In this month’s Global Social Challenges focus, we spotlight our author Peter Beresford, who shares insights from their latest research addressing some of the most critical issues explored in our Poverty, Inequality and Social Justice theme. Our Global Social Challenges themes align with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, to help social scientists drive real-world impact.
The reality of low pay and welfare support
As I write this, I am sitting in the café of our local bookshop while a cleaner is sweeping around the tables. She tells us: “I’ve got two cleaning jobs, one pays £12.00 an hour, the other minimum wage. I do get a little help from Universal Credit, which makes a bit of a difference.”
A customer chips in: “Yes, but what I hate is the way they go on about people on welfare benefits when so many are working.”
“Yes,” says the cleaner, “and we need benefits because the wages are so low.”
She is right, and what she might also have said is that this puts her dead centre of one of the most condemned and reviled groups in our society – people living on benefits. And she is not alone.
Who do we blame? The stigma of welfare
Alongside refugees and asylum seekers, disabled people, mental health service users, trans people, Muslims and teenage lone mothers, those on welfare support and many more are routinely demonised by mainstream media and politicians. These groups become easy scapegoats, while those really responsible for social and economic problems remain in power.
The question is why and how did we get here?
In my 2016 book, All Our Welfare, I asked: “Why and when did taking care of each other as human beings become contentious?” Or as Black leader Malcolm X famously put it, “If you aren’t careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”
A system designed to divide
These are the new politics of division – where powerless people are encouraged to despise others even more powerless than themselves. They are told to believe the word of those who profit from their disempowerment, while billionaires and corporations remain untouched.
We see the consequences all around us: rising hate crime, social unrest and riots. This populist ideology is the enemy of equality, diversity and inclusion, both locally and globally. The last few years have seen the UN Social Development Goals under attack and in retreat as prevailing neoliberal politics have become associated internationally with a rise in poverty, disease, conflict, inequality and environmental damage.
Neoliberalism: Five decades of inequality
Political leaders, both close to home and far away, still spout the rhetoric of economic growth, anti-immigration and militarism, when in fact it actually means death, loss and destruction at personal and planetary levels. They don’t provide evidence for their arguments, but their policies persist. Why? Because they work – not for the majority, but for the wealthiest few.
Perhaps, though, the big question is how can policies and politics which are repeatedly shown only to benefit a tiny minority and make the gap between rich and poor ever larger, actually work? The truth is that they have done so now for a long time. We have heard these slogans before. Donald Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ is no more than a rerun of Ronald Reagan’s 1980s rhetoric. Are we really all turkeys voting for Christmas?
Sadly, this question seems to be much easier to ask than to answer. It’s a question, though, that I seek to address in my forthcoming book, The Antidote. There has now been more than half a century of neoliberalism – from Pinochet’s Chile to Thatcher’s Britain. It can be summed up as the freeing of the market and the marginalisation of state intervention to support people’s human, civil and social rights. This is hardly a blip, although some political and social policy commentators do still seem to act as though it were, offering the same old prescriptions for intervention which repeatedly fail at the ballot box. They seem unaware that the people in the US who will most suffer from Trump’s reforms are those who will most likely vote for them.
The welfare state: A shadow of its former self
Voters in the UK will probably have to be in their eighties to remember the progressive post-war welfare state. Now it is a much more reactionary and controlling institution, as we saw at the beginning of this discussion – more to do with rationing than supporting. It’s now associated with regressive taxation, social control, stigma, marginalisation and, sadly, social policies like social care, education, planning, and housing which tend to challenge UN conventions for the rights of children, disabled people and poor people, rather than advance and support their agenda and implementation.
With the exception of the NHS – which is itself now being hollowed out by privatisation – public services and state intervention don’t seem to serve as effective rallying calls for the electorate. They have been systematically undermined, making it easier to justify further cuts and restrictions.
A new path forward
Clearly what’s needed is another approach with, at its heart, a regard for inclusion and diversity, and participation by groups that have been more and more marginalised by dominant neoliberal politics.
Such potential engagement offers personal and political hope for the future, to replace the old top-down prescriptions and so-called expert solutions, which play into the hands of the populist right, rather than giving us the means of effectively challenging the status quo.
Here lies hope for humans in all our diversity, for world peace and for the planet – the only home we have.
Peter Beresford OBE is Visiting Professor at the University of East Anglia, Co-Chair of Shaping Our Lives, the national disabled people’s organisation and has long term lived experience of welfare benefits and mental health services. He is also an Emeritus Professor at Brunel University London the University of Essex and an Honorary Professor at Edge Hill University.
Part of our Poverty, Inequality and Social Justice and Equity, Diversity and Inclusion focused Global Social Challenges publishing programme, The Antidote by Peter Beresford responds to No Poverty, Reduced Inequalities, Zero Hunger and Gender Equality SDGs.
Explore more Global Social Challenges themes on Transforming Society, browse our Global Social Challenges e-resources and read the latest articles in our open-access Global Social Challenges Journal.
The Antidote by Peter Beresford is available on the Bristol University Press website. Pre-order here for £19.99.
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