Gerry Mooney

'A land of milk and honey'?: Social policy in Scotland after devolution

This paper questions the extent to which a distinctively Scottish social welfare policy has emerged post-Devolution. Exploring the myths that continue to pervade the discussion and analysis of Scottish society today, it is argued that the scope for policy departure is limited in a number of different ways. While acknowledging that there are important institutional and implementation differences that can and do affect the delivery of welfare in Scotland and England, nonetheless the paper argues that there is a need to acknowledge the similarities between New Labour policy in London and in Edinburgh, to go beyond narrow institutional-centred approaches and to explore both the social relations that underpin and shape the delivery of social policy and the mounting contradictions that are at the heart of the New Labour project.

Glasgow’s new urban frontier: ‘Civilising’ the population of ‘Glasgow East’

Focusing on Glasgow’s East End, home to the 2014 Commonwealth Games, this paper explores the ways in which narratives of decline, ‘blight’ and decay play a central role in stigmatising the local population. ‘Glasgow East’ represents the new urban frontier in a city that has been heralded in recent decades as a model of successful post‐industrial transformation. Utilising Löic Wacquant’s arguments about advanced marginality and territorial stigmatisation in the urban context, we argue that narratives of decline and redevelopment are part of a wider ideological onslaught on the local population, intended to pave the way for low grade and flexible forms of employment, for punitive workfare schemes and for upwards rent restructuring. To this end, the media and politicians have played a particularly important role in constructing Glasgow East as a marker of a ‘broken Britain’. While the focus of this paper is on Glasgow’s East End, the arguments therein have a wider UK and global resonance, reflected in the numerous cases whereby stigmatised locales of relegation are being re‐imagined as elements in wider processes of neo‐liberalisation in the city.

'Welfare Ghettos' and the 'Broken Society': Territorial Stigmatisation in the Contemporary UK

Abstract The idea of a “broken society” is advanced by Conservative politicians in the UK as emblematic of social and moral decay. With many echoes of long-standing claims of societal and moral breakdown, the narrative centres on “irresponsibility” and “disorderly” behaviours in disadvantaged working-class communities and asserts that welfare dependency is the underlying condition which produces “social breakdown”. Social housing estates and the populations therein, in particular, are represented as problematic and vulnerable on a number of different levels, especially in the frequently interlinked notion of “welfare ghetto”. In this paper, we adopt an interdisciplinary approach, utilizing Loïc Wacquant’s recent work on “territorial stigmatisation” and his thesis on the “ghetto”, to critique these narratives; and we explore the work these notions perform to legitimize increasingly pervasive state interventions to regulate and control working-class lives and communities. The classed assumptions underpinning these discourses are revealed in this context.

Introduction: Neoliberal housing policy – time for a critical re-appraisal

This paper introduces the themed section of Critical Social Policy on social housing, privatization and neoliberalism. In tracing the key elements in the development of privatization and residualization since 1979, it argues that these can only be fully understood as part of a wider neoliberalizing agenda, an agenda that is driven by a particular class project. The paper also seeks to re-assert the importance of a critical approach to successive decades of social housing policies in the devolved UK, arguing that the classed basis of housing privatization policies has been largely overlooked by academics in favour of an evolutionary and ‘modernizing’ framework which isolates developments in social housing provision from other wider shifts in social welfare and in labour markets. Understanding such processes, it is claimed, is a necessary step in the development of a more socially just and sustainable form of housing provision.

Crisis social policy and the resilience of the concept of community

This paper considers the continuing resilience of the notion of community in social policy making and wider political commentary in the contemporary UK. Focusing in particular on the ways in which community is negatively and positively invoked and mobilized in narratives of the ‘big’ and ‘broken’ societies, it considers why the notion of community, so popular with the previous New Labour government, continues to enchant the present UK Coalition government and has been given added resonance in the context of the economic crisis and of the ‘austerity’ measures currently being adopted. The paper argues that placing community at the heart of current welfare provision illuminates a number of tensions in the UK government’s policy-making agenda. Informed by a discussion of Liverpool – once one of the big society ‘laboratories’ – we highlight the contradictions between top-down, depoliticized understandings of community and the types of community engagement and participation that are to be found in poor, disadvantaged communities in particular. Such communities are also where the impact of UK government ‘austerity’ measures are being most keenly felt.

Housing Stock Transfer in Birmingham and Glasgow: The Contrasting Experiences of Two UK Cities

ABSTRACT Housing stock transfer is arguably one of the more controversial aspects of New Labours housing policy. It was a policy originally pursued under the Conservative governments from the 1980s into the early 1990s and has gained pace under New Labour since 1997. Across Britain, the Westminster government, along with the devolved Scottish and Welsh administrations in Edinburgh and Cardiff, have all demonstrated a commitment of late to the use of stock transfer to reshape and reconfigure social housing provision. This paper considers some of the key aspects of stock transfer, not least the underlying national policy drivers of demunicipalization and use of private finance, and then explores the contrasting fortunes of stock transfer in the two largest local authority social housing authorities in Britain, that is Birmingham and Glasgow. In 2002 Birmingham tenants rejected stock transfer while in Glasgow, following a tenant vote for transfer, the citys entire council housing stock was transferred to a not-for-profit housing agency. The different experiences of the pursuance of stock transfer in these two cities together highlight some of the key questions and issues that are now being asked of this central component of New Labours approach to social housing.

Forging new ‘ways of life’? Social policy and nation building in devolved Scotland and Wales

This paper explores the ways in which social policy is being used to recreate and reproduce a sense of nation and national identity in devolved Scotland and Wales. It argues that devolution has important consequences for our sense of Britishness and of Scottishness and Welshness, not least in relation to the ways in which social policies are presented and legitimated. It is further argued that across the UK there is a marked attempt by New Labour to forge a new sense of nation organized around neo-liberal and market-oriented themes. This is critically mediated within the welfare regimes of these nations in accord with reconstructed ‘ways of life’ that are centred on the themes of work and enterprise.

Marginalised Voices: Resisting the Privatisation of Council Housing in Glasgow

This paper explores the opposition to housing stock transfer in Glasgow in the early 1990s. Taking the position of anti-transfer campaigners, it argues that transfer can be interpreted as a form of ‘privatisation’ involving a profound restructuring in the role of the state in a key heartland area of welfare provision. Using interviews from housing campaigners in Glasgow, the paper argues that the much-heralded rhetoric about housing stock transfer as promoting tenant choice is highly contentious and misleading. The paper includes by highlighting that dispite the move to transfer in Glasgow, there remains a significant campaign against transfer in other parts of the UK.

Poverty and social justice in the devolved Scotland: Neoliberalism meets social democracy

Drawing on current debates in social policy, this paper considers the extent to which social justice has and is informing social policy making in devolved Scotland. Relating to the work of social justice theorists Young, Fraser and Lister in particular, it critically examines some key Scottish social policy measures since 1999, considering some of the ways in which these have been constructed in terms of social justice and which make claims to the Scottish national. Through a focus on the issue of anti-poverty policies, the paper explores the ways in which the dominant policy approaches of the Scottish Government have reflected an uneven and tension-loaded balance between the enduring legacies of Scottish social democracy and the influences of neoliberal economics.

Introduction: Rethinking social policy through devolution

This paper argues both that devolution is central to our understanding of developments in social policy in the contemporary UK and that social policy is a key means through which we can develop a critical understanding of the process of devolution itself. Much of the devolved powers available to the governments in Edinburgh, Belfast and Cardiff centre on social policy innovation and practice. Devolution was widely welcomed as opening up the potential for the development of radically different social policies. However, the discussion of devolution has been largely dominated by an approach that focuses on institutional and/or organizational differences marginalizing, in the process, the wider social relations of welfare around which social policy is organized. In bringing the study of devolution into the heartland of social policy analysis, it is argued that we can begin to develop a more critically informed appreciation of social policy across the entire devolved UK. Through critical social policy analysis we can both evaluate and explain the complex interrelations between devolved governance and the continuing reproduction of inequalities and social divisions throughout the UK.