Abstract
In November 2015, protests erupted in Oxford in response to the decision of the Oxfordshire County Council to cut, among other things, forty-four Children’s Centres and seven Early Intervention Hubs. The debate about whether these centres could be considered as disposable or not did not get to an agreement. I argue that the main cause of this outcome is that the opposing arguments were based on moral positions that were not only incompatible but fundamentally incommensurable. Those in favour of reducing deficit spending argue that cuts to social services (including family and children services) are unavoidable. Parents, however, refuse to accept austerity measures that will undermine the rights of their children to access services that will improve their chances in life. Neither position is based on incontrovertible evidence. On the one hand, the decision to cut a given service always involves the arbitrary evaluation of that service against other services that will not be cut. On the other, the demand to fund those services is based on the hope that early intervention initiatives will benefit children, even if the evidence that early intervention works is unconclusive or thin. On the basis of a thematic analysis of twenty-seven stories written by Oxfordshire parents, I interpret this conflict using the notion of moral economy, and argue that such an approach allows an appreciation of the link between health economics, perinatal mental health, the morality of parenting, and the early intervention discourse.
Highlights
In 2015, the Children’s Centres and Early Intervention Hubs in Oxfordshire faced the prospects of closure after the local County Council announced cuts to services in the attempt to save £6m
Their connection between austerity measures, morality, and mental health suggests a relationship between the macro-level determinants of health economics, the values held by a community, and the individual experiences of psychological stress
In order to make these connections explicit, I look at how these families reacted to the announcement of the Oxfordshire County Council as part of the austerity measures to the UK national budget, and frame these experiences within the public and political discourse about early intervention in England
Summary
In 2015, the Children’s Centres and Early Intervention Hubs in Oxfordshire faced the prospects of closure after the local County Council announced cuts to services in the attempt to save £6m. The impact of the cuts to the Children’s Centres and the Early Intervention Hubs on the perinatal mental health of Oxfordshire parents must be understood in relation to the shift in the political discourse about the moral responsibility of parents that dominated the British public sphere before, during, and after the advent of the economic crisis. It is as if no words were allowed to comment on the incompatibility between the morality of parenting and the morality of austerity These contradictions at different levels of British public and political life are relevant to understand the reactions of Oxfordshire parents to the cuts. These contradictions focused on the relationship between the state and the household, which is perhaps the central metaphor of Cameron’s rhetoric. Such contradictions reinforce the impression that a change has taken place in the political and public discourse about early interventions and austerity, one that has shaped how parents responded to the cuts
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