Solidarity for Whom? Selective Social Rights in a Post-Brexit Welfare Settlement #

Daniel Edmiston

We are, once again, at an important juncture in the European project and the mainstreaming of social priorities through European integration. Often described as ‘the last chance for social Europe’, the 2017 European Pillar of Social Rights presents an opportunity to transform the reach and impact of European Union social policy. It remains to be seen, however, whether its broad (and at times vague) ambitions will amount to substantive progress in the fulfillment of social rights or the more usual co-option of EU social priorities by macroeconomic agendas.

Indeed, many have expressed concern that the pillar is suffering the same fate as prior activities and funding instruments, with instrumentalisation and poor implementation compromising its potential to protect and extend the social rights of European citizens. Moreover, inherent ambiguities emerge from the pillar’s focus and framing: the capacity for the principles laid out to be claimed as rights remains an aspiration with little consistent specification as to who would be responsible for their enforcement or realisation. As ever, a tension is in play between national and EU citizenship and their respective jurisdictional claims. Meanwhile, Covid-19, welfare-state disinvestment and the rise of far-right, nationalistic politics are all undermining social rights across Europe.

Within the United Kingdom, Brexit is routinely presented as a further threat to antecedent conditions safeguarding rights to social citizenship. For example, some underline the regulatory, normative and substantive benefits of the ‘European social model’, which the UK stands to miss out on without a progressive, post-Brexit agenda. Others argue that Brexit increases the likelihood of a ‘race to the bottom’ vis-à-vis workplace protections, revenue generation and workers’ rights.

Some have speculated, more optimistically, that Brexit could engender popular support for national policies that reinvigorate the redistributive power of the welfare state and its capacity to respond to longer-term, global challenges. Overwhelmingly though, in a post-Brexit welfare settlement there are more reasons to be doubtful than hopeful about the resourcing and justiciability of social rights.

National solidarity and ‘flexible citizenship’ #

After a decade of highly regressive cuts to public services in the UK, social and political movements are seeking to reconfigure welfare politics in a manner which responds to but also counters the underlying causes of Brexit. Emerging from this is a renewed sense of political urgency to safeguard and extend the social rights of legal citizens (as opposed to resident subjects). Indeed, the stated desire of the prime minister, Boris Johnson, to ‘unite and level up’ is a clear attempt to tap into this sentiment and ‘bring people together’. Here, national solidarities are being stirred up to enliven the status and practice of social citizenship.

From above, this trend has been characterised as a rejection of global financialised capitalism in favour of nationalist populism, with borders protecting sovereignty and social or self-interest. From below, it has been explained as a protest against technocratic ‘elites’ who have ignored the interests of ‘left-behind’ communities, battered by poverty, precarity and austerity. Both accounts—which have proven alluring to commentators and analysts—tend to sidestep the racial antagonism and xenophobic politics which nurtured this Brexit moment. Failure to recognise this risks characterising social citizenship (and the national solidarities that underpin it) as a somewhat benign feature of democratic welfare capitalism, underplaying its highly disciplinary and selective tendencies.

In reality, the terms and functions of national citizenship are actively engaged in the making of exclusionary relations on a global stage, that border the status and rights it affords. This underlines the need to consider whose interests national solidarities serve and which ‘people’ a post-Brexit welfare settlement hopes to ‘bring together’. Answers to these questions have significant implications for the scope and nature of social rights envisaged and who comes to be recognised as entitled and deserving.

Within Europe, legal and regulatory mechanisms centred on social and economic integration have led to increasingly transnational forms of entitlement and belonging. As a result, European citizens and denizens are routinely granted particular civil, political and social rights, across multiple sites and scales. Crucially, the benefits of this are not evenly applied or apparent. Aiwa Ong (2006) argues it is helpful to think of this process as formations of ‘flexible citizenship’, where the parameters and conditions of membership shift in ways that privilege some relative to others. Looking across European welfare regimes, we can see that nation states are granting exceptional status or rights to entrepreneurial global elites, chequered entitlements and conditional access to markets for low-paid migrant workers and protection from the financial duties of residence for denizen ‘wealth creators’.

This splintering of citizenship, in terms of the security and opportunities it affords, presents challenges for galvanising national solidarities in the defence of social rights, as their integrative potential remains obscure or illusory for many. Fuzzy perceptions of relative privilege have been used to explain the rise of Brexit politics, where right-wing populism is acting as a kind of remedial glue holding together a fractured welfare settlement, with citizens mobilised to protect their subjective position and worldview over ‘others’. Significantly, attempts to ‘take back control’ and ‘level up’ have principally been framed in terms of ‘White working class’, male grievance, which only amplifies the exclusionary features of citizenship, questioning entitlements for some and denying belonging to others.

In reality, grievances arising from ‘flexible citizenship’ are heavily raced and gendered in ways that profoundly complicate the possibility for national solidarity, at least in its current, ‘imperial’ form (Benson, 2019). The uneven entitlements and application of civic duties which characterise ‘flexible citizenship’ make social rights—as an aspiration and reality—a contested arena in which it is hard to identify, let alone mobilise around, inclusive categories of collective association rooted in a genuine equality of status between political agents.

Categories of welfare #

In this latest period of political disturbance and socio-economic uncertainty, many have called for ‘greater social solidarity’ to safeguard the social rights of citizenship. If the current content of social citizenship is experienced or perceived as privileging some at the expense of ‘others’, however, how is it possible to mobilise around solidarities that defend or advance the terms of such entitlements? This may be possible, but in ways that risk consolidating the inequalities that have emerged out of and sustained the last ten years of austerity. In thinking through the possibilities for national solidarity and its relationship to welfare revisioning, the conditions under which forms of social solidarity operate then become particularly important to understand.

At its most basic level, social solidarity requires a sense of collective identity and purpose, resting on categorisations of the self and our relationship to others. These categories have the capacity to form, dissolve and galvanise collectivities of association—particularly when it comes to the defence or advancement of social rights. How we talk and think about welfare and social rights will determine the nature of solidarities possible and the ends towards which they are put. With that in mind, it’s helpful to reflect on the category of ‘welfare’ and the modes of collective identity and purpose it tends to invoke. Doing so gives a sense of the direction of travel for social rights in post-Brexit Britain.

After ten years of fiscal consolidation, some have suggested that the UK public have ‘had enough’ of austerity: insurgent forms of political disaffection have surfaced to defend the resourcing and delivery of public services. Ostensibly, this could be seen as an ascendant form of collective association, even solidarity, around the protection of social rights and the resources they demand of us all. Perhaps the most recent expression of this has been the ‘clap for our carers’ campaign in response to the pandemic. Alongside this, there has been a powerful shift in recasting key workers and those at the frontline of public services as ‘heroes’ within the wider civic imaginary.

Unfortunately though, the potential this presents for social rights rest on an overly optimistic reading of recent shifts in public opinion and the forms of collective identity and purpose underlying them. While there has been an apparent ‘softening’ of public attitudes towards welfare and reduced support for cuts to government spending, we should nonetheless be cautious about characterising this as a thermostatic ‘backlash’ against austerity or, indeed, a renewed zeal for social rights.

Criticism of the adequacy of public spending has principally arisen from a concern for the integrity of ‘universal’ services, such as education and healthcare, rather than the (re-) distributive or integrative functions of social security. Looking at the British Social Attitudes survey, support for increased public spending remains partial and tempered. When asked about the government’s top spending priorities, the majority believe health should come first, then education and housing. Despite the drastic cuts made to it, a very small proportion of respondents support increased spending on social security (Hudson et al, 2020).

Where a softening of public attitudes is observable and directed towards low-income groups, this appears to be more conditional than encompassing. Scepticism towards those claiming benefits has fallen: the proportion of the public believing that most people ‘on the dole are fiddling’ has fallen from 35 per cent to 22 per cent (a 30-year low) since 2010 (Baumberg Geiger et al, 2017). Yet the public remains relatively indifferent to increased spending on benefits for those in poverty, with an even split between those who believe benefits for unemployed people are ‘too low and cause hardship’ or ‘too high and discourage them from finding jobs’ (Hudson et al, 2020). Underlying this contradiction or selective weariness with austerity is a fading but stubborn distinction between ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ citizens, which has fuelled the austerity agenda since the Conservative accession to power in 2010.

Within this context, the subjugation or denial of low-income citizens as legitimate claimants of justice and social rights is entirely reconcilable with growing support for and concern about the integrity of universal services. Even if the tide is turning on public hostility towards welfare spending, such shifts are nonetheless qualified, distinguishing between worthy and unworthy claimants of social rights. This is unlikely to help those most vulnerable to poverty and socio-economic restructuring in the wake of Brexit.

There is some suggestion that the national solidarities emerging through Covid-19 present a window of opportunity for reimagining welfare politics: there has been increased support for public services and a softening of attitudes towards unemployed benefit recipients in recent months. While this is true, it is however likely that political leaders will fall back on the same familiar classificatory distinctions to justify a recuperation of monies expended in dealing with the pandemic.

In light of this, the category of ‘welfare’ has and will continue to be deployed in ways that corrupt progressive possibilities for collective identity and purpose to advance social rights for all. It continues to be misrecognised as the reserve of those reliant on low-income social security. Here, a false distinction is made between ostensibly universal public services on the one hand and social-security entitlements on the other.

Within discourses surrounding ‘welfare’, the latter is assumed a contingent provision, the former an inalienable right of worthy citizens. Even if national solidarities manage to speak to class-based inequalities during and beyond Brexit, these will be increasingly grounded in a xenophobic politics which denies rights to low-paid migrant workers, European residents and those deemed to lack the social markers of (White) Britishness.

Reflecting on this within the current Brexit moment, it is clear that there are pockets of inclusive and emancipatory politics that offer reasons to be hopeful. However, these lack the means of collective identification that might sustain a meaningful progression or expansion of welfare for all. More extensive forms of solidarity that appear centred on advancing social rights actually emerge from and consolidate social divisions, that continue to destabilise an equality of entitlement and status between political agents. Any attempt to galvanise solidarities that contribute towards welfare revisioning and a defence of social rights has to engage with this reality. Without doing so, attempts to foster seemingly progressive solidarities are likely to reinforce inequalities and further foreclose possibilities for inclusive belonging and recognition.

References #

Baumberg Geiger, B, A Reeves and R De Vries (2017), Tax Avoidance and Benefit Manipulation, London: National Centre for Social Research

Benson, M (2019), 'Focus: class, race and brexit', Discover Society Edmiston, D (2020), 'Citizenship', in N Ellison and T Haux (eds), Handbook on Social Policy and Society, London: Edward Elgar

Hudson, H, C Grollman, H Kolbas and I Taylor (2020), Key time series: public attitudes in the context of COVID-19 and Brexit, London: National Centre for Social Research

Ong, A (2006), Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty, Durham NC: Duke University Press