Welfare Rights and Social Policy

Hartley Dean

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780130404626
• eBook ISBN: 9781317904724
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

Welfare Rights and Social Policy provides an introduction to social policy through a discussion of welfare rights, which are explored in historical, comparative and critical context.

At a time when the cause of human rights is high on the global political agendathe authorasks why the status of welfare rights as an element of human rights remains ambiguous. Rights to social security, employment, housing, education, health and social care are critical to human well-being. Yet they are invariably subordinate to the civil and political rights of citizenship, they are often fragile and difficult to enforce, and because of their conditional nature they may be implicated in the social control of individual behaviour.

Part I

Welfare rights in theory

Chapter 1

The social rights of citizenship

The term ‘welfare rights’ is subject to a variety of interpretations. Sometimes it is used rather specifically to refer to specialised individual entitlements created by domestic social legislation, particularly those relating to social security or cash benefits. Sometimes it is used to refer to the arena of professional practice in which welfare rights specialists, advice workers and welfare lawyers engage. Sometimes it is used more generally to refer to the level of social protection that is, or that perhaps ought to be, guaranteed to the citizens of a ‘welfare state’. This book is concerned with all senses of the term, including its practical and conceptual connotations.

In this chapter I am starting at the conceptual level with a discussion of what are generally defined as the social rights of citizenship. In the British context the terms welfare rights and social rights may for most purposes be coterminous, but social rights is a less parochial term than welfare rights. It is a term that I shall use here to apply as much to people’s right to social participation as their right to receive socially provided services. It is concerned with a species of right that is not necessarily specific to the welfare states of the developed world and it is a term that helps us to conceptualise our own welfare rights in relation both to other kinds of rights and to the broader concept of citizenship (to which I shall return in Chapter 10).

Rights are central to social policy not only because they relate to the substantive entitlements to which the policy making process gives rise, but because they provide the basis of the rhetorical claims which drive debates and struggles over welfare. Lawyers characteristically define the first kind of rights as ‘positive’ or ‘black-letter’ rights and the latter as ‘moral’ rights. In social policy we usually recognise that both kinds of rights are in fact socially or ideologically constituted and later in this chapter I shall say something about the complex ways in which these two kinds of right relate to and feed off each other. I shall also say something about the extent to which provision for welfare is a matter of social rights, as opposed to private consumption.

First, however, I plan to discuss the way in which the concept of social rights has emerged as a defining feature of welfare capitalism.

The amelioration of class

Social rights, according to the sociologist T.H. Marshall (1950), were the unique achievement of the twentieth century. In Britain the struggle to achieve civil rights (i.e. civil liberties, property and legal rights) had by and large succeeded by the eighteenth century and the struggle to achieve political rights (i.e. voting and democratic rights) took major strides in the nineteenth century. The establishment of social rights – that is entitlement to basic standards of education, health and social care, housing and income maintenance – was completed with the formation of the ‘modern’ welfare state after the end of the Second World War. Marshall may be accused of over-generalisation, particularly in his broad-brush characterisation of different historical periods, but this ought not to obscure the importance of his argument. His contentions were, first, that social inequalities based on class divisions have been ameliorated through the development of citizenship and, second, that full citizenship requires three components – not just civil and political rights, but social rights as well.

Towards a classless society?

The first of these points finds favour in the writings of many commentators and supporters of the welfare state, especially those on the Fabian left (see George and Wilding 1985). However, T.H. Marshall’s use of the term ‘amelioration’ had in fact been directly drawn from the works of the nineteenth-century economist Alfred Marshall. It was in a series of lectures in memory of Alfred Marshall that T.H. Marshall advanced the proposition that the welfare state as founded by the post-war Labour government represented the ‘latest phase in an evolution of citizenship which has been in continuous progress for some 250 years’ (1950: 7). In so doing, he claimed he was addressing a question raised by his erstwhile namesake some 70 years before, namely ‘whether… the amelioration of the working classes has limits beyond which it cannot pass… [or] whether progress may not go on steadily, if slowly, till by occupation at least, every man is a gentleman’ (Marshall 1873, cited in Marshall 1950: 4–5).

Marshall the nineteenth-century economist was no egalitarian (least of all so far as women were concerned). The equality he foresaw was an equality of opportunities and lifestyle rather than a material equality of incomes or wealth. Technological advances, he believed, would ameliorate the arduous nature of manual labour, while compulsory elementary education would civilise the manners of the working classes. Marshall the twentieth-century sociologist similarly believed that ‘equality of status is more important than equality of income’ (1950: 33). The development of a range of social services and cash benefits financed through taxation clearly did involve an equalisation of incomes, but this was not its only or even its primary achievement:

What matters is that there is a general enrichment of the concrete substance of civilised life, a general reduction of risk and insecurity, an equalisation between the more and the less fortunate at all levels – between the healthy and the sick, the employed and the unemployed, the old and the active, the bachelor and the father of a large family. Equalisation is not so much between classes as between individuals within a population which is now treated for this purpose as though it were one class, (ibid.)

The argument then is that social rights abolish class differences (gender differences were not considered). Academic commentators in the Fabian tradition, such as Titmuss (1958; 1968), argued that the development and maintenance of state welfare provision constituted a moral imperative in so far that it represented the peaceful means of mitigating the unacceptable consequences of class inequality; social rights were a civilising force which compensated for the diswelfares of the capitalist system. Other Fabians, such as the Labour politician Tony Crosland (1956), went so far as to argue that the development of social legislation and the rise of labour and trade union power had together shifted the balance so far against the capitalist class system as to promise the imminent realisation of a democratic form of socialism.

It is important, however, to grasp the extent to which T.H. Marshall’s concept of citizenship was not necessarily consistent with socialist pretensions. Marshall saw citizenship, particularly through the effects of a truly meritocratic state education system, as an alternative instrument of social stratification (1950: 39). Certainly, he believed the emergence of social rights signalled the extent to which laissez faire capitalism had been superseded. But the result would be a society based on status and desert, rather than contract and mere good fortune: ‘Social rights in their modern form imply an invasion of contract by status, the subordination of market price to social justice, the replacement of the free bargain by the declaration of rights’ (ibid.: 40). Ironically, shorn of any commitment to economic equality, this view of social rights can be rendered consistent with a form of one-nation Toryism and the kind of call for a ‘classless society’ which the Conservative British Prime Minister John Major made following his 1992 General Election victory (The Guardian, 10.4.92).

We do not of course live in a classless society. None the less, the class structure of Britain has changed since the creation of the ‘modern’ welfare state, although this has been driven by changes in the nature of capitalism, rather than by any influence of the welfare state (see Bottomore 1992; Marshall 1997). The fault line in Britain’s occupational structure now lies, not so much between a manual working class and a non-manual middle class, as between secure, highly trained, well-paid ‘core’ workers and vulnerable, low skilled, poorly paid ‘peripheral’ workers. What is more, since the late 1970s the growth of the welfare state has been curtailed and the extent of social and economic inequality in Britain has worsened (see Glennerster and Hills 1998; Gordon et al. 2000). One economic commentator has recently argued that Britain now constitutes a ‘30:30:40 society’ in which, though 40 per cent of the population are relatively privileged in material terms, 30 per cent are chronically insecure and 30 per cent are systematically disadvantaged (Hutton 1996). I shall examine the implications of such issues – not least for social stability – in Chapter 2.

The ‘hyphenated’ society

For the moment, however, I shall return to the second limb of T.H. Marshall’s argument, which was that civil, political and social rights are all necessary to full citizenship. Marshall recognised the sense in which citizenship based on a broad equality of rights was potentially in conflict with the workings of a capitalist market economy. In later writings, however, he stressed that full citizenship need not inhibit a market economy, provided a state of equilibrium can be sustained between political, social and civil rights in what he characterised as the ‘hyphenated’ society, democratic-welfare-capitalism. The hyphens in this formulation symbolise the interconnectedness of a democratic polity, a welfare state and a mixed economy, all functioning in harmony (1981). The maintenance of a flourishing ‘hyphenated’ society is therefore a matter of achieving the right balance between the three constituent components of citizenship. These components are like the legs of a three-legged stool: just as the stability of the stool depends upon the strength of each of the legs on which it stands, so the stability of society depends upon the strength of each of the three dimensions to citizenship.

Upon this premise, if too much emphasis is being placed in Britain, for example, on our rights as producers and consumers and not enough upon our rights to guaranteed living standards and social provision, this creates an imbalance between the civil and social aspects of citizenship, which in turn poses a potential threat to social stability. Similarly, the social upheavals that followed the collapse of communism in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe might be regarded as a consequence of violent shifts in the equilibrium of citizenship. Under former Stalinist regimes, social rights had been guaranteed, while civil and political rights were either suppressed or neglected, but now political rights have been promoted at the expense of social rights and without an adequate framework of civil rights (see, for example, Bottomore 1992).

Marshall’s sociological model of citizenship clearly has its applications and attractions. It may be criticised, however, first for cstate-market essentialism’ and, second, for its inherent functionalism.

The charge of state-market essentialism is levelled by Barry Hindess (1987) who complains that Marshall’s model in fact assumes an overly simplistic conception of the antagonism between the state and the market. Hindess points out that there are aspects of capitalist market relations that are in tune with equal citizenship and aspects of state welfare systems that are not. As we shall see later, not all the changes to welfare systems that have been occurring since the 1970s in countries such as Britain have diminished the social rights of citizenship. Though there are obvious limitations, it is possible for the market as well as the state to contribute to the realisation of social rights. And as we shall see in Chapter 10, citizenship is a far more multi-faceted concept than that employed by Marshall and is as capable of accommodating itself as much to individualism and the needs of the market as to collectivism and the ambitions of the state.

Marshall’s functionalism is evident in his treatment of social class. Although he examines the effects of social citizenship on social class, as Bottomore (1992) points out, Marshall fails to account for the impact that social classes have had on the development of citizenship. The development of civil rights and the beginnings of political rights resulted from the struggles of an emerging capitalist class to wrest power from the feudal aristocracy. The more recent development of political rights and aspects of the beginnings of social rights owed much to the struggles of working-class organisations – the Chartists, the trade unions, socialist and social democratic parties. Marshall expresses the conflicts from which citizenship has emerged in terms of clashes between opposing principles rather than between opposing classes. The development and maintenance of welfare states has been analysed by other commentators (e.g. Korpi 1983; Offe 1984; Esping-Andersen 1990) with reference to the influence of corporatism (the effect of which is more relevant in some European countries than in others). Corporatism, in this context, is a process of tri-partite negotiation between the representatives of business, workers and the government. What is often involved in the development of social rights is not an impersonally established equilibrium between formal principles, but a directly negotiated compromise between substantive class interests.

There are, as we shall see, two very different ways of looking at rights: they may be regarded as being founded on abstract or constitutional doctrines (as things that human beings are born with) or as arising from claims or demands established in the process of daily life and political struggle (as things that human society fashions for itself).

The origins of rights

The distinction I have just drawn between what might be called ‘claims-based’ and ‘doctrinal’ rights is an attempt to answer the question – where, then, do rights come from? However, it is not a straightforward distinction, because it is intended to capture two sets of overlapping conceptual distinctions: one legal and one historical. It is also bound up with competing notions of property rights on the one hand and human rights on the other.

Jurisprudential debates

I mentioned earlier the distinction that lawyers make between moral rights and cblack-letter’ rights (rights that are written down and legally enforceable). The utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1789) brutally dismissed as ‘nonsense on stilts’ the very idea that there can be basic moral or ‘natural’ rights that somehow inhere in the individual subject: what matters, he asserted, are the laws by which we might ensure the greatest good of the greatest number. However, more recent philosophers of law have sought to distinguish two underlying theories of rights: the will or choice theory and the interest or benefit theory (see, for example, Jones 1994; Campbell 1988: ch. 2; Spicker 1988: ch. V). The former is based on the idea that every human individual with free will must necessarily have some power to exercise choice and therefore to control or in certain ways limit the behaviour of other individuals. The latter is based on the idea that rights are created by rules that benefit the human individual by imposing obligations upon other individuals to protect or further her interests. The problem is that neither theory can quite account both for the material substance of our rights (the things they actually achieve) and for their procedural form (the way they have been set up).

A celebrated attempt to do this has been made by Ronald Dworkin (1977), who attempts to make a different kind of distinction, between concrete institutional righ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Welfare rights in theory
• Part II Welfare rights in practice
• Part III Rethinking welfare rights
• References
• Index