The starting date for this bookās account and analysis of youth policies in the UK is 2007āthe year of a global financial crisis which over the following months came close to bringing the worldās banking system to collapse and whose impacts on those policies were felt throughout the following decade.
Three ācontextualā features here were particularly critical: a neo-liberal ideology which, in often taken-for-granted ways, defined most of the policiesā goals; a reinforcement of the historic power balances already embedded within the societyās political structures and processes; andāparticularly high-profile after the crisisāan increasingly unequal access to that societyās economic resources. Directly and indirectly, these markers of the post-2007 period went far to determining what eventually came to be labelled as āyouth policy ā. This included how āyouthā was seen and its needs and problems defined ; the kind of adults young people were expected, even required, to become; and the ways in which the services and programmes mandated to ādeliverā those aims were conceived and set up, funded, managed and eventually evaluated. In this period, policies became increasingly preoccupied, too, with how young people viewed and used the newly developing forms of information technology .
This chapter, with commentary, outlines the crucial features of these formative conditions. In particular it seeks to clarify how and why the state, increasingly in collaboration with civil society and for-profit organisations , responded as it did to young people.
The Neo-liberal Context: Via āMarket Freedomsā to āSelf-Regulationā
Though with a longer pre-history , 1 it was the assumptions and prescriptions of the ideology labelled āneo-liberalismā which, since the 1980s, had shaped the public discourse on young people and government and non-government organisationsā responses to them. Even though the roots of the 2007ā2008 financial melt-down lay in the largely uncritical ways in which these ideas had been understood and applied, by those in power they continued to be treated until late in the period as largely self-evident and unchallengeable ātruthsā. 2
What then were their defining features and how did they help shape youth policies ?
Neo-liberalismās foundation premise has been that āthe marketā āthe supply of goods and services traded for profitāhas an in-built and unlimited capacity to generate the wealth that a nation and its population need. To ensure that this potential is fully exploited, the main actors within itābanks and other profit-making institutionsāmust be allowed to āself-regulateā: given maximum freedom from external and especially state direction or even guidance on how they should act. Only then can the marketās presumed intrinsic benevolence be fully realised.
The rationale for these āmarket freedomsā , however, was not just to ensure that businesses had maximum room for making their profits. They were seen as essential, too, for releasing the competitive energy and drive essential to fully realising the marketās wider wealth-creating possibilitiesāa process which would in turn, it was assumed, ultimately benefit all citizens including the poorest via a built-in ātrickle down effectā.
Underpinning all these propositions was a further core premise: that, as Margaret Thatcher put it in the 1980s, āthere is no such thing as society, only individuals and familiesā. Certain personal qualities were then seen as particularly (and again self-evidently) ones which all citizens needed to display in their daily lives and which therefore merited (demanded) special nurturing and reward, including, somewhat contradictorily, via public policy. These, understood in entirely de-contextualised ways, included self-reliance and (emotional) resilience, personal confidence and ambition. Also systematically resurrected within Conservative educational policies after 2015 and given strong intellectual support by one of Prime Minister David Cameronās closest advisors Paul Oginsky 3 was the notion of ācharacterā .
Within neo-liberal thinking, the corollary of this affirmation of the individual and individual responsibility was an at least implicit but sometimes quite explicit denial of wider and deeper structural inequalities and their impacts on those individualsā life chances. In this analysis, the ways in which those lives continued in often crucial ways to be determined by class , gender , race , sexual orientation and (as so many young people discovered) age remained largely unacknowledged. Indeed, the possible consequences of these inequalitiesāof poor educational achievement, failures to get a well paid job and, for up to a third of those born between 1980 and 1996, the prospect of living in rented accommodation all their lives 4 āwere often rebranded as evidence of inadequate individuals or, at its widest, dysfunctional family relationships.
The neo-liberal promotion of individualistic, privatised and competitive values also delegitimised a collective pursuit of shared goals, not least because such collectivities were seen as obstructing the marketās freedoms. This was perhaps exemplified particularly starkly by increasing restrictions on trade union action and by legal constraints imposed on charities ā pre-election campaigning and lobbying. 5
All this also indicated another of the far-reaching consequences of neo-liberal policies: the systematic weakening of the independence of those charitiesāof that āungoverned spaceā within civil society which constitutes a defining feature of democracy in action. Starting under New Labour, these organisations increasingly found themselves pressured (even contractually required) to work in the ācorporateā ways favoured by neo-liberalism . This could include developing ābusiness plansā, adopting ānew managerialist ā staff structures and redesigning themselves as āsocial enterprisesā generating profits to fund their activities. In return for getting what state funding remained, more of them also to took on policies and agendas with government-defined priorities including requirements to āmeasureā their āimpactsā in statistical ways. 6
A powerful negative driver of these policies was the assumption that state bodies were intrinsically bureaucratic and hidebound and so operationally inefficient and not cost-effectiveāor, as a House of Commons Education Select Committee put it in 2011, that āthe Government as default provider ā¦ stifles competition and innovation ā¦ā 7 The Coalition government , in its first Treasury Spending Review in October 2010, made it clear that, for a wide range of social, health , justice and youth services , it would āā¦ look at setting proportions of appropriate services across the public sector that should be delivered by independent providersā¦.ā 8 As well as applying these perspectives directly, the periodās āausterityā policies , though repeatedly explained as unavoidable for economic reasons, also acted as cover for reducing the role of the state. With philanthropic bodies expected to fill many of the resultant gaps in services , these as a citizenās right were thus replaced, implicitly if not always explicitly, by a growing entitlement presumption by the wealthy and powerful that it was for them to decide who was ādeservingā and of what. Though governments made much of the need for āpartnershipā and ācollaborationā , a k...