Welfare Reform, Class Struggle and Crisis: A macro socio-historical and micro street-level investigation of British out-of-work welfare services

Punitive welfare reform is an urgent and immediate social problem. Not only do punitive reforms continue to inflict harm, but history suggests that they are likely to intensify in the near future as policymakers look to combat a record high claimant count. These issues primarily persist because welfare reform is founded and legitimised upon erroneous assumptions about the nature/agency of poor people and a lack of understanding around the broader historical processes which drive its development.

The core aim of this fellowship will be to present an original challenge to how contemporary welfare reform is understood and the foundational logic on which it is presently justified. In doing so, I will also make significant advances towards my long-term goal of acquiring a Leverhulme ECF. I will do this in the following ways:

First, I will write an article which critiques and presents an alternative to the dominant model of the 'welfare subject'. Welfare reform is founded on a specific theory about the human nature and agency of urban poor populations (the 'welfare subject'). This theory claims that they are primarily predisposed towards anti-work/anti-social proclivities and behaviours, which have been nurtured by the availability of generous/permissive cash benefits.

Advocating this theory, policymakers have sought to correct such behaviour by implementing a punitive shift in contemporary welfare reform. This article will develop a new position which rejects existing theories and provides a new model of the welfare subject. This model will draw on a plethora of evidence garnered through my PhD, as well as secondary data sets, to demonstrate

how the urban poor are primarily predisposed to eschewing harm and self -preservation in response to political/economic/social conditions that routinely pose a threat to individual needs and interests. The model will also draw on knowledge from a range of disciplines, including philosophy, political economy, sociology and psychology.

Second, I will address the ahistoricity of contemporary welfare reform debate via another article. I will demonstrate how the punitive shift in welfare reform is not historically new and has not been driven by a necessity to correct anti-work behaviour. Rather, I will reveal how it is instead intimately connected to, and determined by, wider processes of political, economic and social development spanning multiple centuries.

This article will contribute towards an original, historically informed theory which shows how out-of-work welfare services are ultimately determined by both the balance of class forces and the condition of the labour market. A full articulation of this theory will be finalised in a future monograph.

Third, I will challenge the 'anti-welfare common sense' typically found in everyday discourse around welfare reform. Anti-welfare common sense describes a tendency among politicians and mainstream media to manufacture pejorative narratives about poor people to secure electoral consent for punitive reforms. In a co-authored article, we analysed 480 claimant interviews, finding that anti-welfare common sense was dominant among out-of-work groups.

I want to challenge pejorative narratives within these groups by setting up a participatory education network which will to encourage critical, alternative ways of thinking about key issues.

Finally, I will challenge existing understandings of how reforms play out in street-level practice to policy-focused audiences. Previous work with the DWP revealed that policymakers are often unaware of how policies can become distorted in practice. This leaves question marks around whether policymakers understand the outcomes of their creations.

Consequently, the workshop will seek to facilitate knowledge exchange among key stakeholders; enabling a greater understanding of how policy is made among practitioners, and a greater understanding of how policy is practiced among policy is practiced among policymakers.