National Issues and Discourses References Revision

MacLeavy, 2011

• The UK coalition’s austerity drive attempted to garner support for the reduction or withdrawal of welfare with appeals to frugality and self-sufficiency; however, the reorientation of state assistance towards work and simplified benefits presents a particular challenge to the financial security and autonomy of women

• Newly conditional welfare entitlements and the use of a single welfare payment per household poses social risks to younger people, families with small children or elderly dependents and working women seeing working or not working become a choice made on the basis of household requirements and resources as UC privileges a traditional single earner model

• The government had a twin focus on encouraging paid employment and achieving cost reduction in social security through integrated benefits and taz credits with discourses of self-sufficiency used to encourage public support for welfare reform

• After the 2008 GFC austerity was used as a motif for the array of cuts necessary to pay back debts, it was part of the ‘Big Society’ politics of the coalition calling on civil society to fill the void created by the retreating state

• Younger people, women and those with low skills face challenges which inhibit their political mobilisation; priority is given to a breadwinner, male employment in welfare-to-work schemes and tax credits due to only one earnings disregard allowed per household

• Austerity reforms failed to recognise women’s unequal starting points in the labour market and their concentration in low-paid industries and care with little attempt to overcome barriers to their entry to the labour market

• Due to women’s unequal labour in the home, they suffer from a loss of economic autonomy, a lower ability to negotiate and a lower pension at retirement

• There were disciplinary characteristics of welfare reforms such as refusing to accept a reasonable job offer for the third time leading to a 3 year ban on claiming out-of-work benefits; this harsh system was justified as Cameron stated it would encourage people to find work, become self-sufficient and reduce poverty levels

Jensen & Tyler, 2015

• In the aftermath of the GFC, a political economy of state austerity emerged and was legitimised through hardening anti-welfare commonsense to form a cultural political economy that produced anti-welfare sentiment as a technology of control but also consent to reforms

• Cameron viewed the benefits system as creating a benefits culture that encourages people to act irresponsibly; therefore, benefit reform created a welfare state that was a moral and disciplinary project conditional upon certain kinds of ideal citizen behaviours grounded in distinctions of ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’

• There was a growth of stigma around those who claimed benefits in a period of austerity as welfare dependency was viewed as toxic through the anti-welfare commonsense formed in public discourses such as ‘Benefit Broods’ and the publication of the Philpott Case framing the manslaughter of 6 children as motivated by economic greed to restore benefits and a larger council house; this was seen as a compelling reason to cut benefit provisioning and justified the Household Benefit Cap as part of the Welfare Reform Act 2012

• A cultural economy of disgust was fostered towards those claiming and abusing the welfare system, the production and reproduction of these benefit broods were a critical mechanism through which antiwelfare commonsense is crafted

• The coalition encouraged citizens to re-learn the lessons of resilience, independence, motivation and personal responsibility to create fairness for hardworking families as part of a new categorisation of work vs worklessness in a behaviouralist policy agenda concerned with disciplining families

Edmiston, 2024

• Deductions in welfare are central to low-income life in the UK as social security appears to perform worse for those who need it most, this often worsens the poverty-debt trap and pushes people further away from the labour market

• Debt is central to low-income life as deferring and distributing costs helps to smooth consumption and enable progression; however, when debts are taken on to service immediate needs this can trap people and make it hard to escape poverty especially against the impact of economic shocks

• The welfare state began to take on the role of a debt collector with benefits reductions used as a form of debt recovery by withholding social security entitlements to repay debts, yet these were a key determinant of claimant living standards with 45% of UC claimants negatively impacted by this

• As a result of debt repayment strategies, low-income households were left without sufficient income to live on, with many no longer being able to afford heating or healthy food; some households are forced to rely on third-parties for loans they will struggle to pay back with the impact of entranching conditions of poverty and allowing people to struggle in the poverty-trap

Cain, 2016

• UC was designed to streamline the UK benefits and tax credits system to encourage work; however, the introduction of new conditionalities ignored lone mothers barriers to employment and forced them to spend minimal time with their children under the threat of sanctions of workfare to form a clash between market ideas of labour flexibility and conservative valorisations of a good mother

• The best route out of poverty under UC was for those who can work to work, this forms a conditionality regime that recasts the relationship between the citizen and the state by providing support in return for claimant’s meeting a set of responsibilities with sanctions to encourage compliance

• This had a disproportionate impact on women as their dual capacities of carers and workers was ignored and social reproductive labour devalued; there was an economic and cultural devaluation of domestic labour and a shift in attitudes towards low paid and single parents to make correct and responsible choices in the work force or face sanctions

• The replacement of multiple benefits with a singular, universal and conditional regime created a stigma surrounding worklessness and heightened anxiety among low-paid and part-time workers, this highlights the disciplinary effect of the welfare state as people became anxious to better themselves and change their behaviours in line with the strict expectations of the state

Hamnett, 2014

• Austerity is associated with a shift in the nature of welfare policy to ‘workfare’ where benefits are means tested, time limited or financially capped and contingent on recipients seeking work; this is geographical in terms of welfare spending and has impacts on employment, housing, education, urban policy and further areas

• The proposed changes had major impacts on household and individual living standards, particularly for low-income households reliant on benefits payments, this will be concentrated in the poorest and most deprived areas where economic activity is low and unemployment and benefit dependence is high

• The distribution of welfare benefits, specifically Allowance and Disability benefits, is geographically uneven with patterns reflecting the North-South divide and the legacy of deindustrialisation in the North East, North West, Wales and Northern Ireland; it is in these areas that cuts to welfare reforms will have the greatest impacts with the highest number of losers in deprived areas and reinforcing the socially regressive North-South divide

• In these areas, there is a challenge to people navigating the unequal distribution of jobs and unemployment with the difficulty of finding work in industrial areas where jobs are limited, here the reforms are introduced at the wrong stage of the economic cycle but this is justified by juxtaposing the hard worker to the lazy benefits claimant to elicit support for proposals

• In London there are high levels of claimant of Housing Benefits due to the high costs of housing, by capping this central and inner London is likely to become increasingly unaffordable leading to groups being pushed out to cheaper accommodation or leave London altogether, this has implications for the ‘right to the city’ as the biggest impacts occur for low-income households in high-coast housing areas

Adam et al., 2015

• The coalition's tax and benefits reforms aimed to reduce the UK’s large budget deficiency, this has had the greatest impact on low-income working-age households and the very richest, whilst working-age households without children and upper-middle classes have gained 

• Work incentives were shown to have increased only by a very small percentage, but participation tax rate reduced by 3% with the majority of workers seeing the incentive to increase their earnings weaken as a result of reforms

• The cuts have not strengthened work incentives as much as expected given their scale perhaps due to reduced in-work support; this may show that the disproportionate effect of tax and benefit schemes have undermined the project of the welfare state

Larsen, 2008

• Welfare regime characteristics have a profound impact on the public deservingness discussion and therefore on public support for welfare, this is based on the degree of universalism, the difference in economic resources between the ‘bottom’ and the ‘majority’ and the degree of job opportunities

• Cross-national differences in attitudes to welfare policy can at least partly be explained by differences in the institutional structure of welfare regimes as a result of feedback mechanisms through the electorate

Lobao et al., 2018

• State retreat is seen in the withdrawal of finance, services and staff and is visible in underfunded social programmes, the smaller public sector, weakened regulatory structures and continued privatisation

• The ‘shrinking state’ produces and is a product of a restructured social contract between the government, citizens and the private sector leaving the public void of public services and a growth in inequality that perhaps correlates to the growth in right-wing populism

• The public sector is under siege across the globe as the state shrinks the social safety net, class power shifts and neo-liberalism is solidified

May et al., 2019

• The changing welfare state sees welfare shift to being delivered through public, private and third sector provides with ideological values embedded in vouchers and referral systems used by food banks stigmatising and excluding people in need of support; food banks are sites of both the further cementing and or challenges to the injustices of Britain’s new welfare apparatus

• UK food banks provide food directly to clients but they must be referred by a local ‘welfare professional’ who assesses their need and provides a voucher that can be exchanged for food; this is problematised by the view that food assistance should be depoliticised and the need for food should be able to be met without confronting systematic injustices

• As food provisioning is caught up in the voluntary sector, policymakers look the other way from the damages of retreating welfare systems 

• There is a stigma and shame surrounding turning to food banks as people may feel insecure in relying on over-stretched, insecure welfare providers; the impact of austerity and welfare policy on food banks reproduced embedded discourses of scarcity but also care 

• The voucher and referral systems implemented by food banks acts to cement the distinction between deserving and undeserving to magnify the stigma melt by those in need of food aid

Cameron, 2011

• ‘The benefit system has created a benefit culture. It doesn’t just allow people to act irresponsibly, but often actively encourages them to do so’

• This quote by Cameron clearly sets out the anti-welfare and anti-benefits stance taken by the UK’s coalition government after their election in May 2010 it is from here that the image of the irresponsible, lazy benefits claimant was created and reasserted to alter public opinion on the welfare system and who was deserving of receiving aid

Harvey, 2005

• In the 1970s, the Keynesian welfare state was transformed for the first time by Thatcher who identified welfare as the root cause of poverty and social problems by forming a toxic welfare dependency culture

• Her modification of the welfare state was grounded in neoliberal ideology that prioritised individual freedoms and responsibilities; in the market this was enacted through widespread privatisation, free markets, free trade and the shrinking of the welfare state

• Neoliberalism bought the first steps towards welfare reform, but it was the GFC of 2008 that paved the way for the coalition’s radical changes as austerity policies swept across Europe and the coalition ushered in ‘Big Society’ politics

Tepe-Belfrage & Wallin, 2016

• There are meanings of austerity that cannot be deduced from national statistics and mainstream economic accounts as there is a cost for British households in the everyday and social reproductive experiences

• Austerity is a moral and disciplinary form of governance that ultimately imposes suffering and inequality on the poor and has prompted an unprecedented decline in British living standards, prompting a reliance on emergency food and support in the precarious everyday

• The household is a useful lens for analysing austerity as social and economic policy is legitimised through gendered and heteronormative narratives with constructions of inequality within households acting as a key device for the reproduction of inequality overtime

• A gender bias is entrenched by austerity especially in terms of failing to recognise the value of investing in care and social infrastructure seeing women, especially single mothers and older women, particularly impacted by losses in income, employment and access to services as a result of social policy reform

Murphy, 2017

• Austerity has had devastating effects on deprived areas with specific risks for women as part of the intersection between gender, the economy and place; this comes about as stagnating wages and the rising cost of living leads to food poverty that impacts low-income lone parents alongside the gradual erosion of affordable housing, fairly compensated work, labour bargaining power, free education and public services as a result of neoliberal principles

• Women are forced to juggle caring roles, reproductive labour and formal waged work as social security emphasizes an active welfare recipient therefore encouraging women to engage in waged labour while commodifying care to result in difficult compromises being made

• The societal position, greater reliance on public services, part-time work and a more sustained interaction with the benefits system places women in a precarious position when these services are withdraw

• Mothers in East London ran the E15 campaign to draw attention to the intersections of place-based, spatial and gendered inequality as a shelter was shut down in Newham in 2013 due to budget cuts, they were offered housing in Manchester or Birmingham but this would separate them from family and social networks 

• It must be appreciated that the economy exists beyond measures of GDP as the unaged domestic duties performed by women supplement the waged economy and must be considered in a more integrated political economy

Rose et al., 2006

• Governmentality was introduced by Foucault in the 1970s as a technique for directing human behaviour in terms of children, souls, households, the state and oneself; the state was able to intervene and manage the habits and activities of subjects to achieve certain strategic ends

• Governmentality are the conditions of formation, principles of knowledge that are generated, practices and how they are carried out in alliance with other arts of governing

Vogler & Pahl, 1994

• In couple households there are significant associations between control over household finances and general power within the household 

• Even when couples pool their money, in practice either the husband or wife is likely to control the pool; gender inequality has been found to be lowest in households with joint control of pooled money and greatest in either low income or high income households with male control over finances 

• There is a surge of interest in the intra-household economy to shift perspectives away from income entering the household and challenge the assumption of the household as an unproblematic economic unit; there is instead an attempt to consider the financial arrangements of married couples

• Shifts to greater equality within household financial arrangements have been found to depend not only on women’s full time participation in the labour market but also on effective challenges to the husband's traditional status as the breadwinner in the family

• Previous work assumed households to be similar to each other, operating as redistributive units where resources are shared equitably with no significant inequalities between spouses; however, these assumptions are now questioned to show significant inequalities in access to and control of finances as well as decision making power 

• The single payment of Universal Credit and male control over finances sees women suffer and lose their financial autonomy as a result of unequal sharing of wealth

Federici, 2019

• The idea of social reproduction originated from Marxist theory in the context or bourgeois economics to indicate the process through which the social system reproduces itself

• It was regarded as revolutionary to realise that unpaid labour was not only extracted by the capitalist class from waged workers, but also from millions of unwaged house-workers and un-free labourers; this exposed the capitalist function of creating labour hierarchies

• This radical social reproduction theory unmasked the socio-economic function of the creation of a fictional private sphere to re-politicise family life, sexuality and procreation

• This places the spotlight on the work that produces the workforce and makes it possible to understand the mechanisms through which capitalist society has been reproduced

• There is a feminist struggle to ‘place life at the centre’ and to valorise the process of reproduction

Katz, 2001

• Social practices allow people to reproduce themselves on a daily basis as well as renew the social relations and bases of capitalism; by focusing on social reproduction we can better address questions on the making, maintenance and exploitation of differentiated labour forces

• Globalised capitalism as well as the shifting social contract under neoliberalism has changed the face of social reproduction worldwide, often public disinvestment in services and welfare means there is a shift to the private as a means of sustaining social reproduction which falls to women and has intersections with class, race and nationality

• ‘Social reproduction is the fleshy, messy, and indeterminate stuff of everyday life’ p711

• Social reproduction is a set of structured practices that encompass daily and long term reproduction, at its most basic hinging on the biological reproduction of the labour force but also extending to the formation of expertise

• The historical and geographical gendered division of labour within the household commonly presume it is women's responsibility for most of the work of reproduction within the home, even when tasks can be purchased through the market this gendered division is not altered

• The state is also involved in social reproduction mainly through investment in the welfare state and trends of privatisation

• Broadly, social reproduction is associated with the political-economy, culture and environmental context in which it takes place

Collins & Bilge, 2016

• Intersectionality is a way of understanding and analysing the complexity of the world by recognising the events and conditions of social and political life that are rarely shaped by one factor, but instead by many diverse and mutually influencing factors

• When it comes to social inequality, people’s lives and the organisation of power in society are better understood as shaped by many axes that work together and influence each other e.g. race, gender or class, than a single axis or division

• Therefore, intersectionality can be used as an analytical tool to give people better access to the complexity of the world and of themselves; however, is currently applied and understood in many different ways in different venues 

• People use intersectionality as an analytical tool to solve problems they or others face as well as being used by ordinary people to recognise the need for frameworks to grapple with complex discriminations e.g. African-American female activists in the 1960s and 70s facing discrimination in their identities as women and black and workers

• The task of intersectionality is to apply an analytical tool to examine a range of topics in relation to core themes of social inequality, relationality, power, social context, complexity and social justice

Mezzadri, 2019

• Radical feminists have always placed an emphasis on the crucial role of social production for the development of capitalism; early work primarily focused on wagelessness and housework, but current social reproduction theory focuses on how labour is regenerated daily and intergenerationally through private and public institutions

• Social reproduction theory is concerned with analysing the circuits of care that reproduce the worker in a way that is connected, but distinct, from capital production; there is a need to conceptualise patriarchy and capitalism together

• Reproductive activities and realms play a key role in shaping relations and contribute to processes of value generation by directly reinforcing patterns of labour control, absorbing the systematic externalisation of reproductive costs of capital and through processes of formal labour subsumption; the value of this wageless reproductive labour must be recognised to form a politics of inclusion

Evans, 2016

• The relationship of women to the conditions of austerity as recipients of charity and the question of which women are entitled to this assistance, discourses are often highly moralised assuming women are unlikely to ask for more and that they have to be good and respectable in order to deserve assistance 

• In the early C21st, the image of the poor woman was increasingly been that of a benefits scrounger demonised and seen as morally incompetent, now the welfare mother is seen as dangerous to the nation

• Women are forced to take on the ‘double shift’ of paid work and work within the home with the presence of children seen as an excuse for avoiding work; there is little attention paid to internal family dynamics, care decisions and availability for work

• The state believes that it is not its responsibility to assist in the care of children, and the new assessment of a single household income undermines women’s financial autonomy by assuming a coordination and consensus about money in relationships that is widely challenged as wealth is proven to be unequally shared

McDowell, 1969

• Young people growing up in the years of austerity face a future in which their prospects of social mobility are significantly worse than their parents, forming a ‘lost generation’ 

• Income is not necessarily shared equally within households, yet UC ignores this as well as variation in what constitutes a household and how resources are allocated within it; there is a failure to grapple with complex and fluid household structures

• Austerity leads to a rise of zero hour contracts, exclusion and higher competition for lower-level jobs seeing precarity rise at the same time as young people are labelled as hard-working strivers or unemployed shirkers to label poor and struggling families as undeserving

• Across generations there are a large proportion of women waged workers who work on a casual and insecure basis outside of traditional workplaces, they are also more likely to work in the public sector but this is where jobs will be lost; this is combined with the devaluation of caring responsibilities to disadvantage women and alter gender relations within and between generations

• The political optimism of the youth should be harnessed in resistance to continual inequalities between the young and the old, social classes and socio-economic groups

Wood, 2023

• A recent report by the Fawcett Society exposed that in the UK, over 250,000 mothers with young children have been forced to leave their jobs due to difficulties balancing work and childcare 

• This underpins the manner in which benefit reform has a disproportionate impact on women due to a new gender contract arising to centralise the devaluation of reproductive work and caring responsibilities often taken on by women

Lees, 2017

• The term gentrification was coined over 50 years ago by Ruth Glass referring to the invasion of the middle class into the previously disinvested inner city working class neighbourhoods in London where they renovated old properties and displaced working class communities; this has since mutated beyond this

• As this was coined in the Global North, there is a need to understand the ‘comparative urbanism’ of the Global South as gentrification in the South does not imitative the process in the North 

• Planetary gentrification refers to the process around the world today as we live in a ‘property movement’ where state led gentrification occurs in many rural and suburban spaces; land is continually appreciated to facilitate endless capital accumulation

• There are many new types such as slum gentrification, rental and creative; now the state leads gentrification agendas with the middle class taking on a new role

• There is much resistance against gentrification, there are few examples of success and these are all concentrated in the Global North; there is a need to diversify urban theory on gentrification

Harding & Blokland, 2014

• Gentrification comes with displacement of lower-status users of the space and directly affects inequalities by altering access to resources and creating political divisions

• Direct displacement occurs as people can no longer afford rent or repairs stop being done; indirect displacement is due to the pressure of displacement due to changes in commercial infrastructure, cultures and ways of behaving that are experienced as exclusionary 

• People forced to leave may be torn from rich social networks that they may not find again, this can hamper opportunities and in extremes form homelessness and overcrowding 

• There can be opportunities as some relocation programmes saw people more likely to have jobs and more likely to have children doing better in schools

Aalbers, 2019

• The first wave of gentrification was localised and sporadic, the second wave expanded to cover larger urban areas and became a commercial and cultural process as much as a class one; the third wave reshaped the process into a state-led, top-down, large scale phenomena that allowed developers to make money from urban land and local authorities to use financial powers to form profits and revitalise the inner city sponsored by the state and aiming to make neighbourhoods safe for corporate investment in a period of neoliberal urbanism

• The fourth wave combined intensified financialisation of housing with the consolidation of pro-gentrification urban policies and the fifth saw the urban materialism of financialised capitalism as the financial sector began to facilitate homeownership and finance took a stronger global hold

• This saw housing become treated as another asset class to be invested in by corporate landlords and international wealthy elites who attempt to maximise rents, benefit from gentrification potential and use property as safe deposit boxes for capital; this can price out residents, diminish community and reduce local economic opportunities

• Platform capitalism operating through Airbnb can increase house prices as well as touristify neighbourhoods to displace residents; through the local state may try and regulate this and international capital the state continues to assist in private investment in urban areas

• Gentrification acts as an urban form of capitalism with finance acting as a dominant force in the fifth-wave, this is increasingly concentrated in the hands of and controlled by financial institutions

Amore et al., 2022

• After the GFC Airbnb was able to reframe the housing market through an increase in temporary lettings in prime urban tourist areas with direct implications for local residents including displacement, tourism gentrification and tourismphobia; Airbnb can be seen to be forming a new form of urban displacement due to the renting of prime residential area to tourists 

• The temporary letting of Airbnb induces a shift from long-term to short-term renting in the economy, it can deplete the stock of affordable and available housing by driving up prices and creating unfair competition between locals and tourists for accommodation in desirable areas; this sees the rent gap applied to tourist gentrification

• There is further opposition in how Airbnb changes the character of towns as they become touristified through new processes of gentrification

• In Athens, Airbnb was seen as a solution to the financial crisis and austerity with socio-economic benefits; however, the resulting rise in rent prices particularly impacted the student population alongside mounting protests in the city surrounding the change of land use and noise levels from tourists

Smith, 1979

• Circulating capital outside of the city was contributing to a process of economic restructuring in central and inner cities

• The resultant rent gap was the disparity between potential ground level rent, and actual ground level rent capitalised under the present land use

Butler & Lees, 2006

• Super-gentrification is occurring in inner London neighbourhood Barnsbury as a group of super wealthy professionals working in the City slowly impose their mark on the housing market in a way different to traditional gentrifiers and the traditional upper urban classes through the interaction between the globalising financial services economy, elite education, and residence in Barnsbury 

• Gentrification has often been treated as un-socially and un-geographically differentiated, but it now becomes very diverse and requires an understanding of local contexts, places, localities and scales; the local and the global can no longer be separated as globalisation allows translational super-wealthy professionals to become ‘super-gentrifiers’ and invest in highly valued property driven by the super profits of the global financial world 

• The key divide for gentrification seems to shift from between the working rich and working poor to instead between the super-rich elite and everyone else to bring about pronounced social change and polarisation

• In Barnsbury, super-gentrification began in the mid-1990s due to deregulation in the City of London to expand employment opportunities especially in financial services, this beckoned in a new group of super-wealthy financial professionals leading to house prices soaring, the fabric of the community changing due to an aggressive emphasis on monetary values and infrastructure shifting to become exclusive through restaurants, bars, theatres, expensive shops etc. to support this luxury lifestyle

• New residents of Barnsbury are professionals who benefit from the globalised economy of financial services allowing them to gain huge salaries and bonuses to afford high quality housing at high prices, this increase priced out traditional middle and upper class professionals as well as the cost of maintaining a high consumption lifestyle to leave room only for the super-wealthy 

• These gentrifiers have access to both global capital but also social capital, as many share a university education at Oxbridge allowing for the formation of a super-rich, high consumption enclave in North London

Newman & Wyly, 2006

• Displacement has been at the centre of political debates over gentrification for years and is a crucial factor in deepening class polarisation; now there are increasingly sophisticated and creative methods used to resist displacement

• In New York there was a huge surge in gentrification in the mid 1990s leading to increased displacement pressures due to new residents, demographic changes, housing revitalisation and new constructions that drove up property prices; although service improvements were appreciated, this was often seen as a mixed blessing as it would ultimately lead to displacement 

• Rapid gentrification puts huge pressures on low income residents especially the working class poor, elderly and immigrants as they are displaced, may become homeless or rely on the city’s shelter system

• However, low-income residents are helped by public interventions such as rent stabilisation and regulation over nearly 80% of New York City housing units in 2002 as well as publicly subsidised housing, vouchers and rental assistance; however, there are limitations and landlords often continue to use illegal tactics to capture higher rents and vouchers and assistance are declining

• Private strategies often include moving to poor quality housing and house sharing often in overcrowded conditions to be able to pay rent; there may also be informal housing markets through relationships with landlords who charge what they know tenants can afford; yet this is risky as relationships may end if the landlord dies or the property is sold

• Homeownership can act as protection as well as the role of community organisations in campaigning against landlords illegal displacement of residents and producing thousands of units of affordable housing; again there remain challenges in the successes of these strategies and competition with the private sector

• These resistance techniques allow low-income families to stay in gentrifying areas but they have serious limitations and are precarious in this position