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Part I
Service users and social policy: an introduction
We start, as any focus on participatory social policy must, with service users. Historically the relationship between social policy and people on the receiving end – 'service users' – has predominantly been a prescriptive one. People as service users have been permitted to play little part in social policy's intellectual or practical development. Instead it has been an essentially unequal non-participatory relationship, with them getting whatever others think is needed. What unifies contributions in Part I is that from diverse perspectives of ethnicity and discipline, as academics and service users, they challenge this tradition and explore different, more equal and inclusive relationships.
Danny Dorling, the social geographer, begins by highlighting the centrality of injustice and exclusion to our world, and their origins in inequality. He suggests that if we want to challenge this, then how we work for solutions will be central. He highlights the importance of social policy being truly social if we want to achieve just and inclusive policies and societies. We are unlikely to end exclusion by seeing ourselves as special and acting or intellectualising in exclusionary ways. Social policy academic Peter Taylor-Gooby focuses on the relationship between participation and solidarity in European welfare states. He highlights the shift in social policy to neoliberalism and individual responsibility, undermining solidarity and increasing social divisions. Equally he warns that, with widening inequality, ostensibly participative and grassroots movement can be used to have damaging consequences for the inclusiveness of the welfare state.
Academic Sweta Rajan-Rankin focuses on the Global South in her chapter, paying particular attention to 'ontology' (the nature of social reality) and 'epistemology' (the theory of knowledge) in doing so. She challenges taken-for-granted assumptions around what social policy is, and how it can be understood in developing world contexts. She draws on post-colonial frameworks as an alternate lens to reimagine social policy from a participatory perspective. She leaves the reader with key questions to help shape a post-colonial theory of social policy in developing countries.
Margaret Alston of Monash University considers the growing phenomenon of environmental disasters, offering two contrasting case studies. She concludes that many social policies are being developed on the basis of neoliberal market-based rather than social justice principles. She argues that social policies based on bottom-up, gender-equitable, participatory processes are necessary if we are to build adaptive capacity and resilience in the face of such mounting environmental disasters.
This is followed by two chapters about the relationship between social policy and particular groups of people as service users. First the activist and academic Colin Campbell explores the relationship between social policy (as political policy) and the experience of disability, using the UK as a case study. He argues that disabled people globally have been marginalised economically and experienced marginalisation and exclusion as a result of social policy, which has largely constructed disability as dependence. He argues that policymakers and professionals must listen more seriously to the voices of those whose lives are shaped by the policies they develop and implement, stressing the continuing struggle disabled people face to achieve this. Then researchers and person with lived experience, Louca-Mai Brady, Felicity Hathway and Emily Roberts, consider children and young people's participation in the development of health policy and service delivery. They explore a systemic approach to 'embedding' their views in health policy and services, based on a UK case study. They offer the lessons for this work from both young people's and professionals' perspectives. While the idea of children's participation may be increasingly popular among policymakers, children are rarely involved in decision making processes and often occupy a marginalised position in healthcare encounters. Children and young people's experience of participation highlights the importance of rethinking how it is frequently actually done.
Finally, Sarah Carr, co-editor of the book and survivor researcher, offers a critical discussion of 'co-production', a key concept emerging in debates about participation. Her chapter addresses some of the fundamental questions; who owns co-production, and the potential of co-production to facilitate radical power shifts towards service users and citizens, for example, in health and social care. She offers an investigation into the origins of the concept and an exploration of how it has functioned in the context of UK social policy rhetoric, where it has been pioneered.
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1
Challenging injustice: the importance of collective ownership of social policy
Danny Dorling
Beveridge's former 'five giant evils' – Disease, Idleness, Ignorance, Squalor and Want – are different now (Stephens et al, 2008: 7–8). With the new five modern evils of elitism, exclusion, prejudice, greed and despair, injustice begins to propagate itself more strongly. Writers like me find it easy to say what is so very wrong, but usually struggle to make suggestions as to what could and should be done.
Some say that it is easy to criticise but hard to find solutions. The central argument here is that it is beliefs that matter most – the beliefs that enough of us still hold – the beliefs that underlie most injustice in the world today. To ask what you should do after you dispel enough of those beliefs is rather like asking how to run plantations after abolishing slavery, or how to run society after giving women the vote, or how to run factories without child labour. Elitism, exclusion, prejudice, greed and despair will not end just by being recognised more clearly as unjust, but that recognition is a necessary precursor.
All the five faces of social inequality that currently contribute to injustice are clearly and closely linked. Elitism in Britain suggests that educational divisions are natural. Educational divisions are reflected both in the misfortunes of those usually poorer children who are excluded from life choices because they are seen as not having enough qualifications, and also through the supposed achievements of those able to exclude themselves, often by opting into private or otherwise segregated education.
Elitism is the incubation chamber within which prejudice is fostered. It provides a defence for greed. It increases anxiety and despair as endless school examinations are taken, as people are ranked, ordered and sorted. Those who reach the top are mostly those with most early advantages, mixed up with a few who are unusually pliant and conform to what they are told to do when young. This perpetuates an enforced and inefficient hierarchy in our most unequal of affluent societies, such as the UK, the USA and Israel. Elitism is a profound injustice.
Just as elitism is integral to all the other forms of injustice, so is exclusion. The exclusion that rises with elitism makes 'the poor' appear different, exacerbates inequalities between ethnic groups and causes the racial differences we identify so easily and do not realise are so temporary – racism and wider prejudice always shifts to new targets over time but a minority are often excluded simply because they are said to be racially different.
Similarly, rising greed could not be satisfied without the exclusion of so many, and so many would not now be excluded were it not for extreme greed. But the damaging consequences of exclusion caused by the greed of the rich spread upwards to the rich. They even reach up to those who appear most successfully greedy: rates of despair might be highest for those who are most excluded, but even the wealthy in rich countries are now showing many more signs of despair, as are their children.
Growing despair has become symptomatic of our more unequal affluent societies as a whole. The prejudice that rises with exclusion allows the successfully greedy to try to justify their greed as apparent reward for some superiority, and makes many others think they deserve little. The divisions and ostracism that such prejudice engenders further raise depression and anxiety in those made to look different, the apparent failures, 'the losers'.
When inequalities rise, those who feel that they have succeeded in life usually begin to behave more callously towards others. As elitism incubates exclusion, exclusion exacerbates prejudice, prejudice fosters greed, and greed – because wealth is simultaneously no ultimate reward and makes many without wealth feel more worthless – causes despair. In turn, despair brings us into a state of apathy and prevents us from effectively tackling injustice.
Removing one symptom of the disease of inequality is no cure, but recognising inequality as the disease behind injustice, and seeing how all the manifestations of injustice which it creates, and which continuously recreate it, are intertwined is the first step that is so often advocated in the search for a solution to injustice (Dorling, 2015). Each route to that solution only differs in style, not substance.
In 2014, Janet Yellen, the new chair of the US Federal Reserve, described growing inequality as un-American (Gongloff, 2014). Public surveys, however, showed how far US public opinion still had to go (Da Costa, 2014). The American public could still be sold the American dream even as inequalities rose and rose ever higher in the USA and the dream became a fantasy even more removed from reality. Shortly after securing control of the presidency, in October 2017, Donald Trump sacked Janet Yellen.
It is in the most unequal affluent states of the rich world – the USA, the UK and Israel – that injustices are most commonly presented to the public as fair, right and proper, where walls are built the highest and minorities are excluded most vigorously. It is in these places that the worse of politics is found (Dorling, 2016), and where the environmental damage from behaving so badly is usually greatest (Dorling, 2017).
The table below shows the 20 richest countries for which comparable data on inequality exists from before and after 2004. In ten of the twenty, inequalities have been rising. In the other ten they have been static or falling. There is no inevitability that inequality always rises. Since 2015 it has been falling in more nations than rising (Dorling, 2018). There are huge differences between otherwise similarly rich nations. The degree of inequality and injustice you live under is a choice that is made and which is constantly changing.
Table 1.1:Household income inequality, most affluent countries of the world, 2004–13
Note: The table shows the ratio of mean incomes of the best-off 20% of households to the worst-off 20%. The 20 most affluent countries in the United Nations Development Programme's 'highest affluence group' are included.
Source: UNDP, Human Development Reports for 2015 (Table 3) and 2005 (Table 14).
The power of crowds
Almost every time there is a victory for humanity against greed, it has been the result of millions of small actions mostly undertaken by people not in government. Examples include: votes for women, Indian independence, civil rights in America, or that earlier freedom won just to be able to say that the earth goes around the sun, a victory against the power of those holding most of the riches of those times and their prejudices.1
People can choose between falling into line, becoming both creatures and victims of markets, or they can resist and look back for other ways, other arguments, different thinking. When they have resisted in the past, resistance has been most effective if exercised by those thought to be the most powerless. But we quickly forget this. We need to be constantly reminded.
Almost anyone who gets near the top of any institution is self-selected by a desire for superiority – unless there is evidence of some other strong and intrinsic motivation. That is part of the reason why the harmful effects of inequality go all the way to the top. More inequality means we are all more obsessed with status, and those who get furthest up are the most obsessed; the main exception is those who are born to assume superiority (Wilkinson and Pickett, 2015).
The antidote to being dominated is to act collectively, otherwise all that results is a new aristocracy. It is true that some people genuinely want to get to the top to help others. The quote 'Never underestimate the power of persistence' is usually attributed to Nelson Mandela, but Mandela's power was a movement outside of his prison. It was a movement of millions.
It is also often said that: 'The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.'2 Thinking that you have to do all your thinking anew and alone is the wrong place to start. To remember earlier times, times before you were born, you need stories, stories that tell you it need not be like this, because it has not always been like this.
Overcoming the power of kings
The latest era of growing inequalities is coming to an end. It is something that cannot go on forever, and so it will not. But it will not end without the millions of tiny acts required to no longer tolerate the greed, prejudice, exclusion and elitism that foster inequality and despair. Above all else, these acts will require teaching and understanding, remembering what is fundamental about being human, remembering compassion:
The human condition is fundamentally social – every aspect of human function and behaviour is rooted in social life. The modern preoccupation with individuality – individual expression, individual achievement and individual freedom – is really just a fantasy, a form of self-delusion … (Burns, 2007: 182)
Accept that individuality is an illusion – we all have and are both kith and kin. Start to behave differently, and even the most apocalyptic of writers will agree that every act of defiance, no matter how small, makes a difference; whatever '... we do or desist from doing will make a difference …' (Bauman, 2008: 39). We can never know precisely what difference, and have no reason to expect our influence to be disproportionately large, but nor should we expect it to be especially small.
It is equally vital to recognise that none of us is superhuman (Dorling, 2012). Seeing yourself as special can lead to loathing others you see as lazy or feeble and below you. This contempt can often be hard to disguise, and is clear to see in the expressions of some right-wing politicians when they talk of 'the poor'; they appear to feel dirty just talking about 'them'. At its extreme, for those who hold this disgust for others, social cleansing is attractive – removing the poor because you think they are dirty. This is how fascism begins, and it always ends in death. A fascist is someone who believes it is right to kill. Fascists differ in how dirty they get their hands. They range from the small town doctor slowly dispatching his elderly female patients, to the planner creating the new clean city designed to hold only the chosen few.
Because none of us are that special, trusting a small coterie is dangerous. It makes no sense to expect others to do great deeds and lead us to promised lands, at least not with any reliability. We are slowly, collectively, recognising this, learning not to forget that, although we can learn without limits, we may not get that far when we each try to learn on our own; our minds were not made to live as we now live:
The world is indeed a strange and mysterious place, but not because of any hidden causal order or deeper purpose. The mystery is largely in the operations of the human mind, a s...
