Public debate often obscures challenges to inequalities through broader claims of being ‘woke’ – a populist right rephrasing, which has been used to disparage efforts to recognise diversity within society dismissing claims to address inequality as reflecting niche, privileged liberal elite views that don’t resonate with common sense. Yet real diversity among citizens persists and needs to be recognised in how we develop and implement welfare policies.
Efforts to address inequality often rely upon a notion of citizenship. Citizenship assumes some level of commonality which can promote a sense of nation and community based on sameness of those who live within its geographical boundaries. At the same time, it defines those posing a perceived threat to the stability of an idealised citizenship. The lingua franca of an enemy within, welfare scroungers, small boats and the ‘wokerati’ all play on fears of folk devils that will undermine social norms.
Citizenship is therefore fundamentally flawed in how it informs policy interventions because it fails to recognise the diversity of those we label as citizens. There is, in effect, a fundamental disconnect between the legal status of citizens and the populist assumptions of citizenship. There is a need for a revised understanding and public discourse that encapsulates the diversity of people who live within a nation and have a right to welfare protections as well as civil and political rights.
Citizenship attempts to present a sense of a unified group of people who share common characteristics, which is often shaped by historic assumptions about people’s lives. Typically, this is heterosexual relationships, gendered roles, able-bodied and White people. In reading this you will already sense the problem with this presentation of citizenship as one that is static, idealised and not reflective of contemporary lives.
Implicit in policy making, this antiquated notion of citizenship remains deeply rooted in the design and delivery of much welfare support. Thus, welfare is a reward and a badge of inclusion; arguably this is also breaking down following periods of austerity, welfare reforms and retrenchment of public services. However, for those not matching citizenship norms, the marginalisation from welfare and the retrenchment has been even more precipitous.
It is, however, important to recognise that those deemed outsiders are not passive victims. They have agency and power to organise. We can easily identify recent campaign activity, such as Black Lives Matter, which demonstrates the ongoing racial inequalities that are deeply embedded in the institutions of society and how these fundamentally shape people’s lives. Yet the COVID-19 pandemic is one recent example of how persistent inequalities are when citizen diversity is not acknowledged. Black and ethnic minority individuals and families experienced worse COVID-19 outcomes compared to White people; LGBT+ people had to hide their identity while locked down in the family home; special provisions had to be made for domestic violence victims (predominately women) to escape abusive households during lockdown. And yet, at the same time, the response to COVID-19 echoed wartime language of all being in it together and the falsehood of the illness being a great leveller.
Reflecting the contemporary accusation of ‘being woke’ is simply identifying someone who is aware of inequalities that exist across gender, sexuality, ‘race’, disability, lifestyle or heritage and the intersectional way in which different social characteristics interact. Positive representation of diversity is often celebrated in the media through the victories of Tyson Fury, the ‘Gypsy King’ from a Traveller heritage, the gender fluidity found on BBC’s Drag Race, or the self-made working-class hero of Lord Sugar on The Apprentice – a media-styled presentation of tolerance and acceptance which doesn’t reflect the lived experience of many.
This presentation of equality and tolerance implicitly infer acceptance and even the legal protection of diversity. Yet, for many who do not fit into the traditional view of a citizen (White, heterosexual, able-bodied, male), intolerance and discrimination is often experienced. Increasing levels of reported hate crime demonstrate how events such as the EU referendum, 2017 terrorist attacks and 2020 Black Lives Matter protests have created spikes in hate crime towards certain groups in society. Subsequently, the fundamental concept of citizenship which informs policy development remains largely silent, one could argue ignorant of this diversity.
Our book, Diversity and Welfare Provision: Tensions and Discrimination in 21st Century Britain, is an exploration of how marginalised groups that do not explicitly fit within mainstream citizenship experience welfare. For many of these groups, rather than improving wellbeing, experiences of welfare have exacerbated their marginalisation and increased inequalities. The book covers various groups of people, though it should be remembered that some people experience the intersectionality of being multiply marginalised. We can see, for example, the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities experience worse outcomes in education, health, housing and criminal justice. Similarly, post-war expectations of welfare recipients have reproduced racial inequalities in a manner that could be seen as institutional racism. Young trans people accessing homelessness services have experienced a worsening of rather than improvement to their wellbeing. Without question, welfare provision has changed quantitatively and qualitatively in the years since Beveridge’s vision, but what remains is a distinction between those implicitly deemed to have citizenship and those who are excluded.
Recognising the experiences of those facing tension and diversity in welfare allows us to challenge the assumption that welfare automatically improves lives and reveal the role it plays in exacerbating fracture lines within society. Welfare retrenchment, residualisation, cuts and conditionality reinforce these fracture lines, widening economic, social and cultural injustices. For those with a strong sense of citizenship, this is less concerning. For many who work, have no health issues and are indigenous, it might even be the case that changes in welfare are not even noticed, except maybe on a moral level. Yet for those who have specific welfare needs, who face social and economic challenges, these fracture lines force them to drift further away from ‘mainstream’ society.
In the shadow of austerity, as competition for increasingly scarce resources intensifies, welfare is proving to be a battleground where those with power seek to raise the drawbridge and exclude those with less claim to citizenship. Recognising and embracing diversity in citizenship is essential for ensuring that welfare support is available to all.
Lee Gregory is Associate Professor at the University of Nottingham.
Diversity and Welfare Provision Edited by Lee Gregory and Steve Iafratiis available here for £85.99 on the Bristol University Press website.
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