IPPR Progressive Review最新文献

It is 80 years since Beveridge took on what he called the ‘five giants’ of want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. His report has shaped British politics and society ever since its publication. As part of a project to assess where we stand today, Ashwin Kumar and I were commissioned to explore ‘idleness’.1 Is it a problem today? And if so, what should be done about it?

For Beveridge, who was writing after two decades of high unemployment, the problem was one of worklessness and a lack of jobs for male breadwinners. Today our labour market is very different: rates of employment are historically high, many more women are in paid work, but alongside this we have record levels of in-work poverty and endemic labour market inequalities along the lines of gender, ethnicity and disability. The UK is stuck in a low-pay, low-productivity rut, but the political rhetoric on both sides has not caught up.

A key factor underlying our underperforming labour market is power. It's something that unemployed people and low-paid workers are sorely lacking. The balance of power between workers and employers has also shifted decisively towards the latter. People are forced into taking jobs that don't match their skills and needs, trapped by both a lack of progression opportunities within their current workplace, but also a lack of alternative jobs that offer a better future. Employers have no incentive to improve job quality if they know their workers have few alternatives.

The state should play a key role in redressing this power imbalance. Being pro-economy isn't necessarily being pro-business, and government should be backing and investing in the unemployed and low paid, rather than treating them as a problem to be managed. But in our book we show that time and again, in policy areas as diverse as unemployment, childcare, transport, skills and regulation, the state conspires to constrain the labour supply of low-paid workers and reduces their power to reject poor quality work.

Our employment service needs urgent reform. For a long time, it has been unashamedly characterized as a “great big nagging service”,2 enforced through punitive sanctions and designed to make unemployment more uncomfortable than it already is.

Reform of this problematic approach has been needed for a long time. But at this juncture, when the DWP is beginning to think about engaging with people in work (an unprecedented shift made possible through universal credit's merging of in- and out-of-work benefits), policymakers need to recognise that we’ve reached the end of the road.

More of the same: a ‘work first, then work more’ approach, which simply requires workers to take on more work, while at the same time doing nothing about the quality of jobs available, just places more pressure on precarious workers. Employers don't welcome this approach either, voicing concerns about the adverse impact this could have on staff wellbeing and performance. 6

There is much that is remarkably similar about the circumstances in which the Labour Party in the UK finds itself now, and where it stood on the brink of its landslide success in 1997. The party has seemingly made itself more electable in the eyes of the electorate following a tack back towards the ideological centre of British politics. Then, in an imitation of what happened after Black Wednesday in September 1992, it has been propelled into a large polling lead after the incumbent government's reputation for economic competence was severely damaged as a result of losing the confidence of the financial markets. Although the next general election could still be nearly two years away, it would seem as though history could well repeat itself.

To illustrate how the pattern of party support has changed, we use here the data collected by the 1996 BSA survey, conducted a year before Labour's landslide victory the following year, and that obtained by the most recent survey undertaken towards the end of 2021.

Peter Pulzer famously wrote in the 1960s that ‘class is the basis of British politics, all else is embellishment and detail’.6 Thirty years later, the picture was no longer that simple. Even so, as the lower half of table 1 shows, support for the Conservatives was still rather higher among those in managerial and more junior non-manual occupations than it was among those in semi-routine and routine – that is, working-class – manual occupations. The opposite was true of Labour who, despite wanting to improve its support among middle-class voters, in fact enjoyed the support of a little over half of those in working-class jobs.

Now, after a general election in 2019 in which Labour lost a number of working-class ‘Red Wall’ seats (and with the party at the time of our survey still much less popular overall than it was in 1996), the Conservatives are only marginally more popular among those in managerial and professional jobs than among those employed in working-class jobs. Equally, Labour is only a little more popular among the former than the latter. So far at least, Labour's attempts under Sir Keir Starmer to reverse the especially heavy loss of support the party has suffered at recent elections among ‘traditional’ working-class voters appears have borne only limited fruit. In fact, the only group whose pattern of support remains as distinctive now as it was in 1996 is the self-employed who remain more inclined than any other group to support the Conservatives.

The point emerges clearly from table 2. In this table we use the BSA's value dimensions to divide the public in both 1996 and 2021 into: (i) the one-third most left-wing, the one-third most right-wing and the one-third in the centre; and (ii) the one-third most liberal, the one-third most authoritarian and the one-third in between. For each group it shows the level of both Conservative and Labour support. As we might anticipate, although the relationship is far from p

In this paper, drawing on the examples of 1997 and 2015, we will look at the task of preparing for government that Sir Keir Starmer must wrestle with over the period until the next general election, which is due to be held no later than January 2025.

One factor distinguishes Keir Starmer's preparations from the case studies of Ed Miliband and Tony Blair, which is that the next general election may be even sooner than scheduled. Indeed, at various points in the past few months it has looked possible that an election would be imminent. In contrast, the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 ensured that the coalition government could endure.

For Miliband's Labour, this meant that thoughts turned in earnest to what governing would involve. In 2013. Lord Falconer was put in charge of leading Miliband's transition to government along with a steering committee, comprised of party aides, shadow ministers, outside experts and old hands like Andrew Adonis, which had limited input. Falconer, trusted across factions and seen as competent, was crucial to ensuring this process was given status within the leader of the opposition's office.

Going back to events surrounding 1997, Jonathan Powell – tasked with creating a greater sense of order and structure at the top of New Labour – began, from early 1996 onwards, to meet monthly with Charles Clarke (who had been Neil Kinnock's chief of staff), Patricia Hewitt and the recently retired former permanent secretary, Sir Nicholas Monck, to discuss preparation for power.2

A decade and a half later, Miliband and Falconer took this work as their point of departure.

The first lesson they took from 1997 was to use management consultants to conduct an ‘outside in’ analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the major delivery departments, aiming to give the party an honest assessment of the capacity of government departments they would inherit after five years of austerity. This echoed the accountancy firm Arthur Anderson's work for Labour in 1997.

The second lesson they took was the need to give potential new ministers the skills and knowledge required for the job of secretary of state. Much has been made of the level of experience within the current shadow cabinet, only two of whom have been secretaries of state, and a further six have junior ministerial experience. But back in 1997, the Labour frontbench was significantly more inexperienced – in the shadow cabinet, only Margaret Beckett and Jack Cunningham, both junior ministers in the Wilson government, had any experience at all. During 1996, ‘summer schools’ were held at Templeton College, Oxford. Driven by Patricia Hewitt, future ministers looked at lessons from the world of big business and the management of large organisations; another session, based around the themes of Gerald Kaufman's book, How to be a Minister, was led by the Fabian Society. These sessions often suffer from a lack of engagement by senior figures – in 1997,

The second implication is that the very possibility of democratic debate also depends on viewing each other as being part of the same community and, even if we disagree about the means of doing so, equally oriented to progressing the cause of that community. In this context, robust debate can be tolerated, or even embraced as a means of testing our ideas without degenerating into hostility and conflict. However, once those who disagree with us are cast as outgroup members, whose interventions are designed to advance alien interests and undermine our own, debate becomes impossible.10 Disagreement then constitutes an assault on us rather than an asset for us. Tolerance gives way to repression.

This relationship between group inclusion and democratic debate – or rather, between exclusion and threats to democracy – has been powerfully illustrated in recent years by the rise of right-wing movements which fuse a populist distinction between ‘people’ and ‘elite’ with the practice of ‘enemyship’ by which political competitors are cast as the witting or unwitting dupes of external foes. This has long been exemplified by Donald Trump who, in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election, asserted that “Hilary Clinton and her friends in global finance want to scare America into thinking small”.11

By January 2021, Trump had radicalised his position to the point where not only were those who opposed him ‘unAmerican’ (and therefore an election defeat was necessarily a coup) but also even those Republicans who refused to actively support him in overturning the election were enemies of the nation. As he put it in his infamous speech to a rally on 6 January: “If you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore.”12 The result was an insurrectionary attack on the institutions of American democracy and the increasing difficulty of democratic debate within the country and also within the Republican party.

On 9 March 2020 – the day that Italy became the first European country to lock down, when Covid infections were starting to rise rapidly in Britain and people were beginning to die – England's chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, spoke to the nation in a televised address. He explained that:

“Anything we do, we have got to be able to sustain. Once we have started these things we have to continue them through the peak, and there is a risk that, if we go too early, people will understandably get fatigued and it will be difficult to sustain this over time.”13

This notion, which became known as ‘behavioural fatigue’, assumed that people lacked the ability to abide by the measures needed to suppress Covid transmission for any length of time. It justified a reluctance to act early for fear that measures would become ineffective by the time they were really needed. It was taken as fact by government ministers and played a part in delaying the UK lockdown for two more weeks until 23 March.14

‘Behavioural fatigue’

This piece discusses the normalisation of welfare chauvinism. It argues welfare chauvinism was introduced through pressure from the far-right but has since become mainstream in most European countries, including the UK. Welfare chauvinism has had and continues to have a devastating impact on poverty and inequality, human rights, dignity, and the right to life. Denmark is used as a core example because of the long-established dualistic welfare state.

‘Welfare state chauvinism’ is a term that was first coined by Jørgen Goul Andersen and Tor Bjørklund in 1990 in a pioneering article where they discussed the breakthrough of the most successful far-right parties in Europe. The forerunners of the Progress parties in Denmark (and later Danish People´s Party) and Norway were founded in 1972 and 1973 respectively. These parties have by most academics been classified as far-right or extreme right and been put in the same party family as the Front National in France or the Freedom Party in Austria. The Scandinavian parties have always resisted that comparison, but, even if they have never been as extreme, they have benefited from support from similar demographics.

The parties have played important roles in changing welfare policy and access to welfare in the two countries whose welfare regimes have long been characterised by relative generosity with universal systems where everyone benefited at certain phases of life. They grew out of liberal anti-taxation movements and soon gained support from small business owners and liberals. Their core following then translated, a couple of years later, into a broad base of male, working class support. They initially called for privatisation of welfare and for the attachment of conditions to eligibility criteria, based on ideas of deservingness. By the 1990s, they promoted, to varying degrees, dualistic or two-track welfare states, with a focus on excluding immigrants from access to welfare state support, and on stopping immigration all together.

Many parties in other European countries drew inspiration from their strategies and successes and the terminology ‘welfare chauvinism’ has since been used widely. There are several different uses and interpretations of welfare chauvinism. Here it will be used how it was intended originally by Andersen and Bjørklund, to refer to preferential access to welfare to ‘our own’.

Immigrants were portrayed through this lens by the far right and the media, they were less deserving of welfare services than citizens or native inhabitants who could prove strong connections to the nation and the land through family and identity. A history of contributing to the state through taxation was an increasingly important criteria to be seen as deserving of welfare services. In several countries, far-right parties were the first to put the need to curb immigration in their programmes in the late 1980s.They wanted to keep the welfare state but advocated reducing immigrants´