and creative possibilities of recent political and economic change.

1Must Brexit be a waste?

Economic policies for a disunited kingdom

Julie Froud, Sukhdev Johal, Michael Moran and Karel Williams¹

Brexit, the decision of the United Kingdom to leave the European Union (EU), will certainly bring economic and social change. Major sections of the UK economy, like wholesale finance or manufacturing, will find themselves in a different place because they will lose unimpeded access to the EU market: Britain outside the EU cannot retain passported rights to sell financial services in Europe and the probability is that automotive and aerospace will be outside the customs union. Politically, Brexit makes the break-away of Scotland more likely and, right across the UK, creates acute dilemmas for the post-1997 style of post-democratic, business-friendly politics of the centre-left and right. Previously, political and business elites could sort things out between themselves without worrying about the electorate; now the politicians must try to reconcile the demands of organised business for market access with a popular vote challenging free movement of labour.

But does this mean a country laid waste as so many remain commentators fear? Or could Brexit put the country on a different trajectory and provide the conditions for economic renewal and a new politics, so that problems for the existing order become opportunities for a new order? And how would we try to understand the drivers of change and the possibilities of progress from a Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC) point of view, where the emphasis has always been on the quotidian and empirical not on the epochal, with accompanying grand narratives about damnation and/or redemption.

Our starting point for addressing these issues, in the first section of this chapter, is the inadequacy of the dominant ‘left behind’ explanation of the Brexit vote (see the introduction to this volume), which blurs voting patterns and fails to recognise the broader political forces that have driven Brexit and increasingly divide the polity and destabilise the historically prevailing model of United Kingdom politics. The second part of the chapter then takes up our corollary economic argument, which is that the Brexit vote of 2016 came out of the way that the political classes and large sections of the electorate and masses were living in different economies. Building on this proposition, the third part turns to the technocrats and their expert economic modelling of the effects of Brexit before the vote. This modelling was underpinned by conventional post-1940s ways of thinking about one manageable economy, which is tied up with the socio-technic measure of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Against this, we will argue that the economic and political future of the UK now depends not on the one economy, but on the performance and management of part of the economy. But, as the fourth and final part of this chapter argues, the mainstream economic debate is about the performance of the tradeable goods and services sector after Brexit, where renaissance is highly unlikely; against this, we will argue that the economic and political debate should be about the reorganisation of the largely sheltered foundational economy.

The aim of this chapter is to replace the unreal economic optimism of the Brexiteers (the most vocal advocates of Brexit) about new trade agreements and competitive success with a more sober political optimism about the possibility of a new settlement based on radical social innovation in non-tradeable activities. The economic optimists, like some pro-Brexit ministers in the Cabinet, put their faith in tradeable goods and services: so Liam Fox (2016) can claim that Brexit ‘presented us with a glorious opportunity to reset our global trading relationships, place ourselves back in the centre of an increasingly interconnected world and build an economy that works for all’. The political optimists, like ourselves, believe that nothing is automatic, but that Brexit underlines the need for a reorganisation of the ‘foundational economy’, which delivers welfare critical goods and services to every household. If economic renaissance through tradeable goods and services is unlikely to happen, political reorganisation of the foundational economy is a serious opportunity.

The disunited kingdom

The result of the Brexit referendum was a surprise and in the immediate aftermath many explained the leave vote by reaching for tropes about places and people ‘left behind’. For John Lanchester (2016) in the London Review of Books, leave was the option of places disadvantaged by structural change: seaside resorts which lost their role with cheap flights; coal fields where the good jobs went with pit closure; and knocked about factory towns like Oldham in north east Manchester. The psephologist, Rob Ford (2016), writing in The Observer, advanced a ‘them and us’ socio-cultural explanation: the working class leave voters were older, socially conservative voters ‘left behind’ by the secular shift of the past 30 years which younger, educated, socially liberal, big city cosmopolitans have embraced.

This kind of ‘left behind’ explanation finds support in more serious analysis of material differences. Some years ago, the leading economic sociologist Neil Fligstein (2008) showed how social class position in the EU correlates empirically with participation in, and perceived benefits from, the EU project: put crudely, well-travelled grant getting academics and their peers were much more likely to be positive about the EU than blue collar workers living in de-industrialised regions with few good jobs. At the same time, the ‘left behind’ trope reworks the binary distinction between new and old in a descriptive way and flatters the self-image of the ‘globalised middle classes’ without really engaging the specifics of voter patterns and their drivers.

The first point to note about this argument is that the largest number of those ‘left behind’ took no part in this referendum. Electoral Commission (2016) data tell us that about 15 per cent of eligible citizens are disfranchised: somewhere around six million eligible adults do not appear on the 2015 electoral roll and therefore could not vote on 23 June. A second group also took no part in the vote: the 27.8 per cent of those registered who did not turn up in the polling booths. Identifying the social characteristics of the unregistered and non-voters has always been tricky, but we can with some certainty say that they consist disproportionately of the economic casualties of the competitive economy: people with precarious housing tenure, those whose skills and aptitudes give them only a toehold in the labour market; the young, especially those with histories of marginality.

Data from YouGov and the Ashcroft polls on those who did vote then reveal multiple differences: there are gaps between classes, educational levels, nations of the UK, and within and between English regions. But one huge variation jumps out: the influence of age on voting preferences. The Ashcroft and the YouGov polls are consistent on this: the young wanted to stay, the old to leave. In the YouGov poll, for instance, 71 per cent of 18–24 year olds voted ‘remain’; the comparable figure for those aged over 65 was 36 per cent. As always, the problem is to know what to make of this. There were presumably significant differences within the young and old age groups according to class and education. But one thing is certain: immiseration on standard measures certainly does not explain the age-related differences in voting.

Using the standard measures of income and assets, older citizens with pensions and houses have done well as the residuary legatees of the post war settlement; while all the old have effectively been bribed by politicians like Chancellor Osborne with his ‘triple lock’ on the state pension. If the incomes of the old have actually increased since the financial crisis (Belfield et al. 2015), as we argue later, the welfare of the elderly raises more complicated issues about health and care services. But, surely, the real puzzle here is not that the old voted leave but that the young voted for a status quo that offers them so little. The young are least likely to own property, to be enrolled in anything resembling a final salary pension scheme, and are most likely to be employed under precarious contract terms in the ‘gig’ economy. When did you last see a pensioner working as a Deliveroo despatch rider?

It could then be argued that ‘left behind’ is not about incomes and assets, but about cultural identity. But the ‘left behind’ binarism does not really explain what’s happened to identity and how this is revealed by a referendum that was conceived in a particular state formation where the referendum’s role was performative. The judgement of the voters was intended to vindicate the choice of the political classes and demonstrate that both lived in a United Kingdom.

Although sometimes pictured as a constitutional innovation, referendums, since the original breakthrough Wilson referendum on Common Market membership, have been traditional tools of statecraft in the hands of the metropolitan elite. They have been offered, as was the June 2016 referendum, as a way of solving problems faced by that elite and it is naïve to complain that they are instruments of party and parliamentary management when electoral legitimation will help. And they are withheld, as in the case of the imposition of elected mayoralties in major British cities, when the calculation is that voters would give the ‘wrong’ answer to a question. They are the product of the court politics of Whitehall and Westminster, used to legitimise choices made for the ‘British people’ by the central state. In June 2016 ‘the people’ of course gave the wrong answer and that revealed divisions within and between elites and masses.

Elite divisions have been rightly emphasised in Glenn Morgan’s (2017) account of the referendum. In the Wilson referendum, only Enoch Powell, Tony Benn and the farmers were against the Common Market; by 2016, business was divided and the governing Tory party was publicly quarrelling about the EU in post truth ways that discredited the whole of the political class. More important, in June 2016 ‘the people’ gave the wrong answer because the entities over which the metropolitan elite claim suzerainty – the British state, the British people – do not exist anymore. The state has been fragmenting along territorial lines for a generation, and the two landmark referendums of recent years – Scotland in 2014, Brexit in 2016 – are accelerating that process.

The picture presented by the June result is indeed one of a ‘kingdom’ disunited and a ‘country’ divided: between the Irish, the Scots and the rest; between big city and small town; between graduates and the rest; between the young and the old; between the multi-ethnic and mono-ethnic. And buried in the Ashcroft polls is one particularly striking finding: in England, leave voters (39 per cent) were more than twice as likely as remain voters (18 per cent) to describe themselves either as ‘English not British’ or ‘more English than British’. We are seeing, in short, the waning of a British/United Kingdom identity, the reconstitution of new territorial identities, and widening divisions between groups with very different identities, encapsulated in the gap between generations. ‘Left behind’ does not capture this fragmentation.

As the British prime minister Theresa May tries to manage splits and rivals struggle for advancement, the court politics within the Cabinet will continue to obsess those who practice and report the politics of that court. But alongside the big overt message of the referendum – a vote for Brexit – is an equally important more tacit message: that after the vote the real action lies beyond the court politics of the metropolitan elite, in the fragmented and dissolving elements of the state that was once the United Kingdom. Ironically, this is denied by the post-referendum consensus within the metropolitan elite that the British people have spoken and their will must be obeyed: so ‘Brexit means Brexit’ and even ‘remainers’ (those who voted to remain in the EU) have accepted this before looking for the wriggle room of a ‘soft’ Brexit, which might maintain many of the conditions of EU membership like membership of the single market and freedom of movement, without formally retaining membership of the political bloc.

The tacit message of the referendum is that this is a disunited kingdom, but this message has not been received by the metropolitan political classes because it is beyond their imagination. The question of what to do in policy terms and how to manage the economy after Brexit is further complicated by divisions within what these political classes think of as ‘the economy’. As we will argue in the next section, the technocratic economic experts want to manage as though there was one unitary economy, even though, like the United Kingdom, this economy has ceased to exist.

The unitary manageable economy?

How and why did the commentariat, experts and academics, not see the Brexit vote coming? Partly because economic divisions within the UK have been read reassuringly through conventional ways of thinking about one national economy, which can be measured in terms of GDP and is amenable to macro-economic management, and which can address regional and social inequalities as well as manage the level of activity. But British voters are not now living in one economy that diffuses standard outcomes. GDP, as a socio-technical form of quantification, fails to capture the multiplicities that require a new approach to economic management. In historical perspective, the now conventional understanding of the economy as a manageable, unitary entity came out of the external conflict of the second world war; the internal divisions revealed by the Brexit vote should now stimulate a new kind of thinking about how there is more than one economy.

The idea of the unitary, manageable, national economy is, as Mitchell (1998, 2002) has argued, an invention of recent date. It links to GDP as the quantitative measure when ‘total war’ in the USA and UK required management calculations of demand around national full employment activity levels (Coyle 2014; Fioramonti 2013). The question in the USA was whether war mobilisation could be managed without crimping civilian consumption; the question in the UK was how much demand had to be taken out of civilian consumption so as to curb inflation. Of course, the policy instruments of activity management have changed in the past 50 years. In the UK, for example, fiscal policy fine tuning and various kinds of corporatism favoured in the 1960s are long gone and have now been displaced by monetary policy of an increasingly experimental kind, with quantitative easing and zero interest rates. But jobs and GDP growth remain the superordinate policy objectives for Governor Carney and the Bank of England, as they did for the British Treasury in the 1960s.

Many critics have rightly argued that GDP and jobs are (marketable) activity measures not (social) welfare measures, but few have questioned the unitary economy framing and the underlying assumption that we do (or should) live in one economy. If prosperity does not trickle down, the policy response within the unitary frame has been to promote ‘inclusive growth’ which distributes prosperity. The most prominent official advocate of inclusive growth is the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (2014: 8), which has responded to the general increase of inequality in high-income countries by advocating ‘a new approach to economic growth that aims to improve living standards and share the benefits of increased prosperity more evenly across social groups’. The OECD accepts the need to supplement GDP with other measures (as in the long-established UN Human Development Index) but retains the core, and problematic, aim of distributing prosperity within the one economy.

Like everything else, the policies for redistributing prosperity territorially between groups and regions have changed quite radically in the past 50 years. UK regional policy in the 1960s took the form of incentives to locate in peripheral regions and planning controls that, for example, forced car assemblers to mo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Our Personal Journey
• 1 Must Brexit be a waste? Economic policies for a disunited kingdom
• 2 ‘The ghosts of class’: space, waste and hope in the ex-industrial north
• 3 Rubbish city, rubbish music: durability and transience in ‘Madchester’ club cultures
• 4 Coping with change: community, environment and engagement in a London Buddhist community
• 5 A waste of energy? Traversing the moral landscape of energy consumption in the UK
• 6 Reconfiguring state-citizen relations: the politics of waste infrastructures
• 7 Refugee waste: death, survival and solidarity in Lesvos
• Index