Frames of war and welfare

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 inequalities map onto two key markers: occupation and housing. Platt notes that Black African populations, for example, were more likely to be working in social care, where the impact of the first wave of pandemic was most viciously felt. Racially minoritised people are also more likely than the white British population to live in ‘densely occupied or overcrowded areas’. Platt concludes by suggesting that the pandemic not only generated disparities in health outcomes but also economic ones. The House of Commons Women and Equalities Committee has noted that racially minoritised people were more likely to be on zero-hours contracts than their white counterparts. As their report found:

“The coronavirus pandemic has sharpened the focus on the systemic issues with the zero-hours contracts policy, including the disproportionate number of BAME people on zero-hours contracts. The pandemic has highlighted the unequal way that zero-hours contracts operate: employers can deny furlough to employees and instead reduce their working hours to zero. In some cases, workers on zero-hours contracts are ineligible for statutory sick pay.”12

Such systemic inequalities and their exacerbation through socio-economic crises clearly affect racially minoritised communities in general, but we are particularly interested here in how they intersect with Islamophobia as a specific form of racialised framing and socio-economic violence.

Through this framing, Muslims suffer welfare disentitlement (the ‘disallowing’ of claims to socioeconomic justice)21 often being framed as ‘benefits cheats’ exploiting the national welfare system, rather than as deserving citizens.22 The framing of class as a discrete or pristine social category, exempt from racialisation, is the necessary condition for constructing the ‘white working class’ discourse, and also for ignoring or erasing racialised disparities in experiences of crises.

Such racialised disparities in the effects of crises impact upon many racially minoritised groups, but again Muslim communities may be hit especially hard. The Runnymede report notes that British Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities (around 90 per cent of whom identify as Muslim, and who together account for of 3.8 per cent of the UK population, or more than 2.2 million people)26 are likely to be even more sharply impacted than the wider ‘BAME’ category. This includes Pakistani and Bangladeshi households being a staggering 66 per cent more likely than white households to be in fuel poverty in the winter of 2022–23. While other scholars have already demonstrated the pertinence of our concept of austerity Islamophobia to understanding the pandemic crisis and its responses,27 we can now anticipate its relevance to the ongoing cost of living crisis too. The positioning of Muslim lives to be disproportionately impacted, alongside crisis-response framings that position them as essentially ‘ungrievable’, deny them the status of ‘working class’, and disallow their claims to socioeconomic justice, all threaten to shape this crisis as they have previous ones.

The succession of major crises in the UK in recent years – the GFC and austerity, the pandemic, and now the cost of living crisis – have had deeply unequal impacts. Racially minoritised people are often positioned to be particularly vulnerable to such impacts. Their over-representation among the working class, and below the poverty line, in deprived urban neighbourhoods, as well as in precarious and ‘frontline’ forms of employment, have all been identified as reasons for this positioning. Muslims have faced particular challenges, and their framing as a more generalised ‘problem’ (as well as their frequent outcasting from frames of the ‘working class’), is at play in their positioning with regard to both crises and crisis-responses. As the cost of living crisis and any new wave of austerity develop, there is a real and immediate risk that racially minoritised groups in general, and Muslims in particular, will face significantly worse outcomes – both in socioeconomic terms and in terms of how they and their experiences are discursively framed (or erased).