IPPR Progressive Review最新文献

In 2019, for the first time since the 1970s, the majority of people in the UK described themselves as ‘dissatisfied with democracy’.1 This dissatisfaction has many causes, but, according to Harry Quilter-Pinner from the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), key factors include the disjoint between the lives people hoped to lead and the lives they are living, combined with a lack of confidence in governments’ ability to tackle the challenges that matter to citizens.2

According to Essex School of political theorists, the perceived failures of representative democracy are the origins of populism – in which people's grievances are brought together and expressed as a hostile rejection of an ‘out-of-touch elite’.3 Yet Education – Power – Change, a new book telling the stories of school-based projects supported by the charity Citizens’ UK, offers hope that a dissatisfied descent into populism and polarisation is not inevitable.4 The citizen activists featured in the book's case studies hint at a more optimistic and inclusive manifesto for revitalised communities, with democracy at their heart.

As members of communities on the sharp-end of the trends described by Quilter-Pinner, you might expect the individuals featured in the book to have given up on the system – rejecting it, refusing to be part of it, and instead carving off new and alternative enclaves. But that hasn't been their approach. Instead, Janice Allen, a headteacher in Rochdale, argues that these citizens were creating ‘liminal spaces’; spaces at a threshold that make politicians pause, and that precipitate a profound response which prompts them to think differently about how they respond to social problems.

Frustrations with power structures often come from the sense that they are impenetrable, but rather than rejecting existing structures, these citizen activists refused to accept boundaries and opened up new routes across divides. In order to do so, they refused to be bound by conventionality and carefully calibrated how much tension to create between themselves and those they sought to influence. In other words, they did not stand outside the system and throw stones, they demanded to be let in so that they could sit with those in power and negotiate change together.

Individuals and communities can unleash surprising power when they span ‘structural holes’ and mobilise the “bridging capital” that the American Sociologist, Robert Putnam describes as “sociological WD-40”6. Putnam critiques the rise of “mere card-carrying membership organisations” where people pay their fees and outsource their voice, a form of participation that fails to bring people together and build the bonds nurtured by civic participation.

The participation catalogued in Education – Power – Change is of a very different ilk to ‘mere card-carrying’, shrinking the distance between decision makers and citizens by unleashing what Community Organiser Hannah Gretton goes

For over 60 years, the way we think about, plan and experience cities has been organised around the private car. The result has been the production, among many people, of what in his recent book Affluence and Freedom Pierre Charbonnier calls “a sense of self” with “psychosocial attachments to automobile autonomy”, which has come to be seen as synomymous with personal liberty.1

Today, there is mounting evidence and recognition of the costs of that liberty – for the safety of other road users, the vibrancy and cohesion of urban communities, and the future of our climate-changed planet. The mood appears to be shifting, and with it the policy agenda. The devolved governments in Scotland2 and Wales3 have committed to introducing a default 20mph speed limit in towns and cities. Many English councils are following suit. Local authorities across England are experimenting with congestion-charging, low-emission zones and low traffic neighbourhoods. In many cities, land once allocated to car use is being re-purposed as cycling infrastructure.

‘15-minute cities’ is the idea that day-to-day amenities should be available within a short radius of people's homes, meaning basic essentials can be accessed on foot or by bike without reliance on the car. It involves creating neighbourhoods where cars drive around rather than across cities, making them places of dwelling rather than ‘rat runs’ for through traffic. It means neighbourhoods in which cars are guests not colonisers. It is this idea that has turned Ghent in Belgium and Groningen in the Netherlands into cities whose neighbourhoods have been reclaimed from car dominance and where walking and cycling has replaced once hegemonic automobility. Mayor Anne Hidalgo is currently pioneering a cognate series of measures (such as replacing on-street parking with cycling insfrastructure, creating neighbourhood parks and new local services, and expanding active use of ground-level buildings) which aim to transform Paris into a ‘city of proximities’.4

The 15-minute city idea underpins Oxford's current – and controversial – plans to cut traffic congestion. In addition to implementing several Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, Oxfordshire City Council plans from 2024 to trial six traffic filters which aim to reduce traffic in Oxford by 20 per cent. According to Andrew Gant, the cabinet member for Highways Management: “our roads are gridlocked with traffic, and this traffic is damaging our economy and our environment. Oxford needs a more sustainable, reliable and inclusive transport system for everyone”. Traffic filters, he says, are designed “to deliver a safer, cleaner and more prosperous place to live, work and visit”.5

Let's not dwell here on the ‘global conspiracy’ animus that fuels these protests. Instead, I want to focus on the objection that 15-minute cities are an assault on personal freedom because they ‘trap’ or ‘silo’ residents in discrete neighbourhoods; restrict people's ability to d

The political-economic terrain of the UK has been beset by a series of overlapping crises in recent years – from the global financial crisis (GFC) of 2007/08 (and the longer-term crises of public services induced by the decade-plus of austerity that followed), to the global public health crisis of the pandemic and its socio-economic impact. Today, stagnant wages and rocketing inflation have led to talk of a major ‘cost of living crisis’, with energy bills and basic commodities becoming increasingly unaffordable to many.

This article explores some of the frames that have shaped recent political-economic crises and crisis-responses in the UK. We argue that successive waves of crisis and austerity in the UK have been framed as universal or equalising moments, even as their impacts have been unevenly distributed. Pervasive racialised inequalities that are normalised, unseen, or ignored in ‘normal’, non-crisis contexts are exacerbated by both crises and crisis-responses. Austerity Islamophobia - the racialised framing of Muslims in the context of political-economic crises – provides the focal case study for our argument.

The UK government's economic response to the arrival of the global Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 included an unprecedented national furlough programme: the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme. From March 2020 to September 2021, the scheme constituted a massive programme of public spending, with employers given up to 80 per cent of staff salaries and employment costs to retain staff while they were ‘locked down’ at home and unable to work. That one of the most radical Conservative governments in recent history, led by the supposedly self-help Churchillian icon Boris Johnson, could find itself effectively nationalising all industry – albeit temporarily – might have offered a glimmer of hope for political and economic progressives for a radical reappraisal of the economic status quo.

Yet from the outset of the pandemic, the spectre of austerity lingered in the air. The invocation of discursive frames from the 2010–2020 austerity era was an early warning sign. In 2020, claims that ‘we're all in this together’ and that we should ‘keep calm and carry on’ – frames central to the cultural politics of austerity after the GFC – were revived with gusto, from corporate advertising to political speeches.2 But the trouble with these framings in terms of who a crisis affects, and how we should respond to it, is that we have never all been ‘in it together’. The systemic classist, racist, sexist, and ableist inequalities that pervade UK society in ‘pre-crisis’ times position some people to be more adversely impacted than others when a crisis arrives.

However, as Lucinda Platt has shown, racial disparities in Covid-19 deaths were not about the supposed (mis)behaviours of racially minoritised groups.11 They were about the complex interaction of social, political, and economic inequalities faced by Black and Asian groups. These inequa

The ecological crisis is subject to a series of political discourses which each imperfectly capture the complex myriad of social, economic, and technological dynamics that are degrading planetary ecosystems. These discourses shape the public understanding of the environmental crisis and the appropriate strategies for its resolution, with each discourse purveyed by distinctive but evolving political factions and social forces.3^,4

The far right discourse on the ecological crisis has historically been to deny its existence.5^,6 This denial has taken many forms, but most commonly the science of ecological degradation has been disavowed and this has been matched by the refusal to accept any national responsibility for addressing the unfolding global ecological catastrophe. Customarily, the scientific evidence has been pronounced as a conspiracy designed to benefit ‘globalist elites’ or a plot to undermine national sovereignty through the ratification of multilateral agreements. This has served to bolster resistance to effective environmental policies.

However, this environmental discourse is no longer as central to the far right movement as it was in the 2000s and 2010s. Increasingly, climate science is tacitly accepted, but the finger of blame is being disingenuously pointed towards the far right's traditional enemies.

As environmental issues have risen up the political agenda (becoming salient to younger voters in particular), far right parties have seemingly shifted away from denialism of the science. This shift has not led to a recognition of the need for a just economic transformation or, indeed, any political action commensurate to the scale and character of the environmental crisis. Instead, the increasing (albeit belated) recognition of environmental issues (primarily those which exist within national borders) has been fused with an anti-immigration agenda to create a new invidious framing of environmental politics. The emerging discourse, which we have conceptualised as ‘ecobordering’ elsewhere,7 is characterised by climate nationalism and seeks to depict immigration (of which migration from the Global South is made hyper-visible) as a threat to local and national environments.

This discourse takes two primary forms. First, it aims to politicise the environmental impacts of ‘mass immigration’ from the Global South, while depoliticising the impacts of ‘natives’. This includes linking ‘mass immigration’ with rising demand for natural resources and local environmental problems such as the pollution resulting from greater traffic and consumption. Immigration, it is suggested, is to blame for such problems, which were not issues of concern for local areas prior to multiculturalism.

The lack of belonging is key to understanding this portrayal; as Le Pen explicitly put it: “environmentalism [is] the natural child of patriotism, because it's the natural child of rootedness… if you're a nomad, you'

Any Labour government coming to power in the next few years will face a severe test. We do not know where the economy will be. What we do know is the economy has deep-seated long-term problems. These will need to be addressed while social aspirations will be harder to achieve. Neglect of our ecology will be taking an increasing toll. Moreover, the state of public services will be appalling.

Previous Labour governments have come to power in difficult circumstances. Are there lessons to be learned? The Attlee government inherited a country exhausted by war and very deeply in debt. The Wilson government inherited a bursting bubble with incipient inflation and a chronic balance of payments crisis. Only the Blair government inherited a relatively tranquil economic situation and was more easily able to tackle underspending on public services. Not coincidentally, the Blair government was the most electorally successful. Clement Attlee survived a single term and one year before losing office. Harold Wilson won two elections and survived six years before losing. He returned for another four years of effectively minority government in the turbulent 1970s. Tony Blair won three elections and he and Gordon Brown between them had 13 years in office.

Yet there is no correlation between time in office and the scale of the legacy that each government was able to leave. The Attlee government implemented the Beveridge plan for the welfare state,3 founded the National Health Service and nationalised the main utilities, while maintaining defence expenditures at over double current levels in relation to Gross Domestic Product (GDP).4 The Wilson government's effort to cure the UK's economic problems with indicative planning à la française was a failure but the government reformed laws on divorce and abortion, legalised homosexuality and abolished capital punishment. Attempts to reform trade union law also foundered but the government founded ACAS to mediate industrial disputes and passed laws against racial discrimination and legislation to promote health and safety at work. It also founded The Open University – Wilson's favourite accomplishment.

What explains this relative failure to leave a mark? It is partly to do with the zeitgeist, which is not under party-political control. The Attlee government rode a wave of belief in the power of government to improve people's lives. After all, complete mobilisation and planning had won a world war. Socialism was fashionable and the military and industrial successes of the Soviet Union, though not its political repression, were admired. Though the electorate tired of post-war hardships, the Conservatives bowed to the temper of the times and maintained Labour's innovations, reversing only the nationalisation of the steel industry.

Blair, by contrast, came to power when the neoliberal ideological wave was at the flood. Academic macroeconomics, often swept by fashion, had taken a reactionary turn