British Welfare Research Articles

A Most Neoliberal Encounter: When Covid-19 Met the British Welfare State

This article explores how the British welfare state was mobilized in the United Kingdom’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic in the context of neoliberal capitalism. This response was conditioned by neoliberal dynamics that had previously shaped the British welfare state, with low investment in healthcare as a case study. The crisis response itself reproduced and amplified neoliberal dynamics, such as poorly accountable contracting out in healthcare. The pandemic context allowed some of these dynamics to be made more visible to the general public, and therefore more questionable, although, as is shown with the example of the benefit system, no overhaul of the system ensued. Ultimately, the Covid-19 pandemic has not been a game changer for the British neoliberal welfare state. JEL Classification: P1, I1

Social Work Archives and the ‘Classic’ Postwar British Welfare State

This paper explores how I have used the collections held at the University of Warwick Modern Records Centre (MRC) to understand how the welfare state works from the inside; or within. Histories of the ‘classic’ postwar British welfare state are mostly either from above or below. This informs the approach and types of sources used. From above, histories of social security, health services and welfare provision are told through legislation, policy documents and government departmental archives. From below, histories of gendered, classed, or racial marginalisation are reconstructed through oral interviews, community and activist archives, and careful reading of official sources against the grain. Using different organisational, professional and individual collections relating to social work held at Warwick, this paper explores how officials did a range of health, welfare and social work whilst being squeezed from above and pressed from below. Ultimately, the view from within revealed by these sources exposes the emergent, contested, and complex relational dynamics of mundane policy and practice which shaped the ‘classic’ postwar British welfare state from 1945 to 1976.

Harriett Wilson, Audrey Harvey and Margaret Wynn: poverty, research and social action in 1950–1970s Britain

ABSTRACT The foundation of the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) in 1965 is seen as a pivotal moment in the history of British welfare policy heralding a new wave of pressure group activism. Many histories of the organisation focus on the expertise of two of their founder members, Brian Abel-Smith and Peter Towsend. But in foregrounding the role of these academic experts in the early history of CPAG the wider ecosystem of professionals, academics, politicians and activists involved has been overshadowed. This insight this article will argue that contributions to welfare policy and practice can be subsumed in organisational histories, particularly work that is local, smaller scale and practical. Often though not exclusively, women have undertaken such grassroots research and activism. Such work can, and does, contribute to the success of voluntary groups as well as feed into wider intellectual and policy currents. This paper will explore one such case study of this: the crucial but under-documented work of three women campaigners Harriett Wilson, Audrey Harvey and Margaret Wynn. It will illustrate how by combining both intellectually rigorous social research and practical social action they were important both in the formation of CPAG and sociological thinking and practice more broadly.

“A Strange Paradox”: U.S. Global Economic Power and the British Welfare State, 1944–1951

“A Strange Paradox”: U.S. Global Economic Power and the British Welfare State, 1944–1951

Book Review: Sick Note: A History of the British Welfare State by Gareth Millward

Book Review: <i>Sick Note: A History of the British Welfare State</i> by Gareth Millward

An Exploration of Changes in British Welfare Social Policy in the First Half of the Twentieth Century through Bourdieu's Theory of Field and Habitus

The question of how to transcend the dichotomy between subjectivity and objectivity is a central one in contemporary sociological theory. Bourdieu advocates habitus as a cognitive framework that embodies an individual's practical understanding of society. Such practices consist of structures and habits, and social behaviour is not directly determined by structures, but is indirectly influenced by habitus as an 'embodied mode'. Habits, as 'opportunities for the subject', act as constraints on the formation of structures and contribute to their reproduction. The welfare policy of Britain has experienced the transformation from solving the problem of the poor with a single welfare policy of relief law to the establishment of national economic law, which is continuously amended according to the native welfare policy habitus, thus affecting the welfare policy field and realising the two-way constraints of the field and habitus.

Digital exclusion and distance in the British welfare system

This article explores how the digitization of the UK’s benefits system has affected welfare service encounters and digitally-excluded citizens’ relationship with the state. Digitization is a key feature of Universal Credit – the Conservative government’s flagship welfare reform policy - that has been subject to limited critical enquiry to date. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in third-sector welfare service centres before and during the rollout of Universal Credit, the analysis contrasts the way advice was given under the old ‘legacy system’ with the new online system.Drawing on an original ethnographic study, the article argues that digitization has profoundly changed the dynamics of welfare service encounters and welfare governance more broadly. It identifies a shift towards a more transactional mode of service encounter and the emergence of new forms of claimant passivity as established routines centred on physical documents were supplanted with less-accessible digital technologies. In making inefficient but relationally-demanding negotiations obsolete, the article details how digitization has worked to further disempower and distance digitally-excluded citizens from meaningful engagement with their benefits claims. Potential implications of the findings for the study of contemporary welfare governance and the state are discussed in the concluding sections.

The Maternalists: Psychoanalysis, Motherhood, and the British Welfare State. By Shaul Bar-Haim

<i>The Maternalists: Psychoanalysis, Motherhood, and the British Welfare State</i>. By Shaul Bar-Haim

Shaul Bar-Haim, The Maternalists: Psychoanalysis, Motherhood, and the British Welfare State

Shaul Bar-Haim, <i>The Maternalists: Psychoanalysis, Motherhood, and the British Welfare State</i>

Compensating Injuries Through the British Welfare State: Arriving at a Coherent System of No-Fault Compensation

Compensating Injuries Through the British Welfare State: Arriving at a Coherent System of No-Fault Compensation

'A troublesome girl is pushed through': Morality, biological determinism, resistance, resilience, and the Canadian child migration schemes, 1883-1939.

This article critically analyses correspondence and decisions regarding children/young people who were included in the Canadian child migration schemes that ran between 1883 and 1939, and those who were deemed ‘undeserving’ and outside the scope of the schemes. Drawing on critical realist ontology, a metatheory that centralises the causal non-linear dynamics and generative mechanisms in the individual, the cultural sphere, and wider society, the research starts from the premise that the principle of ‘less or more eligibility’ lies at the heart of the British welfare system, both now and historically. Through analysing case files and correspondence relating to children sent to Canada via the Waifs and Strays Society and Fegan Homes, I shed light on the complex interplay between morality, biological determinism, resistance, and resilience in decisions around which children should be included or excluded. I argue that it was the complex interplay and nuance between the moral/immoral, desirable/undesirable, degenerate, and capable/incapable child that guided practice with vulnerable children in the late 1800s. In judgements around ‘deservedness’, related stigmas around poverty and ‘bad’ behaviour were rife. Within this, the child was punished for his/her ‘immoral tendencies’ and ‘inherited traits’, with little regard for the underlying reasons (e.g. abuse and neglect) for their (abnormal) behaviour and ‘mental deficiencies’.

Voluntary Action, Territory and Timing: The Council of Social Service for Wales, Periodisation and the New Historiography of the ‘British Welfare State’

AbstractThis article analyses the development of the Council of Social Service for Wales during what is often called the Golden Age of the Welfare State. Recovering the neglected history of the peak organisation for voluntary social service in Wales adds to our understanding of the histories of social policy and postwar Wales. The article addresses social policy from a doubly peripheral perspective – it attends to a territorial periphery of the UK State while voluntary action can be left at the margins of Welfare State analysis. From this perspective we hope to cast new light on the historiography of the ‘British Welfare State’

Understanding Social Insurance: Risk and Value Pluralism in the Early British Welfare State

This article seeks to make two contributions to the understanding of social insurance, a central policy tool of the modern welfare state. Focusing on Britain, it locates an important strand of theoretical support for early social insurance programs in antecedent developments in mathematical probability and statistics. While by no means the only source of support for social insurance, it argues that these philosophical developments were among the preconditions for the emergence of welfare policies. In addition, understanding the influence of these developments on British public discourse and policy sheds light on the normative principles that have undergirded the welfare state since its inception. Specifically, it suggests that the best model, or normative reconstruction, of social insurance in this context is a value-pluralist one, which pursues efficiency and equality or solidarity, grounded in group-based perceptions of risk.

“Partnership Not Prejudice”: British Nurses, Colonial Students, and the National Health Service, 1948–1962

AbstractNurses and their labor are essential to the provision of health care. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the flagship institution of postwar British welfare, the National Health Service. When it launched in 1948, a shortage of thirty-five thousand nurses endangered its future. This article examines the National Health Service's nursing shortage and its most enduring solution: the recruitment of Caribbean and African nursing staff for struggling British hospitals. It follows the manner in which British civil servants, hospital administrators, and nursing leaders came to recruit nurses from the colonies and the deep ambivalence that marked their project. What began as a reformulated colonial development project gave rise to a sprawling and unregulated market for nursing labor that powered the National Health Service for decades. The so-called dark stranger, deemed unworthy of membership in the national community, in fact carried out its most intimate work—caring for the bodies of sick white citizens.

Retrenched, Reconfigured and Broken: The British Welfare State after a Decade of Austerity

This article is an attempt to take stock and critically reflect on the UK’s decade of austerity and social policy hostility over the past decade. It distinguishes between economic and political austerity and digs deeper into the data on expenditure in order to examine the impact of austerity on British public expenditure and politics. It argues that the decade of austerity was a hostile one for British social policy which not only undermined the financial base of key parts of the welfare state, it reshaped it and redefined its priorities, setting in train a series of subsequent events that would further change, not just British social policies, but British economics, polity and politics. And, as subsequent crises – notably Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic – testify, crisis events tend to be linked, and each one shapes and influences the ability of the state to respond to the next.

Shredding the Social State: Maternal Studies, Ten Years On

This article reflects on ten years of British welfare policy and explores the impacts of these shifts on key groups of mothers who have been demonised and weaponised under an increasingly authoritarian political present.

Activist conceptualisations at the migration-welfare nexus: Racial capitalism, austerity and the hostile environment

In recent years British welfare policy and immigration policy have intertwined in new ways, with widespread cuts alongside increasing conditionality, rationing, and differentiation of rights. This article explores perspectives among activists attempting to resist these developments, with a focus on those that go beyond narrow reactions and engage in systemic critiques. It draws on in-depth qualitative interviews with activists from a variety of campaigns in England. The article presents a conceptual framework, synthesising these activists’ ideas and comprising three elements: racialised profit-seeking as a driver of policy; ‘situated universalism’ as a counter-hegemonic basis for unity; and a theory of change through grassroots campaigns.

The Influence of Politeness Strategies on Visibility in I, Daniel Blake

In I, Daniel Blake (2016), British filmmaker Ken Loach points to topics of social injustice and inequality in contemporary British society. Loach explores the inadequacies of the British welfare system and the problems of those who are being left behind and blamed for their situation, following what researchers have termed \textit{the ‘underclass’ approach} (Madanipour et al. 2015). The film highlights the welfare system’s dysfunctionalities through the main characters Daniel (Dave Johns), a 59-year old carpenter, having suffered a heart attack, and Katie (Hayley Squires), a single mother of two, who both fall victim to a social system that should support them but instead blames them for their situation. This paper, then, examines how face work and politeness strategies influence the conversations taking place in the film and how these lead to the characters’ enhanced (in)voluntary (in)visibility. I argue that visibility (Brighenti 2007 and 2010) and face work (Brown and Levinson 1999) interact and produce heightened (in)voluntary visibilities. This is particularly relevant, as visibility has become a major discourse within surveillance and digitisation both thriving on exposure and allegedly omnipresent visibility. In the film, as I argue, this is contrasted against the invisibility and impermeability of the social welfare system and the state. Ultimately, this paper suggests that bald on-record strategies (Brown and Levinson 1999) are used to expose claimants and keeping face is used as a strategy that strongly characterises scenes that highlight the importance of empathy.

Peace News and Radical Disability Writing in 1970s Britain: Perceptions of Welfare and the Welfare State

The 1970s were an important decade for disability policy in Britain. The 1970 Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act promised services for all disabled people and a series of cash benefits appeared to comprise a national disability income. By the 1980s, however, these measures had failed, and some disabled people had taken radical stances against the perceived failures of capitalism. This article shows that radical views amongst disabled people began earlier and were more common than has been assumed. It examines Peace News, a prominent activist publication, as evidence of this phenomenon. Disabled people in the 1970s became radicalised in response to traditional failures of British welfare and recent failures of the welfare state. They self-identified as a minority group—alongside homosexuals and ethnic minorities—and fought against discrimination. Unlike major disability organisations in the 1970s, disabled people had a militant approach to improving their welfare and their position in the welfare state.

The Eureka Moment? The creation of the British Welfare State

This article explores when the welfare state was established in Britain. First it examines the definitions of the welfare state, before turning to outline the methods and criteria used in exploring the establishment of welfare states. It then discusses the criteria that have been applied to the British case (expenditure; legislation; content; social citizenship; antithesis of the Poor Law) before critically analysing the arguments for different creation periods for the British welfare state (Old Poor Law; nineteenth century; Liberal reforms; inter-war period; 1945; later periods). It is concluded that while the strongest case and the greatest number of dimensions suggest 1945, in the words of T H Marshall: ‘we may still be in doubt what was the exact combination of circumstances in Britain in the 1940's which evoked that cry of "Eureka !’