All Our Welfare

Towards Participatory Social Policy

Beresford, Peter, Peter Beresford

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781447328933
• eBook ISBN: 9781447328971
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The UK welfare state is under sustained ideological and political attack. It has also been undermined by accusations of paternalism and past failures to engage with the very people it is intended to help.

This unique book is the first to critique the past, present and future welfare state from a participatory perspective. Peter Beresford, champion of user involvement, draws on pioneering theories and practice of welfare service user movements to offer a blueprint for a new participatory social policy. He controversially challenges orthodox social policy and the limitations of both Fabian and Neo-liberal perspectives in engaging people to improve their own welfare, drawing on service users ' own ideas and experience, including fascinating vignettes from his own family's experience, to demonstrate the value of 'user knowledge'.

Filling a much-needed gap in the literature, this accessible text will provide a great introduction for students and a road-map for practitioners of an alternative vision for a future participatory and sustainable social policy. It will also command much wider interest from everyone concerned with how we look after each other in future in society.

PART ONE

The legacy of the past

Conventional accounts of social policy have tended to present it as a battle between welfare state past and a more pluralist present; between paternalistic central planning and a drive for personalised choice and control, or most baldly, between neoliberal market and old style ‘statism’. The aim of the first part of the book is to try and get a better understanding of current trends in social policy and possible futures, by looking more carefully at their relationships with the past and with people on the receiving end. It also sets the scene for an exploration of how we look after each other, which places an emphasis on it as a participatory and democratic project.

ONE

Setting the scene for welfare and social policy

We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.

(Milton Friedman)

… the welfare state has caused millions to live deprived and even depraved lives …

(James Bartholomew, 2013)

If you are not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are oppressing them.

(Malcolm X)

The bad-mouthing of welfare

The UK welfare state has long had a poor press, but this probably reached its nadir in 2013. It was then that it was accused of colluding in mass murder. Occupying the lofty moral high ground was the Daily Mail, the tabloid newspaper which has the second highest sales, as well as being one of the most influential political institutions in Britain. Its front page headline described Mick Philpott, who killed six of his children by starting a house fire, as the ‘vile product of welfare UK’ (Dolan and Bentley, 2013). This was then picked up by right-wing blogger Guido Fawkes, who called the welfare state ‘Philpott’s evil accomplice’ (Guido Fawkes, 2013). We should remember that this is the same Daily Mail whose proprietor and editorials supported Adolf Hitler and Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists before the war, and which more recently had to pay damages to a Tamil hunger striker for falsely claiming that he secretly ate burgers during his 23 days without food (Jones, 2010) and invaded a memorial service being held for the uncle of the then Leader of the Labour Party, Ed Miliband.

This certainly was not always the way the welfare state was presented in the press. In 1948, heralding the new social security system, the Daily Mirror proclaimed: ‘We are leading the whole world in Social Security … Our State belongs to the people – unlike so many countries where the people belong to the state – Social Security converts our democratic ideal into human reality.’

Less predictably perhaps, The Times asked whether the next generation would be able to ‘reap the benefits of a social service State while avoiding the perils of a Santa Claus State’, concluding that, ‘it would be a grave mistake to overlook the deep feelings and sense of purpose and common humanity which all the new social services are trying, however imperfectly, to express’ (cited in Kynaston, 2008, 285).

If the emergence of totalitarian ideology and mechanised mass slaughter were the negative inheritance of the twentieth century, then its great achievement was the introduction in Europe and beyond of new collective commitments to improve people’s health and wellbeing. In the UK this culminated in the creation of the post-Second World War welfare state, which became an international beacon for achieving this ideal.

Yet the debate about welfare, framed in terms of ‘welfare reform’ has more recently become a very narrow one, particularly in England. Thus a development that was transformative in its political, historical, social, economic and cultural implications, affecting almost all, if not every life and every institution in the UK, the welfare state, has been reduced to an ideologised discussion framed in terms of restricting and cutting cash benefits paid to ‘shirkers’, immigrants and others who ‘don’t need them’ (Maddox, 2013). The National Health Service has long been seen as the ‘jewel in the crown’ of the welfare state. Yet significantly discussions about it, both for and against, tend to have been separated from those about ‘welfare reform’. Given the wide recognition that the NHS continues to command enormous public support, it is difficult to see what would justify this arbitrary separation of key pillars of the welfare state – health services and social security, other than a desire to isolate and attack those on the receiving end of benefits and welfare benefits themselves. This has also translated into public policy which has emphasised the ‘ring-fencing’ of funding for the NHS, with all major political parties claiming it is ‘safe in their hands’, while stressing the need to cut and cap welfare benefits spending. The inappropriateness of isolating different key arms of the welfare state was elegantly highlighted by Olive Stevenson, a major figure in the development of social work and also an adviser to the Supplementary Benefits Commission in the 1970s, the body which replaced the National Assistance Board set up under the post-war welfare state reforms. In her autobiography she reported the comments of her predecessor in the role, Eileen Younghusband:

The comments which jumped out of the page concerned the difference which the National Health Service had made to poor people. She showed graphically how before 1947, the costs of illness weighed on people’s lives, especially those of the elderly. Overnight it seemed, the creation of the NHS changed the main focus of benefit claims. I have never forgotten this and am reminded of it when I read of those in the United States who are trapped by uninsurable healthcare. (Stevenson, 2013, 54)

Perhaps there is little surprise then (if even less justification), for the way the critics of the welfare state cherry-pick what they now choose to associate with it, rather than addressing it in its entirety and judging it on its overall merit.

A particular focus in current welfare reform has also been on older and disabled people and how ‘we’ can reduce the increasing ‘burden’ ‘they’ represent. Ironically, the indications are that such ‘welfare reform’ is actually causing damage to the people welfare is meant to help (see, for example, Adams and Phillips, 2013). How and why have we got to this position and where do we need to be? In a world where demographics are massively changing and the numbers and proportions of older and disabled people are greatly increasing, it is unlikely to be enough to try to define the numbers down by increasingly harsh approaches to assessment or eligibility, as governments now seem to be doing, or simply to argue that people will have to work longer, or do much more to look after themselves. Each of these suggestions, as we will see, raises its own questions.

Yet academic social policy does not seem able to advance effective alternative discussions to challenge this situation. Instead it largely seems at best to be drowned out and at worst sucked into this ever narrowing debate. At a time when traditional understandings of social policy have come in for unprecedented attack, the discipline of social policy seems unable to offer a sustained counter-critique which carries conviction and has any wider resonance with the public. Instead we are onlookers as media, politicians and survey makers repeatedly ask ‘the public’ questions about welfare benefits and people receiving them and then feed back to us that these are major issues for the public. But they tend much less to ask them questions or press their views about the ‘super rich’, bankers getting big bonuses or multinationals paying minimum taxation, which provide more relevant targets for public anger and disquiet.

What most seems to be needed now is a return to the confidence and challenge that originally underpinned the welfare state. For all the talk about ‘thinking outside the box’, ‘thinking the unthinkable’ and challenging conventional wisdoms, much discussion about welfare seems unimaginative and backward looking – and this includes much academic or ‘expert’ discussion. What is needed instead is thinking that goes back to first principles and which takes full account of newer thinking; of environmentalism and sustainability; of diversity, inclusion and identity; of participation and empowerment. This book aims to be part of this move.

Revisiting ‘social policy’

So a key aim of this book is to challenge the reductionism and narrowness of current political and public discussion about social policy and welfare and reopen discussion. To start that process, we need to begin to examine what in the UK has come to be called social policy and in the United States, public policy. In Chapter Eight we will look more closely at social policy as both a discipline and practical policy.

If economics was seen as the ‘dismal science’ by the Victorian historian Thomas Carlyle, judging by the lack of popular and even academic interest in it currently, social policy now appears to have taken over this unfortunate mantle. This highlights an outstanding contradiction. How can a subject – like social policy – which now routinely commands media headlines and sparks off the keenest controversy at all levels in society – seem to be of such limited interest as a subject of study to students and others? As social policy has increasingly become front page news, so academic courses have closed. The Social Policy Association (SPA), the professional body of social policy, for example, has only 500 members. Yet social policy is a subject which can also truly say, like the now deceased and disgraced News of The World, ‘All human life is there’. Here is a field of study and practice concerned with all the complexities and intimacies of life, death, sex and violence and the public policy responses to them. It can have a powerful bearing on any of our lives. How can that not be interesting? What is happening – indeed, perhaps we should be asking, what is going wrong – that makes social policy such a minority interest?

I believe that key to the marginalisation of academic social policy is the nature of its relationship with ‘us’, its subjects and the subjects of practical social policy. It is my contention that the answer lies in the degree to which social policy as academic discipline (and indeed as a public policy) has distanced itself from most of us. This book seeks to challenge this problem by reconnecting it with its subjects in as much of their flesh and blood reality as possible. It seeks to do this in several ways:

1.by foregrounding social policy’s day-to-day practice and reality, rather than keeping it at a safe distance;

2.by drawing on both first-hand life experience and an academic and scholarly approach;

3.perhaps most important, by drawing on and giving centre stage to the lived experience and experiential knowledge of those with the most intimate understandings of social policy – its face-to-face practitioners, service users and those who try and support them as family, friends and neighbours.

In his introductory social policy textbook for students, the mainstream social policy academic, Pete Alcock, draws a helpful distinction between social policy as an academic discipline and social policy as ‘the focus of what is studied’ (Alcock, 2008, 2). He goes on to describe social policy in the latter sense as: ‘the term used to refer to the actions taken within society to develop and deliver services for people in order to meet their needs for welfare and wellbeing’ (Alcock, 2008, 2).

Alcock is far from alone in offering such a non-problematic definition of social policy, which presents it as a kind of benign domain of collective action to improve people’s lives and conditions. As Kevin Farnsworth, another social policy academic, has argued, most research carried out into welfare states: ‘centres on a relatively narrow conception of welfare as social provision and the extent to which various collective interventions meet the needs of the individual’ (Farnsworth, 2013, 4).

It is difficult to see how such an approach can be sustained given that social policies have also included the Nazi Aktion T4 or euthanasia programme, which resulted in the killing of more than 200,000 physically or mentally disabled people and the compulsory sterilisation policies for people with learning difficulties that operated in many countries as recently as the 1970s, including Sweden and the USA. Such policies clearly had far from benevolent intentions for the people they targeted. Since then it has frequently also been argued that the political New Right and then neoliberal social policies which were first associated with Thatcherism, have had highly damaging effects on many people affected by them.

Thus this book is concerned with building and renewing connections, both between social policy and those on the receiving end of it and between academic social policy and the policy world with which it is ostensibly concerned. But primarily it is a book that is concerned with breaking out of narrow academic and theoretical traditions and is concerned with how we look after each other in society. Its starting point is how people are treated in society and how they treat each other. It’s also a book about how the state and other institutions within and beyond specific societies treat people. This includes the market, political parties, social movements and social organisations like charities. Thus it is a book that would probably be expected to fit into the space of social or public policy, even if it sometimes might be pulling in other directions.

Not one of us can truly expect to look after ourselves through the whole course of our life without help from others. Indeed it can be argued that we all need some help throughout our lives, although it may not be defined as such. This help may come in many ways and take many forms. That’s why across time and cultures, almost invariably human societies, communities and groupings can be seen to make some kind of formal provision to respond to members needing help. But it should be remembered that this may be harsh, punitive and damaging, as well as supportive and humanistic. Nonetheless we can expect it to be an inescapable part of collective living in the past, present and future.

The book doesn’t start from any conventional fixed ideological position, but rather the simple question, how do we feel people should behave towards each other especially at times in their lives when they are facing difficulties and disasters, personal and social – and may not have the wherewithal to deal with them on their own? Of course, the question is itself inherently ideological. But it is one that is primarily concerned with the achievement of our wellbeing, rather than being tied to a particular prescribed or imposed route to attaining it.

We may all have different answers to this question, but the real point is that it has to be addressed. We know this from our history books. We may want to think that it is a question that can be left to sort itself out. But that is an answer in itself – and not a very helpful one. It is important to remember that this is neither an abstract question, nor one that is only for people who feel a commitment to each other or shared allegiance and identity. Remember that even in war this issue has to be and is often faced. What is to be done to enemies who are wounded, killed, disabled, taken prisoner or whose land is occupied? Yes, they can just be slaughtered, raped or degraded and their communities razed to the ground and historically that has often been their fate – and still sometimes is. But for many years now, with the Geneva Convention and other legal frameworks, there has been a sense that more is needed and there have been commitments to much more. So these are not just issues that are posed within societies or in relation to those with whom we identify or have kinship. They are much bigger issues about our understandings of being human, humanity and our relations with each other. How do we see ourselves and how do we see other people?

We do really need to think from the beginning again. Of course the post-war welfare state did not represent a total break from a longer-term past (perhaps this is its key if unacknowledged problem and one to which we shall be drawn back). B...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of photographs and sources
• Foreword by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Owning not othering our welfare
• Part One The legacy of the past
• Part Two The way to the future
• Afterword The future: a different way forward?
• Appendix One The family
• Appendix Two Research projects and related publications
• References
• Photographs