EDWG – Economic Dependency Working Group ESA – Employment and Support Allowance SJPG – Social Justice Policy Group SRA – Strategic-Relational Approach SRSSC – Social Rented Sector Size Criterion.
Now that’s music to my ears?
George GIDEON Osborne
The Euro-American state is a cowardly lion, a weeping bully, a plaintive lover to finance capital. It cannot bear to admit that having grown its own administrative limbs to serve at the pleasure of the new sovereign of privatized wealth, that the wealthy feel no obligation to feed the state. (...) I don’t think it’s about converting shame, therefore, into pride or anything. I think it requires a hard confrontation with and a very difficult process of changing what the reproduction of life means in both pragmatic and phantasmatic terms. What this means will vary, but its impact on the political and on the social relations of labour will be astonishing, because it has to happen: there will be politics, and there will be sacrifice, and there will be a chaos of wants responded to badly and with a bigger burden on the already vulnerable unless they converge to rethink their own investments in inequality and xenophobia, the ready-to-hand fear formations.
Lauren Berlant
For the One Nationers, New Labour had dramatically increased welfare spending to a maddening level. It had given the public too much, too soon, too fast. It had failed, at once to economically have the intended effect on poverty & deprivation; the expressed Forgotten People, the people of Broken Britain, child poverty, slum estates, the whole package was illustrated by the Conservative critique of New Labour’s income-based concept of relative poverty. The false question to the problem was devised:
How is it possible for the state to spend so much money, to devote so much energy, to fight poverty – only for poverty and inequality to win the fight?
Here, the claims that New Labour’s welfare state had in fact endorsed its opposite, had ensured poverty had won and inequality ruled. Time for austerity. Time to end irresponsible spending.
New Labour should therefore occupy a more structural position in this genealogy, rather than appearing merely as an interlude between Thatcherism and Cameronism. Cameron did not invent welfare conditionality, labour-market activation or the elevation of paid employment into the privileged measure of social inclusion; these principles were already embedded within New Labour’s communitarian authoritarianism.
Under New Labour, the redistributionist understanding of unemployment as a consequence of inequality or insufficient employment was increasingly displaced by an integrationist emphasis on participation through paid work. At the same time, this became entangled with a moralising account of dependency, behaviour and family disorder. New Labour constructed this ideological and administrative bridge; Cameronism extended it under austerity, intensifying its punitive dimensions while theologising them through the moral language of responsibility, community, voluntarism and the Big Society.
Time to Button the Fuck up.
George Osborne, or simply GIDEON said that the Conservatives had aligned its thinking with ‘Working Britain’; ‘the shift worker, leaving home in the dark hours of the early morning’, contrasted with ‘the closed blinds’ of their next-door neighbour sleeping off a life on benefits. This ‘heating up’ would soon be keyed in by the chief architect of Universal Credit (IDS) via its means tested overhaul. Many other faces shrouded amid its creation, namely Iain Duncan Smith’s thinktank CSJ adjuncts Tim Montgomerie, Philippa Stroud, Baroness Stroud & American management consulting firm Oliver Wyman.
The closed blinds are especially productive. Osborne converts an architectural surface into a moral diagnostic instrument. The claimant’s home is interpreted from outside: closed blinds become evidence of sleep, sleep of idleness, idleness of dependency, and dependency of defective character. It is a miniature of the sanctions regime—an administrative fantasy that claims to see through walls.
In addition to policy development, the CSJ has built an alliance of poverty fighting organisations that reverse social breakdown and transform communities. We believe that the surest way the Government can reverse social breakdown, and poverty is to enable such individuals, communities and voluntary groups to help themselves.
The CSJ was founded by Iain Duncan Smith in 2004, as the fulfilment of a promise made to Janice Dobbie, whose son had recently died from a drug overdose just after he was released from prison. This emerging underclass lives in communities consistently defined by five characteristics, which become the pathways to poverty: family breakdown; educational failure; drug and alcohol addiction; severe personal indebtedness; and economic dependency – caused by intergenerational worklessness.
The five-pronged attack would soon be undertaken by a brooding batch of ‘Compassionate Conservatives’ with heavy links to the Religious Right of Britain. Yet this right is less a sin- gle ideological bloc than an unstable convergence of Conservative theological traditions. One lineage descends from Anglican Tory conceptions of society as an inherited moral organism: a structure of reciprocal but unequal obligations joining family, parish, property, Church and nation. From Burkean association and Disraelian paternalism came the argument that property conferred duties, privilege required stewardship, and reform might be necessary to preserve authority. This was never egalitarian. Poverty appeared less as the consequence of exploitation than as a disturbance within an organic order, to be met through protection, discipline and charitable obligation. The poor entered this theology not as political agents but as objects of care, classification and moral supervision.
A second lineage passes through Anglican social theology and Philip Blond’s post-liberal Red Toryism. Influenced by Radical Orthodoxy, Catholic social thought and older traditions of guild, parish and associative life, Blond diagnosed the centralised welfare state and deregulated capitalism as expressions of the same liberal abstraction: one dissolving association through bureaucratic administration, the other through commodification, debt and monopoly. Red Toryism was not initially a theological defence of Thatcherism. It proposed dispersed property, reconstructed local economies and institutions between individual and state—a moral ecology of families, cooperatives, churches, mutuals, small businesses and civic associations. Its criticism of monopoly finance was genuine, even if its organic community could obscure class antagonism and naturalise inherited authority.
Cameronism drew from these traditions without fully belonging to either. From paternal Conservatism it borrowed duty, stewardship and the distinction between responsible and irresponsible conduct; from evangelical social action, dependency, family repair and personal transformation; from Red Toryism, association, localism and civil society. But these moral languages were joined to a fiscal programme with a markedly different destination. Blond’s attempt to restrain monopoly capitalism was attenuated while his critique of the central state was retained. Community survived; the economic redistribution that might make communal autonomy possible did not. An argument for dispersing economic power became a mechanism for dispersing public responsibility. Post-liberal theology supplied part of the language; evangelical social action supplied personnel and exemplary institutions; neoliberal government supplied the fiscal and administrative machinery.
The ‘brochure’ at some point refers to dynamic modelling—a method used extensively in the private sector. The model imports the epistemic authority of management consultancy into social security: poverty appears as a system of incentives to be optimised, while the claimant appears as a behavioural variable. Benefits are no longer ‘just a passive money dispenser; it is also an active player in determining whether people work’. And yet, Iain Duncan Smith, known as IDS from henceforth tended to prefer or imply that the ‘system’ is the thing that traps people into that dependency & that the insufficient drive to ‘remove oneself’ or ‘cancel/self-abolish’ from this ‘urge to depend’ is something like an overture of the New Labour ‘culture of excess’. So Big Society.
IDS, Responsibility, Fairness & finally Compassion. Hard Working people & benefit dependents, ‘detoxification’ under Cameron. Cuts & the programme of austerity. The explanation was clear as day, it was so obviously to do with a ‘culture of entitlement’ to state support, in which there is ‘less expectation to take responsibility’. Today the State is everpresent: either doing it for you, or telling you how to do it, or making sure you’re doing it their way. So BigSociety & its ‘centrist’ methodology of abstinence & hope were to be implemented:
A country not just back in the black but back in business. A big society. A prouder people. And we know the values that are going to get us there. Responsibility. Real fairness. Compassion. A poem, written 2016. 11th of July, immediately after Cameron’s resignation. Today, 8 years on.
For workable antinomy
new decimal impressed
on the condition of intense purified awareness
of the young & The State
of their coherence is to make distinct
concentratedly despite throbbing uncertainty
of being just right relief
to the social kernel of abolition
patter the balance
looks like austerity
produced this urban stampede
and the unkillable infants with no name
or place stiffen in the air preserve
this basmati as a living thriving literalness
taking in a 360 degree revolution
of a world and says:
’I’m not a piece of shit, I’m a piece of society’
will never be exhausted
by feeble sketches or piloted extinctions
in tinctures with lease go down our debt
is mind dependent &
a negativity so negativity
you say a tungsten ring is forever
but the basmati is still a living thriving literalness
Big Society did not reverse Thatcher’s denial of society. It reconstructed ‘society’ as an unpaid, morally disciplinary infrastructure through which the state could withdraw material provision while intensifying its supervision of the poor. Cameronism retained the individualising move but added a communitarian vocabulary: neighbourhoods, charities, churches, families, voluntary associations and Burkean ‘little platoons’. Thatcherite market liberalism, One Nation organicism, Christian service and personal transformation, New Labour activation, austerity’s fiscal withdrawal and an increasingly punitive administrative state could now inhabit the same programme.
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The paradox is crucial: the state became smaller as guarantor but more intrusive as examiner, assessor and sanctioning authority. The welfare state was not simply dismantled. Its protective arm was shortened while its examining finger was extended.
Its capacities were poured into a proliferating field of contractors, consultancies, charities, social enterprises, behavioural experts, philanthropic foundations and policy institutes. Think tanks did not straightforwardly remove power from government; they helped constitute a para-state in which policy could be conceived outside democratic institutions, returned to government as expert necessity, and implemented through contracts and financial incentives. Central provision was fragmented, but central power remained active in constructing markets, enforcing welfare conditionality, measuring outcomes and determining which organisations could deliver formerly public functions.
Public services were decomposed into measurable interventions; social needs became contractual outcomes; charities competed for commissioned work; investors were invited to treat social dysfunction as calculable risk and return. The Open Public Services White Paper crystallised the settlement by combining reduced expenditure, devolved responsibility and the opening of provision to new suppliers and financial instruments. What appeared as decentralisation was also a parcellised corporatisation of the social: profitable functions passed to private providers, reproductive burdens to households and voluntary labour, and a residual state remained to manage the risks the market would not absorb.
The theological force of this transformation lay in economic compulsion being recoded as moral agency. State withdrawal became vocation; unpaid substitution became service; conditionality became responsibility; exposure to the market became independence. The citizen was summoned as volunteer, entrepreneur, parent, worker, donor and self- regulating moral subject. Communities already deprived by austerity were expected to generate the social capacities that retrenchment was destroying, while financial and corporate actors entered newly opened domains of provision. The older paternal promise of protection remained chiefly as moral imagery. Its material obligations were evacuated. Cameronism did not resolve the contradiction between distributism and financial concen- tration, paternal obligation and fiscal abandonment, evangelical compassion and punitive conditionality, local autonomy and centrally imposed austerity. It made these contradic- tions operational: a moralised disaggregation of the state.
The political climate in the UK found a new register with the financial crisis: the invocation of public and personal shame. Stuff of wholly Victorian demarcation, the deserving and undeserving poor, moral panics of youth deviancy emerging straight from the privilege of EMA, straight from the communitarian authoritarianism on New Labour social policy. It was that during this period, wherein GIDEON would chastise those that exploited the public without generating wealth, those that flouted it through a culture of ‘dependence’, that he would sometimes label an ‘excess’, much like the very same nervous excess car- ried by those with insomnia, depriving them from the ability to sleep or maybe it was a perpetual wakefulness, ‘the closed blinds of the next door neighbour sleeping off a life on benefits’ their dependency a ‘cultural choice’. Shameless milking of state benefits enables these reckless personal habits to grow uncontrollably burdensome to (our collectively) cash strapped public services. The register of shame and excess, outlined against an assumed notion of a common-sense decency still to be found in the working-class heartlands. As the late, great Marina Vishmidt had written, in terms of the roles around shame & shaming within the political climate of post 2010, ‘the language of personal responsibility shaped the political discourse of ‘austerity’... There is a sense that such language acts conser- vatively in how social and economic problems are conceived, including their causes and solutions, that it both permits and excludes certain types of policy approaches and certain types of defenses and criticisms of those policies. The relationship between shame and indebtedness is a major example, how the link of credit to credibility becomes a cipher for all kinds of social violence.’
Libidinal satisfaction to the non-negotiable imperatives of austerity or rather the question of how can we reroute shame? How can there be a re-formulation of the terms around which shame and its punitive assortments, its empanelment in daily life can be revolted against. As Berlant noted:
Austerity sounds good, clean, ascetic: the lines of austerity are drawn round a polis to incite it toward askesis, toward managing its appetites and taking satisfaction in a self- management in whose mirror of performance it can feel proud and superior. In capitalist logics of askesis, the workers’ obligation is to be more rational than the system, and their recompense is to be held in a sense of pride at surviving the scene of their own attrition.
On this subject Berlant is too inimitable & so I have to quote at length again:
What ‘shame’ is is to be seen seeing one’s own forced adjustment, to be seen seeing the wearing away of the old anchors for being tethered to the world, to be watched or encoun- tered as one displays profoundly not knowing what to do, to be seen frantically treading water or to be encountered in paralysis (again, there is a whole range of proprioceptive performances through which we learn to register feeling the contingencies of survival and the negativity of encountering ourselves as subjects who make sense either in our fantasies or the world & how this manages itself into the effective EDWG – Economic De- pendency Working Group ESA – Employment and Support Allowance SJPG – Social Justice Policy Group SRA – Strategic-Relational Approach SRSSC – Social Rented Sector Size Criterion. These are not merely bureaucratic abbreviations.
They show political violence passing through a purification process: moral assumptions become technical categories, categories become administrative instruments, and instruments act upon bodies. Now that’s music to my ears? The closer you are to the forms of punitive systems such as the DWP, the more the relation of social negativity to subjectifying effects is a reactive intensity.
But it is also a birthright. Rendered in blood. Mended into your sensibility, just not experienced vicariously. It is a cartography, you hold it in your sternum. It is the in- tensive build of the self. Within the Big Society narrative Burkean ‘little platoons’ largely rested on the ‘vigorous values’ of moral responsibility to work & to self sufficiency. That is, the historical fracture lines around the English working class, post-1980’s disintegration & disenfranchisement, 90’s reinfranchisement as a cipher, a symbol re-liquidated, primed & pasted. The epiphenomena of class obsessed over by marketers, psychologists, and rock musicians & so what approach is to be taken with regarding to the post Big Society clutch on the throat of the disintegrating integers of ‘working class culture’ other than the opined death wretch of its junk the necessary traps, its clobber its gubbins its odds & sods its dunnage equipage.
As Huw Lemmey lays out; That fancy dress is especially popular when young people attend university, searching to find an identity that fits and distinguishes them from the dreaded label of being middle class. English universities are full of people using their miner grandfa- ther to offset their stockbroker grandfather. The impossibility of Bossnapping in the Mind of Someone Dead. Or whatever the Hirst work was called The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living......
And to at least, in respite mode attempt an ending, or edging to an end. Fisher on the expe- rience of class, as it bifurcates as it irritates your skin, eyes, nose, or throat. In epistemic terms - i.e. in terms of knowledge of the true nature of the social - the subordinate group is in the privileged position precisely because its experience is incommensurate and disconti- nous, precisely, you might say, because it experience is not (a consistent or quasi-natural) experience at all. It encounters the social field not as some natural(ised) home, but as a series of irreconcilable antagonisms and discrepancies. But this sublime and traumatic ‘experience of the unexperiancable’ is an encounter with the social field as such - which, in class societies, is not contingently but necessarily and inherently distorted by class an- tagonism. The working class becomes the proletariat when it recognises this - when, that is to say, it begins to dis-identify with the ‘class fantasy’ which has kept it in its place.
To repeat, when it begins to ‘dis-identify with the ‘class fantasy’ which has kept it in its place, in other words when the class itself is abolished. When the class abolishes itself. The antagonism at the heart of this quote, is seemingly obvious when you think the con- dition in which class is coincident and therefore experienced as a collective ‘oppression’ or a structural position has been increasingly fractured. The forms in which Big Society has opened out the space wherein the experience is individuated is so vast as to effectively mirror the transformation itself. In the ways in which, ‘Responsibility. Real fairness. Compassion’ migrate themselves into the forms of privatised social justice, in the ways in which the eviscerated welfare state dissolves the casing around a collective Dole Mentality that had a kick on reactive cultural movement. What then? What happens when the enfran- chisement of the disenfranchised is rendered null & void? One answer is written into law. Weatherley Law, 2012.
Michael Richard Weatherley, now dead, was MP for Hove from 2010-2015, which following his election he campaigned an EDM alongside Kenneth Clarke to criminalise squatting in residential properties., SQUASH (Squatters’ Action for Secure Homes), a pressure group which reformed to oppose section 144 included the likes of John McDonnell in helping organise a meeting for the at the House of Commons. McDonnell said, ‘“there was no need for a new law. It was put through on the basis of prejudice ... to pander to the media and the right wing of the Conservative party. We are now finding young homeless people being sent to prison at great cost to themselves and to the exchequer.’ 34,080 families were homeless in 2012 which was a 12% increase on the previous figures. The campaign itself received Royal Assent on May 1st 2012. Its title was Legal Aid, Sentencing & Punishment of Offenders Act & its enforcement ranged from 51 weeks in HM or hefty ‘fines’ & of course a criminal record.
Weatherley noted in Valedictory debate, that ‘scrubbing the law on squatting was a huge deal, and it has virtually ended squatting in residential properties in the UK. Wikipedia now lists it as Weatherley’s law. We won.’
But he's dead.
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