Stigma by Tyler Doctor Imogen;

Author:Tyler, Doctor Imogen;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zed Books
Published: 2020-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

The unsettling of the welfare settlement

Austerity is an anti-social and an anti-democratic movement which signals a deeper unravelling of the social contract between citizens and the state. That is, if British citizens are no longer collectively willing to meet the basic needs of children, disabled people, the elderly and other vulnerable citizens – for shelter, care and education through state-organised systems of wealth redistribution (taxation) – then what kind of state we are in? Can a state with only skeletal social provisions, a state in which the provisions which exist are so unequally distributed by geography, be called democratic? What kind of state is a state without a functioning welfare state?

In place of the ‘big state’ envisioned by architects of the British welfare state in the mid-twentieth century, what is emerging is an uneven patchwork of social provision. A pared down, stretched and stressed health and public sector pegged together by armies of unpaid charity volunteers, combined with the emergence of new private for-profit health, social care and educational provisions for those who can afford to pay. Indeed, in terms of widening economic, social and health inequalities, the austerity welfare state increasingly resembles that of the first decades of the twentieth century, when much welfare was dependent on philanthropists.108 Many of Britain’s poorest citizens are already reliant on the charity of the individuals and corporations whose predatory capitalism (and tax avoidance) contributed to the crisis we are in.

There are more than echoes of early historical periods of social provision in the austerity state, and it is with historical warnings about the abdication of the state, the erosion of democracy and the return of charity in mind that I want to conclude this chapter by returning to a final time to Lancaster Town Hall, and to a period before the post-war welfare state.

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