Only a few months after the 2010 election in the UK, which resulted in a coalition government between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, then Home Secretary and Equalities Minister Theresa May gave a speech in which she promised to ‘radically turn around the equalities agenda’ of the last Labour government (May 2010). At much the same time, Prime Minister David Cameron was reiterating the now-familiar claim that:
We are all in this together, and we will get through this together.We will carry out Britain’s unavoidable deficit reduction plan in a way that strengthens and unites the country.We are not doing this because we want to, driven by theory or ideology. We are doing this because we have to, driven by the urgent truth that unless we do, people will suffer and our national interest will suffer (Cameron 2010a).
Not long after, the new Work and Pensions Secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, introduced a Green Paper on welfare reform in which he promised:
We are going to end the culture of worklessness and dependency that has done so much harm to individuals, families and whole communities. Our aim is to change forever a system that has undermined work and the aspiration that goes with it. (DWP 2010: 1)
At the Conservative Party’s autumn conference after the election, Cameron also promised a new relationship between the state and the people, one in which localism and the ‘Big Society’ would prevail over the too-big state:
The old way of doing things: the high-spending, all controlling, heavy-handed state, those ideas were defeated. Statism lost … society won […] It’s about government helping to build a nation of doers and go-getters, where people step forward not sit back, where people come together to make life better. (Cameron 2010b)
Turning around equalities, radical cutting of state expenditure, permanent change to the social security system, shrinking the remit of the state in order to build a nation of ‘doers and go-getters’. An appeal to ‘urgent truths’ and to people who step forward not sit back. An assertion that austerity is not about making people suffer but rather about preventing even worse suffering. In linking these individual events and foregrounding these particular statements by government ministers, I am, of course, constructing a narrative, one that stitches major changes of approach to questions of (in)equality and social difference into the fabric of austerity. Narratives are always selective and partial, focusing on some aspects and not others, imposing a particular timeline, adopting a particular point of view and way of addressing their presumed audience. And narrative is my focus in this book, as I attempt to read policy documents for their narrative qualities, in order to unpick the ways in which gender, race, disability and other categories of social difference are positioned in a neo-liberal project of austerity. The policy documents I focus on stretch across the legislative agenda of the Coalition government; they include equality policy, welfare reform, disability policy, the ‘Troubled Families’ programme and the ‘social justice strategy’, the Big Society and the localism agenda, integration strategy and migration policy. My interest is not so much in evaluating the details and effects of particular government policies, which have already been the focus of many working in the social policy field but, rather, in tracing the narrative logic and structure and the affective economies (Hemmings 2005; Ahmed 2004) evoked in political discourse which set the terms for broader social and political debates about difference and inequality, and which therefore work to produce some kind of social consensus that frames the public debate.
Even before the 2010 election, the UK Conservative party had announced that Britain would be entering an ‘Age of Austerity’ (Cameron 2009) in which a too-big, too-expensive and wrongly interventionist state would need to be rolled back in the interests of the people. Once the Conservative-led Coalition gained power, it embarked on a process of radical cutting of public sector service provision and welfare reform. As many have argued, these cuts have already had a disproportional effect on women, racialized minorities and the disabled, and promise further to retrench gendered, racialized, ableist and classed inequalities. As in much of the developed West, an ascendant conservative ideology accompanies and provides the rationale for these policies. Crucially, in the UK context, much of this discursive legitimation for public sector cuts directly involves a recasting of what is meant by equality , social justice and ‘fairness ’, so that May ’s promise to turn around the equalities agenda becomes a constitutive part of the politics of austerity . While much important work has already been done to track the material effects of these changes, in this book, I am more interested in examining the underlying political grammar (Hemmings 2011) of narratives about (in)equality and difference that these policy developments produced. In particular, I am interested in tracing the production of a series of narratives about difference and sameness emerging across the Coalition legislative and policy agenda that suture gender, race, disability and their intersections into a legitimation of a neo-liberal approach to the state, social inequality and difference.
My sense, which I aim to investigate in this book, is that, when viewed in conjunction with each other, these narratives coalesced in troubling ways to constitute a shift in the discursive ground upon which issues of social difference and inequality have been problematized, and that this discursive shift will both affect the terms within which campaigns around specific equality issues are waged within the UK, and, more broadly, impact on how stories about equality and difference will be told, and what will be heard, in the contemporary context. Whether austerity remains the framing logic of government policy or not, I believe that the work these narratives have done will continue to influence mainstream politics in the UK for years to come. While my focus is on the UK, these narratives inevitably open out to transnational dynamics, most explicitly when they engage the ‘problems’ of immigration and integration. But they also more broadly reflect a cross-national discursive politics of neo-liberal austerity that has been taken up across most countries of the global North and, as such, their impact extends beyond the borders of the UK. Commitments to greater social justice on grounds of gender, race/ethnicity, sexuality and disability, fragile at the best of times in contemporary power formations, have been under assault worldwide in times of economic crisis and state austerity. The instrumental use of gender and sexual politics as markers of neo-liberal modernity (Brown 2006; Haritaworn et al. 2008) in order to further demonize and marginalize racialized populations, especially migrants and Muslims, is a feature of local–global entanglements transnationally.
In attempting to make sense of these complexities, I draw on the insights of feminist theories of intersectionality, especially Phoenix and Brah’s understanding of the concept of intersectionality as ‘signifying the complex, irreducible, varied, and variable effects which ensue when multiple axes of differentiation – economic, political, cultural, psychic, subjective and experiential – intersect in historically specific contexts’ (Phoenix and Brah 2004: 76). Understanding how social difference is narrated in austerity politics requires such an intersectional approach, because we can’t see what is happening with gender in contemporary power formations without also tracking configurations of class, race, disability, sexuality and the ways in which these come together. Neither can entanglements of the structural and the subjective ‘be separated out into discrete and pure strands’ (ibid.) if we want to understand the full scale and depth of the austerity project’s retrenchments in relation to social difference and inequality.
Why Narrative
Much of the exasperation with austerity in critical commentary has turned around the ways in which the Coalition, and especially the senior Conservative partners in the Coalition, seemed able to control the narrative surrounding the political choices being made. The ways in which a crisis in the banking/financial sector was turned into a crisis of too-much public spending on social policy and the welfare state , in which the dysfunction of the wealthy few was turned into the dysfunction of a too-intrusive state and the welfare-dependent scroungers it bred, has already been the object of much media and scholarly critical scrutiny. As Clarke and Newman put it, austerity:
has been ideologically reworked, at least in the UK, from an economic problem (how to ‘rescue’ the banks and restore market stability) to a political problem (how to allocate blame and responsibility for the crisis): a reworking that has focused on the unwieldy and expensive welfare state and public sector, rather than high risk strategies of banks, as the root cause of the crisis. This shape changing, we argue, is the result of intensive ideological work – work that we identify here through the image of the (political and financial) wizards attempting to find the alchemy that might turn disaster into triumph – the triumph being a new neo-liberal settlement. (2012: 300)
The focus on the national welfare state rather than the transnational financial sector as the source of crisis also shifts the terrain to one of challenging past senses of entitlement to social support, and therefore makes past efforts to address inequality part of the problem. As Bhattacharyya has argued, the austerity project aims to ‘to remake the terrain of the social in such a manner that previous agreements about equality and the reach of mutuality are under threat’ (2015: 1). Austerity, for her:
has been deployed as a way of suggesting that the misfortunes of some of the most disadvantaged arise as a result of previous attempts to address systematic inequality. At its most blunt, this is the suggestion that poverty has been overlooked due to an institutional focus on discrimination. (Ibid.: 6)
Noting the dissonances produced by failed promises on combating racism and delivering gender equality , and by the imperfections of the welfare system as it is, Bhattacharyya argues that ‘the explanatory narratives of austerity seem designed to respond to this dissonance and to recoup its consequences into the most atomised and mean-spirited vision of social relations’ (ibid.: 7).
In response to this apparent capture of the public debate, there has been no shortage of attempts to provide a corrective account. Economists such as Robert Reich, former US Labor Secretary, and Ha-Joon Chang have characterized the austerity narrative as ‘nonsense’ (O’Hara 2014) and argued that it is welfare myths, not costs, that are ‘spiralling out of control’ (Chang 2014). Feminist economists have pointed to the gendered underpinnings of a view of the economy that leads to austerity as the only possible response to the financial crisis (Pearson and Elson 2015; Griffin 2015). Other critical thinkers have asked why the basic logic of austerity has been accepted by so many working-class (Graeber 2014) and middle-class (Stanley 2014) people, and how shared values and experiences of different non-elite classes have been mobilized to elicit support for austerity policies. These kinds of reflections ask some important questions about narrative—what it is saying and what might be wrong about it, how a particular narrative fits into or contests wider discourses, how different classes o...