Austerity UK

By Mark Featherstone

Two news stories caught my attention over the last couple of days – first, a report from the House of Commons Library, which showed that wages in the UK have fallen sharply since 2010, and second, an article focused on the Shadow Health Secretary, Andy Burnham, and his view that Labour needs to ‘put its cards on the table’ in order to offer voters a viable alternative to the Conservatives in the next general election.

Reading the first piece we learn that UK wages have experienced the fourth largest fall in the EU (5.5%) and that only Greek, Portuguese, and Dutch workers have seen a greater decrease in their real wages since 2010. Given that German and French workers wages rose (2.7% and 0.4%) over the same period, and that the overall average decline in wages across the EU was 0.7%, it seems clear that in the UK, the workforce has been asked to carry the can for the crash in 2008. In light of this, it seemed strange to read an article concerned with the problem of Labour politics. In the BBC report, we learn that Burnham thinks that Labour needs to capture the electorate’s imagination now, and offer an alternative to the Coalition. I agree - what is strange, however, is that this has not happened already. Why is this the case? Why is it that austerity, and the commitment to reduced public spending, has such a strong hold over the political, and perhaps more importantly, popular imagination in the UK?

If we consult recent sociology on austerity, such as Stuckler and Basu’s ‘The Body Economic’, the problem of austerity becomes very clear. In periods of recession it makes little sense to cut public spending because this simply reduces consumer confidence and destroys any potential for growth. The result of this is that the economy gets caught in a kind of downward spiral. According to more humanistic measures, we might argue that under conditions of mass unemployment it is not a good idea to dismantle the social safety net, which can help to stabilise society, because this will simply exacerbate the problems caused by economic stress – i.e., depression, alcoholism, and ultimately suicide. This, of course, supposes that a government cares about the health of the people. However, Stuckler and Basu take the view that the health of the people matters and paint a bleak picture of Europe in the age of austerity. They show that in countries where the social safety net has been attacked as bloated and wasteful the health and welfare of people has suffered. This much would seem clear – surely in a society where the economy contracts and people suffer from unemployment and other stresses, society should ‘bail them out’ and support them? This is, after all, what happened to the banks.

As I have explained on many occasion on this blog, austerity makes no sense, and has been proven to fail in the case of the Great Depression of the 1930s, unless its aim is to restructure the industrial or post-industrial base of a society, and make it more competitive by slashing public spending, driving wages down, introducing more flexible contracts, and generally providing a retrofit to the economy. This is largely what I think we see taking place today – the aim of austerity is not simply to reduce the national debt, but also to reduce the cost of labour, and the responsibility of the state, in order to make the national economy more competitive in a global market, where competition may come from China and India. In these new industrial powers labour is cheap and the state has little responsibility for supporting the body of the people. Of course, this means that they are perhaps the most competitive economic powers in the world, save for the US, where the worker is similarly expected to weather whatever economic storm hits. However, even in the US, Obama understood that the way out of recession was taxation and social spending, rather than wage reduction and social austerity. The result of this decision is that America has emerged from recession much quicker than the UK.

We will, of course, eventually escape recession and austerity in the UK, but the problem will be that this will happen on very different terms than we entered this dark period. Under the new austerity landscape growth will take place on the basis of low-wage labour, contracts that offer little protection for workers, and a minimal social safety net. In sociological terms, the kind of society that we may find ourselves living in will be very friendly towards business, but less favourable for the lives of people. And here is the main point of my blog today – much of what I have written is well known, and we have read work by Naomi Klein and Zygmunt Bauman, which explains the problems of disaster capitalism and austerity. However, what I think the current period of history demands that we do, and this is especially important for students and young people, is to start to think about the kind of society they want to live in.

What is it that matters in life? Is it most important to have a society organised around profit, where competition is everything, and life is precarious? Or should society forsake profit, and make economic value subordinate to other life goods – such as health and welfare? What is it that makes a good society? This is what I think Labour really need to do. They need to open up a debate about what matters to people. Are commodities the be-all and end-all? Are people prepared to accept precariousness to make more money? Are they happy to accept vast inequalities in society? Is it acceptable to have children going hungry because their parents do not have enough money to feed them? It strikes me that the very fact that politics is not the normal debate about these kinds of fundamental questions, and that a senior politician has to talk about the need for an alternative to austerity, is enormously problematic. I think this illustrates our deep lack of social and political imagination and shows how far our political elites have fallen and / or leapt into bed with business where the only good that matters is the bottom line.

We must escape from the grip of this law of the bottom line - currently we are still caught under the spell of what we might call the fetishism of economic growth, growth at all costs, growth even if it kills people. I think that we need to escape from the fantasy of this idea. As Marx taught us over a century ago, the economy is not more important than people. The market is not a living thing and it is the height of stupidity and brutality to sacrifice people to a machine that produces nothing that can rival the value of human life.   

New publication - ‘Being-in-Hull, Being-on-Bransholme: Socio-economic decline, regeneration and working-class experience on a peri-urban council estate.’

A new paper by Mark Featherstone, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, has been published in City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action. The abstract for the paper follows and more details can be accessed here.

Featherstone, M. (2013) ‘‘Being-in-Hull, Being-on-Bransholme: Socio-economic decline, regeneration and working-class experience on a peri-urban council estate’, City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action.
The objective of this paper is to investigate the sociological and existential situation of the inhabitants of Bransholme, a peri-urban council estate on the northern edge of Hull, in the context of the current economic downturn and contemporary regeneration discourses. In ‘reading’ life on the estate against economic decline and regeneration practices, I aim to show why the latter cannot really succeed because they are premised on (a) a failure to understand the situation of the socially excluded and (b) injustices and inequalities hard-wired into the very form of late capitalism itself. In light of this thesis, my claim is that only large-scale changes to the neo-liberal socio-economic system will save Hull, and as a consequence, the people of Bransholme, because only this will oppose the ‘winner takes all’, exclusive neo-liberal politics Meagher discusses in her 2009 work on ‘urbs sacra’ and ‘rurban America’ and offer hope for some kind of spatial justice. In order to reach this conclusion, I divide my paper into three sections. First, I explore recession, decline, dislocation and the socio-economic condition of the city. Second, I consider regeneration as discourse and offer some theoretical considerations towards the development of what I call ‘the language game of post-Thatcherite hyper-rational utopianism’ which constructs the de-industrialised city as a business to be saved through the advance of market principles. Finally, I turn to thinking about life on the estate through reference to my own ethnographic observations in order to suggest that the condition of the excluded is not somehow a natural state, but rather an effect of their immersion in a temporal and spatial environment, which has been destroyed by market forces premised on the objectivity of processes such as creative destruction. Thus, I explore ‘Being-in-Hull’ and ‘Being-on-Bransholme’ in terms of notions of territoriality, marginality and what I call ‘the culture of despair’ in contemporary working-class life.

Against the New Authoritarianism

By Mark Featherstone, Senior Lecturer in Sociology  

Recent research prompted me to write this blog in order to think through the broad social and political landscape of Britain today. Working on material for one of my undergraduate modules, Sex, Death, Desire, which focuses on the social and cultural value of psychoanalysis, and a current research project on psychoanalysis and globalisation, I read a Samaritans’ report, Men, Suicide, and Society. This report explains the rising rate of suicide amongst socially disadvantaged men and paints a bleak picture of contemporary British society. This reminded me of the recent visit to Keele by Swayne O’Pie, author of a book about the hatred of men in contemporary Britain, and also put me in mind of debates I had watched on the BBC2 current affairs programme Newsnight – in particular, I was reminded of a debate focussed on the state of welfare and public opinion about issues of poverty broadcast on 7th March, 2013. It occurred to me that these apparently unrelated events can be seen as symptomatic of a deeply worrying trend in British society and politics – a more or less unopposed swing to the right that recalls the popular authoritarianism of the Thatcher years.

Reading the Samaritans’ report immediately reminded me of O’Pie’s book – Why Britain Hates Men. This is essentially an anti-feminist polemic full of claims that women choose inequality, sexualisation, and abuse that simply ignore, and are indeed designed to defend, the embedded nature of gender inequality and violence in society. At this point, I think I must stress, there is nothing in this book that would lead one to explicitly defend the position of men in contemporary society, because it is an attack on women’s right to fight for equality. However, from a psychological point of view, and students of my current module on psychoanalysis would recognise this, O’Pie views are clearly the result of his perception that men have lost their place in society. While this may be true, because of the decline of industry and the rise of the post-industrial mode of production, it is not the fault of feminists who want to pursue the emancipation of women from patriarchal domination.

If men are indeed redundant in contemporary Britain, this is because of a mode of production which has left them behind, and a form of globalised trade which has outsourced industrial work to other parts of the world. The impact of these systemic effects on men is evident in the Samaritans’ report, which was also reported on Newsnight (broadcast, 5th March, 2013). Centrally, what the Samaritans’ work highlights is the problem of men committing suicide in a society wracked by high levels of social and economic precariousness. The key here is the emphasis on social and economic precariousness – this is the proper sociological / psychoanalytic response to this kind of condition because it focuses on systemic effects. Unfortunately, this is not the established line in contemporary Britain, where the populist position, often advanced by politicians courting public opinion, is to attack other groups. This position, which reflects the authoritarian, fascistic, response of social problems, is useful for elites because it excuses them from having to take on systemic problems. Essentially, it is much easier to blame others and turn them into ‘out groups’.

Unfortunately, this rightist, authoritarian, response to social problems is far too prevalent in Britain today. On the 7th March Newsnight debate, for example, we were told that the public has no time for the poor, and that welfare is a burden that Britain cannot afford, because the vulnerable are simply lazy. This position ignores basic sociological truths. One does not need to be a leftist to know that the idea of full employment is a fantasy in capitalist society and that there will never be enough work for everybody. As one of the founding fathers of sociology, Karl Marx, taught in the 1850s, capitalism relies on a reserve army of labour to keep those in work on their toes. Marx called this reserve army the lumpenproletariat. Today, we call them the underclass, the excluded, or chavs. The latter is, of course, the language of class hate, which Owen Jones discusses in his excellent Chavs. The Lancaster Sociologist Imogen Tyler, reflects upon the same condition of systemically produced hatred in her new book Revolting Subjects, and I have also spoken about this new authoritarian politics in my article Hoodie Horror. Essentially, what we find in these works is an explanation of the way a society systematically creates outsiders, who it then blames for their own exclusion in order to evade the difficult question of the need for socially and politically managed inclusion.

In the case of unemployment, the truth is that unemployment has nothing to do with laziness. The unemployed are not happy, and I do not believe that they are basking in the warm glow of excessive benefits paid for in hard earned taxes, but are instead an excluded group who suffer the kinds of psychological problems outlined in the Samaritans’ report. As anybody who has ever been unemployed will testify, unemployment destroys a person from the inside out. Unfortunately, this psychological destruction makes the unemployed an easy target for critics of welfare who want to drive down taxes and encourage a society based on violent, aggressive, individualism. How can the unemployed, the poor, the vulnerable speak when they first, have no political representation and second, have no sense of their own value because they have been psychologically undermined by conditions such as worklessness?

In this way, those men made redundant by capitalism, men who feel under fire, who Swayne O’Pie feels the need to defend against the virus of feminism, have a real problem. But this problem is that they are being attacked by rightist critics of welfare who condemn them as the underclass, lazy, feckless, and undeserving of support. The problem with O’Pie’s position, then, is that he is attacking the wrong target – the target is not fantastical, monstrous, feminists who are pulling the strings from behind the scenes to destroy men. The real target is the socio-economic system which has made some men redundant, but also transformed many women in sex objects, branded ethnic minorities freeloaders and scroungers, and made children into the frontline of consumerism. As Bernard Stiegler shows in his excellent, and disturbing book, Taking Care of Youth, advertising agencies think about children in terms of available brain time to be colonised and controlled. Here, the child is an object, an object to be exploited for the sake of profit. Of course, all of this violence is excused away by elites, who would rather not confront real social problems, because this would require large scale systemic change.

The truth is that contemporary capitalism is in favour of equal opportunities – it is indiscriminate in its violence. It does not care. All that matters is the bottom line. Of course, in times of economic stress and recession it is easy for people to turn to the politics of hate, because the politics of systemic exclusion mean that it is either you or me. We live in a society defined by precariousness and what we know most surely is that our socio-economic position is not secure. On the contrary, life is defined by insecurity. Under these conditions, it is easy to attack the other who is different from you, seek to elevate your own position, and make yourself feel secure by attacking them. If I can demonise and destroy the other it means I am more likely to survive. This is a Hobbesian world and one that I think we have to resist. As students of my module on psychoanalysis would again be able to explain, this is a politics of sadism, a politics of abuse, that we must seek to escape through a sociology that is sympathetic to others and does not see them as dangerous enemies. There is no future in a society of spite, violence, and destruction. As even Hobbes understood, even if I destroy you today, it is only a matter of time before a bigger fish comes along and wipes me out. This is the logic of precariousness and even the most hardened realists - Thomas Hobbes and the founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud – knew, it is suicidal for humans to try to live this way.

Sociology society supporting the local food bank

Posted by Emma Head

In this post one of our second year students, Nicola Edwards, reflects on the decision the Keele Sociology society made to support the Stoke-on-Trent food bank.

It has become impossible to ignore how the Government’s recent austerity measures have impacted upon local people. The previously comfortable are now facing hardship, the vulnerable are facing desperation. This is the reason the Trussel Trust Food Bank opened in Stoke-on-Trent this May; demand has been so high that an additional food bank opened early November in Newcastle-under-Lyme. In 2010 there were over 16,000 children living in poverty, this was just under 30% of the 0-19year old population. Stoke-on-Trent food bank testify that this has risen dramatically since the Indices of Deprivation report was released in 2011, ranking Stoke-on-Trent 16th in the list of 50 most deprived areas.


Despite such worrying statistics it was the personal stories of those who have experienced poverty that touched the newly formed Keele Sociology Society. After discussing how I had experienced needing to skip meals as a new mum ten years ago, due to rent and childcare costs higher than my wages, and hearing the stories told by Amy who volunteered with her local food bank and had seen first-hand why so many had to turn to their food bank for support, we knew as a group we had to do something.

Spurred in to action we visited the food bank and the society set to work arranging a two day collection on campus at Keele. All of the committee members rallied around to raise awareness of the food bank and the society’s food drive while society members showed their commitment to such a worthy cause by enthusiastically collecting in the freezing cold, volunteering their time and donating food. Together we collected 421 items of food and £53 in spare change (given to the food bank for when supplies of a particular item are low). Each food parcel supplies 3days food and would cost in the region of £28. Our donation will go towards feeding around 30-40 people for 3 days this winter. A small dent when you consider the food bank has already given out over 2000 food parcels, feeding approximately 6000 people since May. However, the food bank relies upon donations and volunteers only. Our collection, plus others like it in schools, churches, and supermarkets, is what makes the service possible and simply enables those most vulnerable to eat.

Iain Duncan Smith and the ‘choices’ of welfare

by Emma Head

Last week, Iain Duncan Smith (IDS), Secretary of State for Work and Pensions gave a speech where he made a case for ‘cultural change’ in government and society concerning the role of the welfare state. IDS’s view of the British welfare state is that it leads individuals and families into long-term ‘dependence’ on benefits and discourages individuals from moving into paid work: ‘instead of supporting people in difficulty, the system all too often compounds that difficulty’. From this political position, the welfare state does not meet its founding aim of providing a temporary safety net, but traps the individual in a net they cannot escape from, and discourages them from wanting to strive for a life off benefits. The media coverage of this speech was interesting as it focused mainly on one aspect - the issue of family size for welfare recipients. In this speech IDS had asked, ‘should families [on benefits] expect never ending amounts of money for every child… when working households must make tough choices about what they can afford?’ In an interview  IDS suggested that those with large families should have their benefits capped and suggested that this cap could be applied once a family living on benefits had two children. This time the question IDS posed was ‘can there not be a limit to the fact you need to cut your cloth in accordance with what capabilities and finances you have?’

This idea of a two child family for those on benefits was widely reported and generated lots of online discussion. More than 1000 comments were made on this story on both the BBC and Mail Online sites. IDS was tapping into a theme that Conservative politicians have rehearsed before, most notably by Jeremy Hunt on Newsnight. IDS also seems to be tapping into ambivalent social attitudes towards larger families and a deeper discontent with the ‘choices’ that those on welfare are perceived to have.

It seems unlikely that this idea of a benefits cap based on family size would become a policy measure. If it did, what impact would it have? As with a number of Coalition government strategies, underlying this plan is an assumption that people make ‘choices’ that are economically rational. The rationale for a benefits cap based on family size, assumes that individuals know and rationally weigh up the financial costs and benefits of children long before conception. If this is the case, then this policy would save money in two ways: by limiting the welfare spend, and by shaping the decisions we make around family size. However, sociologists know that people often do not respond to policy initiatives in ways that follow economic rationality, and certainly not when we get into the territory of sex and reproduction. Research evidence tends to suggest that around 50 per cent of pregnancies are unplanned, so some larger families are by accident rather than by design.  Additionally, larger families make up only a small percentage of families in receipt of welfare and there is no good research evidence to document the claim that families continue to have children as a means to secure welfare payments. In terms of child benefit, an additional child adds an extra £13.40 a week to the household income.

In financial terms then, this kind of benefits cap would not have any significant impact on the government’s welfare budget. So what was the aim of this speech? If we look at the language IDS uses throughout the speech, one aim seems to have to been to continue a current theme of Conservative government to construct a particular image of British society and the welfare state. Here, we get an image of British society divided into two classes. The majority are the responsible taxpayers in 'working households' who live according to their means, who save money where possible and whose choices are curtailed by the reality of their financial situations. Two examples that IDS gives here are the working families who have to limit the number of children they have, and the young adults who remain living with their parents while they save money to buy a flat. This class is presented as in need of protection from those who are dependent on welfare. The minority on welfare are presented as able to exercise ‘choices’ that are out of reach of the majority, they can get ‘never ending amounts of money for every child’ and the young adults of this class move from parental home to their own home ‘without finding a job first’. Of course, this latter point might also apply to the children of the very rich in society, who don’t get a mention here.

This is a problematic, and socially divisive, version of Britain. In IDS’s speech we get the sense that these are two stable groups, however, this is not the case. Most people of working age who are reliant on welfare, will move into paid work at some point in the future. And many in the responsible taxpayer class are only a redundancy letter, relationship break up or illness away from claiming welfare. These two groups are also not so easily separated. Many adults in paid work are dependent on tax credits to supplement their low wages, to fund childcare, or both. Those who live ‘on welfare’ still pay taxes, for example, through VAT on goods and services. It also detracts attention away from the huge differences in material wealth of those in 'working households'.

Perhaps, the most troubling aspect of IDS’s speech is the idea that life on welfare is characterised by ‘choice’ - to have as many children as a family decides, to move into independent housing when adult children want. What gets lost here is the reality of life for those reliant on welfare payments. This reality is more likely to be one of enduring hardship, not endless choice.

Poverty Porn

By Siobhan Holohan

For a while now the current economic downturn has presented programme makers with a dilemma of sorts. After years making a good living off the back of the property boom with television gems like Channel Four's Location, Location, Location, the credit crunch, accompanied by thousands of job losses and home repossessions, made the conspicuous consumption found in such shows hard to swallow.

Move over property porn here comes poverty porn. I first heard this phrase last year in relation to Danny Boyles’ hugely successful film Slumdog Millionaire, then again a couple of months ago in relation to Channel Four’s Slumming It. This programme saw property guru Kevin McCloud spend time living in and exploring Dharavi, a shanty town in Mumbia and one of the largest slums in Asia. Like poverty tourism, where the affluent travel to less developed parts of the world to ‘experience’ how the other half live (sometimes with horror other times through rose coloured spectacles) the television equivalent drops a presenter and camera crew into an area exemplified by poor living conditions and subjects it to the lofty gaze of the Eurocentric traveller.

But it’s not just global others programme makers treat as strange. Recent weeks have seen a number of reality television programmes alluding to social and economic deprivation in the UK. Coming close on the tail of Channel 4’s The Tower Block of Commons, which dressed MPs as 'ordinary members of the public' and housed them with council tenets, this week BBC One offered up Famous, Rich and Jobless, a two-part examination of how unemployment affects the 2.5 million currently out of work in Britain. In this programme four celebrities were sent to unemployment black spots around the country ostensibly to find out what its like to be out of work in the UK today. With the trappings of celebrity taken away and replaced with a bag of second hand clothes (apparently the poor person's uniform), they spent four days (!) experiencing life on job seekers allowance. In that time Meg Matthews (famous for being married to Noel Gallagher) found work on a market stall, celebrity gardener, Diarmuid Gavin, managed to find a few odd jobs to supplement his JSA, Emma Parker Bowles (one time It girl and recovering alcoholic) worked a shift in a pub, and Larry Lamb, AKA Archie Mitchell from EasterEnders, bucked the trend by living quite happily on the £40 he was given to survive. The underlying narrative was clear: job seekers – there are jobs get on your bike and find one.

In the second part of the experiment the celebrities went to live with people currently on job seekers allowance in order to help them to break the cycle of claiming benefits. Regardless of the fact that this is purportedly what government agencies are for, the strange shift in gear between programme one and two saw a new form of moralising appear. While Meg, Larry and Emma embraced their roles as part therapist, part life coach, Diarmuid found his role in a household with two long-term unemployed parents and their five children (with another on the way) morally problematic. He could not escape either his dismay at what he considered to be their poor parenting practices, or the mindset that told him that they shouldn’t keep having kids if they can’t afford them. In the end the celebrities got their own clothes back, went home and no real solutions were found.

Beyond the idea that such programmes simply exploit those living in poverty and socially degrading circumstances for television ratings, I’m not sure what the moral of this programme was. Perhaps that celebrities have more get up and go than the average person? This is the difficulty with these kind of unreflective reality shows, they simply serve to perpetuate the hyperbole found in much of the mainstream media which continues to suggest that people in difficult circumstances are there of their own making. What the programme makers, the celebrities, and possibly the job seekers failed to recognise was that there is no easy solution to the problems of job losses or long term unemployment. These issues must be tackled at every level – top to bottom – not just by forcing blame on those affected by their social conditions.

Basic standard of living: what is poverty these days?

By Rebecca Leach
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation have just published a new report which gives findings from their survey of the British population on which items are regarded as 'essential' for a basic standard of living. Some of the findings are surprising: a car is considered a 'luxury' item, but holidays and bottles of wine are considered 'essentials' by most people.

Much of the media debate this morning has focused on the hysterical response to this kind of contrast: partly fuelled (do you see what I did there?) by rising fuel prices, there are many indignant cries of 'How dare you call a car a luxury, when I must drive everywhere and there is no public transport!?', alongside equally indignant objections to the idea that people on low incomes ought to be entitled to live in reasonable comfort as opposed to abject misery: 'how dare single mothers feel they need a DVD player; why aren't they out scraping streets with their babies strapped to their backs in sackcloth and ashes...?'. And so on ad nauseum.

But what the JRF is doing is opening a really interesting debate about quality of life. In a wealthy country like ours, expectations should be higher. Beyond basic food, shelter and clothing (but let's not forget for many people, this is still the main issue), poverty is a relative concept. In the UK and the US for example, there is plenty of money to go around to provide people with relative comfort: the problem is that most of it is still in the hands of the wealthy. In fact, the government measure of poverty is already a relative one (usually measured at 60% of the median income - which means it changes all the time, and this is one reason why the government is finding it very hard to meet the target they set on child poverty).

If a 'minimum standard of living' can be established, then a 'minimum income standard' can be established which gives more precise guidance to policy makers about what people need. According to the JRF, this is about £13,000 per year for a single person and around £27000 for a couple with kids. Many on the BBC site (linked above) are screeching that this is far too low. That may be true for people with high consumer expectations. But for many people on really low incomes, or managing on benefits, £13k would be a lifeline.

This raises some interesting sociological questions too. How do we value stuff? Is it OK to include previously luxury items as essential? Who decides? One way to think about this is to get some perspective on how this boundary between luxury and necessity changes over time and space. 400 years ago, for some people, wearing purple silk was a necessity; for others, it was banned. In Papua New Guinea, string bags are essential for status and subsistence - they could count as both luxury and necessity at the same time. Tampons are taxed as a luxury in the UK. What this flexibility tells us is that the distinction between essential and luxury is a social distinction, used to define status boundaries, membership and identities (it performs a 'function' for society if you want a 'perspective' to label it with).

All this and more essential (!) discussion with your resident Keele experts on consumer culture, objects and taste: Lydia Martens and Rebecca Leach; and on policy issues relating to family life: Emma Head and Graham Allan: we teach a range of modules on similar topics on our programme...