Immigration, Social Cohesion and Political Reaction [1st ed.] 9783030527075, 9783030527082

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Immigration, Social Cohesion and Political Reaction Bill Jordan

Immigration, Social Cohesion and Political Reaction

Bill Jordan

Immigration, Social Cohesion and Political Reaction

Bill Jordan Social Policy and Social Work University of Plymouth Plymouth, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-52707-5    ISBN 978-3-030-52708-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52708-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover Pattern © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To the memory of Jean Packman—partner, colleague and inspiration

Acknowledgements

For helpful discussions and suggestions, I would like to thank Sarah Jordan, Linda and Colin Janus-Harris, Simon Pearson, Alexandra Allan, Franck Düvell and John Ingham.

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Contents

1 Introduction: Migration, Integration and Pandemics— Historical Perspective  1 2 Solidarities Under Conditions of Mobility 19 3 Global Capitalism, Inequality and Insecurity 33 4 Family, Health and Well-Being 45 5 Terrorism and Instability 59 6 Policies for Sustainability 69 7 Alternative Scenarios or Back to the Future? The Case of the UK 79 8 The Growth in Coercion 89 9 Conclusions 97 References105 Index111 ix

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Migration, Integration and Pandemics—Historical Perspective

Abstract  Although globalisation has transformed every aspect of the world’s economies, polities and societies, by accelerating movements of money, goods and people across national borders, it has been the recent migration of refugees that has in many ways been most transformative of political life. Whereas wars—both civil strife and international conflict— have always given rise to movements of people, the persistence of long-­ drawn-­out hostilities in the Middle East, and especially Syria and the Lebanon, have caused mass migrations towards Europe, while those in South and Central America have led to similar movements to the North. These in turn have played a great part in the transformation of democratic politics, weakening traditional ruling parties, and giving rise to authoritarian regimes or significant nationalistic mobilisations. The coronavirus pandemic has added a dimension to these processes. Keywords  Globalisation • War • Authoritarianism Movements of people have recently far exceeded those of the immediate post-war period. For example, in the UK, the migrant population in long-­ term residence rose by over half a million between 2011 and 2015 (BBC News on-line, 6th March, 2015); by November 2018, another quarter of a million immigrants a year were arriving, but the proportion from the European Union (EU) was falling, and that from the rest of the world © The Author(s) 2021 B. Jordan, Immigration, Social Cohesion and Political Reaction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52708-2_1

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rising. Asylum applications peaked between 2004 and 2007, but have continued at high levels ever since. After 2016, fewer students from EU countries came, but this was more than compensated by the increase in non-EU immigration (Migration Statistics, November, 2018). By the end of 2019, there were estimated to be a million undocumented (irregular) immigrants in the UK, similar numbers in Germany, and 800,000 in the USA (BBC Radio 4, News, 14th November, 2019). But now a new factor has put a sudden brake on these population movements, as nation states rush to close their borders against the spread of the coronavirus Covid-19. Although economic globalisation is much too strong a force to make this a feasible policy goal, the pandemic has slowed economic growth, caused mass lay-offs of workers and launched whole new institutional innovations. The idea that President Donald Trump would authorise the payments of something like Universal Basic Incomes (UBIs) to US citizens would have seemed wildly implausible only a fortnight before the pandemic struck the USA. In this book, I shall argue that it has been the dominance of politically driven movements of people (in which religion, too, has played a major role) that has made this century’s mass migrations distinctive. Industrialisation, which came first to the UK, then to Western Europe and the USA, and finally to Russia and the Far East, was achieved mainly by movements of peasants and other rural workers into factory jobs in cities, mostly within national borders (the huge trans-Atlantic migration from Ireland during and after the famines of the 1840s took several decades). Now refugees from civil wars, most with religious undertones, have combined—first with economic and now with pestilential factors—to accelerate these movements. There have been other examples of mass migration, especially from the Soviet Union after the First World War, and from former communist states to the West after 1989. But the scale and consequences of present-­day movements have been exceptional; in combination with the other features of globalisation, they have challenged our democratic political systems and now also our health systems. After all, the main features of Democratic Party politics were established towards the end of the nineteenth century, and remained in place until very recently. Conservative (Christian Democratic) and socialist (Social Democratic/Labour) parties ruled throughout in Western Europe, with the mercifully brief exceptions of the rise of Fascism in Italy in the 1920s, Spain in the following decade through to 1970s and Nazism in

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Germany from the early the 1930s to the end of the war. Even in Russia and Eastern Europe, the Soviet period seems quite short from the perspective of the present day; in Hungary, for instance, it was crumbling within a decade of its establishment. The impact of globalisation is likely to be far more lasting than that of those versions of Fascism or Marxism; those of the pandemic are even more difficult to predict, as institutional innovation becomes a feature of some unlikely regimes. This book will analyse the relationships between policies for political and economic integration at the national level, and those for regulating movements of people across borders. During the period of industrialisation in the USA, mass immigration, notably from Ireland and Eastern Europe, was supplying labour power for the new factories and construction sites. After the Second World War, the reconstruction of the German economy, and its recovery as an industrial power, were achieved with large supplies of labour power from Polish and East German refugees. But there is no such demand in today’s post-industrial Western economies; these refugees have arrived in countries with long-standing mass unemployment, and in which even the service sectors, expanding sources of employment for many decades, have begun to experience the impact of automation through Artificial Intelligence (AI) (Jordan 2020a). The impact of the pandemic has rapidly exposed the shortcomings of policies to sustain employment levels; earnings subsidies have quickly had to be replaced by income guarantees for those struck down. The tension between social cohesion and free movement has always been recognised in capitalist countries and in unions of states such as the EU. The goal of policy has been to take specific measures to sustain solidarities between backward, rural districts (and nations) and dynamic, industrialising ones (most recently, ones in which services deploying IT and other digital innovations have flourished, and ones where manufacturing has declined, or agriculture has remained predominantly on a subsistence basis). Various forms of support and subsidy have been used to assist those activities and areas losing ground, and particularly disadvantaged citizens and districts within them. Suddenly now the main transfers are between the healthy and the sick. Before the coronavirus crisis, these measures seemed to have sustained political stability in Western European countries since the Second World War, and to have given rise to a successful transition to democracy in the former Soviet satellite states of Central and Eastern Europe. There were few signs of resentment or dissent among the latter during the years after

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1989; rather, they seemed to compete with each other in their keenness to comply with the terms of membership of the EU, and to embrace the reforms required. If the older generations grumbled and looked back with some nostalgia, the young took every opportunity to travel to the West for work and study, to learn English in particular, and to become good EU citizens. As a professor employed by the EU to teach democratic politics, social policy and social work in Slovakia and Hungary in the 1990s (none of which had existed under their old regimes) I experienced friendliness among most colleagues, and enthusiasm among most students. However, there was always a price to be paid for globalisation, and it was those made redundant by traditional industries, and the less-skilled staff in the expanding service sectors, who paid it. Not only did they endure periods of unemployment and see their wages and salaries fall to match those in the industries that had been shut down; they also experienced precarious work and earnings (Standing 2011), often requiring supplementation by state benefits (Jordan 1973, 1987, 1996, 2008). Crucially, this work was enforced by the benefits authorities, by means of sanctions (cuts) and disqualifications, the coercive conditions imposed on claimants, both employed and unemployed (Haagh 2019a, b). Above all, the insecurity engendered in populations as diverse as France and the USA contributed to mass protests against governments, and created the climate for a rise in authoritarianism (Standing 2017; Jordan 2019, 2020a, b). Immigration was blamed for this insecurity, even in regions with low levels of inward movement, when the true causes were long-term failures in systems for social integration. For instance in the Mediterranean French city of Marseilles, the whole northern urban extension has become a segregated concentration of immigrants, originally from Israel, then Algeria and most recently from the Middle East; some terrorist incidents and high rates of unemployment of those with Muslim names, together with the election of a Mayor from the former Front National, have brought an erosion of the French republican tradition of laïcité. So far, drug gangs rather than ethnic conflicts have constituted the main social structures, but economic forces could soon cause this to change (BBC Radio 4, Le Divide, presented by Lucy Williamson, 25th March, 2020). In the USA, UK, Hungary and elsewhere in Europe, the rise in authoritarian regimes and parties could be seen as related to the replacement of many state benefits and services designed to cover whole national populations from contingencies of ill-health, illiteracy and environmental

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degradation, as well as poverty, by private agencies and companies, often international in scope. These were claimed to be able to identify varying needs of beneficiaries and service users, who in turn could select the quality they required, and to contribute (in fees and charges) in line with their means. The hierarchy of such membership organisations did not include the poorest and most vulnerable, who were left to the (coercive) provision of states (Jordan 1996, 2005, 2019). These were, of course, most susceptible to the coronavirus pandemic.

Reconciling Migration and Social Integration In the 1950s, the end of post-war austerity signalled a rapid burst of economic development, in which societies were transformed. In every West European country except the UK (where this process had occurred before the First World War) there were large flows of population from the countryside to the towns and cities. This involved the building of new residential districts (Power 1997); it also soon required large flows of migrant workers from Southern Europe (Portugal, Spain, Greece and the Southern regions of Italy), and from Turkey, as well as from the colonial territories of the UK (the Caribbean and South Asia) and France (North Africa), to supply the growing demand for labour power (Freeman 1979). The processes of integration of these migrants into systems for political, economic and social cohesion among their citizens were uneven, and varied considerably between countries. Only after economic growth began to slow down, and rivalries between native citizens and immigrants began to sharpen, was the need for active measures for integration recognised. For instance, the establishment of the European Economic Community addressed issues of trade and labour standards for several decades before it turned to migration between its constituent states. Free movement was not achieved until the 1990s, and then accompanied by restrictions on access from outside the Union, applied especially to the citizens of the post-communist countries which eventually gained membership in the first decade of the new century; ‘mobility is socially divisive’ (European Foundation 1990, p.  10). Only the UK and Ireland introduced visa schemes for skilled workers; the other EU states blocked access from Eastern and Central Europe until their members joined the Union in the next century. It is easy to forget how this whole history, both in terms of social integration and free movement, was accomplished in an environment of

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threat. The US still had large numbers of military personnel in Europe for much of the period, and the imminent danger of conflict among European states was a major motivational force in the steps taken. It was these dangers, rather than the desire to create a new kind of European social citizenship, which shaped institution-building; the integration of populations was a secondary goal to the need to defuse risks of armed conflict. So the re-integration of Europe, which had been split in the aftermath of the Second World War, had also eventually led to Europe-wide policies for the integration of migrants between member states after the collapse of the Soviet Bloc in 1989. But at this time the integration of citizens in each member state’s systems for social cohesion was still not settled or secure. As a result, the strains on the European social model of the financial crisis of 2008–09 were most obvious where this had the biggest impact, and made integration and migration once more politically contested.

Social Integration, Economic Development and Political Stability In each EU country, different mechanisms were used to reduce the risks of organised disaffection. Whereas Stalin’s allies had used intimidation to keep citizens in Central Europe in line, and his successors had brutally punished the leaders of the 1956 Hungarian uprising, and imprisoned the ministers who implemented the 1968 Prague Spring reforms, his earlier rejection of post-war Marshall Aid had signalled that German re-­unification was not in prospect (Pulzer 1995). The Bonn regime was therefore focussed on reconciling its security against threats from the East (especially in West Berlin) with measures to enable social integration. The federal structure it adopted devolved many powers to the Länder, still allowing the national regime to oversee the economy, mediating between capital and labour. Forty per cent of coal and iron producers, two-thirds of electricity-generating plants and the majority of the banks were owned by the state. Trades unions were represented on boards supervising these, and banks were involved in processes of decision-making. As part of this systematic cohesion-building, the most successful political party, the Christian Democrats, and their ally, the Christian Social Union, gained support from both Catholics and Protestants across the country, and in both urban and rural constituencies (Judt 2006, pp. 265–7).

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In Austria, the rival People’s Party, which represented Catholic and small-town interests, and the Socialists, supported by workers in cities, formed a Grand Coalition, in the face of the nearby threat from the Soviet Bloc. The public services were also partitioned between them, so that the issues could be negotiated through consensually structured institutions (Bader 1966). Italy, too, gained stability through systems for redistributing resources to the backward southern regions; both industry and infrastructure were controlled through state agencies, allowing extensive patronage and clientelism, and deployed by the Christian Democratic Party to keep the communists from holding power. This gave rise to serious problems of corruption in later decades, but it did allow the renaissance of the country’s economy and social cohesion. Despite differences in both institutional structures and political alliances, all these arrangements overcame historic conflicts and the extremist brutality of the interwar years, to enable reconstruction, and eventually rapid growth. They also saw large movements of population from backward to dynamic regions, and growing incomes for their working-class citizens. Charles Kindleberger’s (1967) account of the period argued that ‘the major factor shaping the remarkable economic growth which most of Europe has experienced since 1950 has been the availability of a large supply of labour’ (p. 3), a ‘delayed Industrial Revolution’, exemplifying the dynamic between a high-productivity, high-wage sector and a less efficient, labour intensive one, as theorised by Lewis (1954)—a repetition of the process experienced in the UK in the first half of the nineteenth century (Kindleberger 1967, p. 22). More significantly from an economic perspective, similar transformations occurred in Europe’s remaining Fascist dictatorships, Spain and Portugal, in this period; in Spain, per capita income rose from $2397 in 1950 to $8739 in 1973. Smaller countries like Austria, the Netherlands and Finland were also transformed into prosperous economies, with per capita incomes to rival those of Germany and France. This helped to stabilise democratic politics in these countries, with successful processes of negotiation between formerly rivalrous classes and ideologies being established. These forms of corporatism, more than the active engagement of citizens or gains in their civil rights, were the characteristic themes of the post-war period.

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Welfare States and Transnational Migration The 1950s were not an era in which democracies extended the social rights of citizens in significant ways. Despite these increases in incomes per head, the shares of GDP going to capital and labour did not vary either during that decade (Kindleberger 1967, p. 3). The ‘social democratic moment’ came in the 1960s, as parties of the centre left gained power all over Europe (including the UK). As social benefits and services embraced more aspects of the economy and society, it was assumed that ‘the state … would do a better job than the unrestricted market … in designing and applying strategies for social cohesion, moral sustenance and cultural vitality’ (Judt 2010, pp. 360–1). Hence the rising proportions of GDP spent by governments—from 27.6 per cent in 1950 to 38.8 per cent in France, from 30.4 per cent to 40.2 per cent in Germany, and from 34.2 per cent to 41.5 per cent in the UK in the same period, with even faster growth in the Scandinavian countries. But at the same time as these measures sought to integrate national citizens in a web of benefits and services, other policies for attracting foreign workers, without membership of several of these systems, were also developing. Such immigrants were denizens rather than citizens. In West Germany, this process had started in the late 1950s, with recruitment from Southern Italy, soon followed by agreements with Spain and Greece in 1960, Portugal in 1964, and Yugoslavia in 1968; but Turkey became the main source of ‘guest workers’ once the southern European states started their own processes of economic development. Indeed, the proportions of the potential labour forces of these countries emigrating to North-West Europe was comparable with the movements from rural to urban Chinese districts in the last decades of the century. A quarter of the Greek labour force and a third of the Portuguese emigrated, and these countries were heavily reliant on remittances from migrant workers to sustain their living standards in the last ten years of their dictatorships. France and the UK attracted migrants from their former colonies, especially those in North Africa to the former, and the Caribbean to the latter, in this period. In some cities, street conflict between indigenous and immigrant groups broke out, and in Paris the police were accused in the press of the murder of some 200 Algerian immigrants after a protest demonstration. In the UK, there were ‘race riots’ in Notting Hill, London and Nottingham; the slowing down of the economy in the 1970s gave rise to fears of further tensions. Controls on immigration from the non-white

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Commonwealth countries were introduced in a series of acts in the 1960s, and the Race Relations Act of 1965 banned discrimination in public places, supplied remedies for discrimination in employment and criminalised incitement to racial hatred. In 1976, the Commission for Racial Equality was created, all ahead of such developments in Europe. Altogether, some 40 million foreign workers were reckoned to have contributed to the industrialisation and urbanisation of Europe in the 1950s and 1960s (Böhning 1972). At the same time, autocratic regimes in Greece, Portugal and Spain, which had blocked development, were collapsing, and new, democratic revolutions enabled these countries to seek membership of the European Community (EC), at the moment when their economies were on the cusp of growth. It was at this moment that the Community was beginning to address the issue of movement between member states.

The Challenge to Cohesion of Free Movement During the early years of the Community, despite the substantial overseas colonial empires still ruled by France and Belgium, the member states still conducted most of their trade with each other, and this proportion grew during the boom years of the 1960s, extending to the new member states as they joined. Thus the political motivation for the formation of the Community was gradually displaced by economic factors; ‘The EEC was a Franco-German condominium, in which Bonn underwrote the Community’s finances but Paris dictated its policies’ (Judt 2010, p. 308). After the economic downturn, the families of workers who had flooded in from Southern Europe and Turkey continued to enter for settlement, but after 1973, substantial numbers of Greek, Spanish and Portuguese workers returned to their homelands as their economies started to develop (Collinson 1994, p. 55). In 1988, the Cecchini Report concluded that the Community’s Structural Funds would need to be doubled to offset the potentially damaging effects of the single market for poor regions. That year, the Council of Ministers determined that the emphasis of cohesion policies was to be equally on the promotion of workforce mobility, the creation of minimum social regulations and the support for marginal social groups and regions. This reflected a new recognition in economic theory of the complexity of relationships between core and periphery, high-productivity and low-­ productivity regions. As a large, advanced economy, with increasing

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returns to scale, attracted labour from a smaller, more traditional one, with constant returns to scale, the gap between the centre and the periphery could widen, as the latter came to specialise in traditional production and to lose competitiveness (Markusen 1988; Krugman 1991). So the centre could gain a permanent economic advantage, as its concentration of highly skilled workers in turn led to increased movement from the less-developed region. This theory cast doubt upon the Lewis model, and focused attention on the need to compensate backward regions for the sake of social cohesion. A more powerful influence pushing the European Community towards new regulations and policies on migration was the sudden collapse of the Soviet Bloc regimes after 1989, as the pressure for Westward movement previously restrained by the Iron Curtain was suddenly released. But in addition, global economic integration meant that transnational mobility had become an integral part of world economic development, while political instability in the Middle East was producing increased asylum-seeking. This meant that the EC was required to develop a framework of law, policy and practice on the control of immigration. Meanwhile, structural unemployment had become a feature of the economies of member states, and there was pressure on public spending to support the versions of citizenship established in the 1960s. The challenge of populations on the margins of their economies, often concentrated around the fringes of cities, and with high proportions of minority-ethnic households, was confronting the governments of member states (Power 1997). These new issues emerged at the same moment that cohesion became an explicit goal of Community policies. Globalisation and the fall of the Soviet regime intensified this challenge. Furthermore, another branch of economic theory now informed the supply of public services like education, health and environmental protection, starting in the USA and UK.  This was the Public Choice school, which regarded nations as ‘clubs’ and citizens as ‘members’ who shared the costs of these collective goods (Buchanan 1965, 1968; Cornes and Sandler 1986). The EC was a kind of federation of such clubs (Tiebout 1956; Inman and Rubinfeld 1997), allowing circulation of members between them. But in relation to outsiders (non-citizens), the marginal gains from allowing large-scale entries from the east and south were seen as far smaller than the costs (in terms of training, integration and the costly effects of competition, crowding and congestion). It therefore set itself the task of controlling access at its external borders.

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Managed Migration and Social Integration The need for a common approach to immigration began to be part of the shift towards open borders within the European Community in the early 1990s, as it became the European Union by the Maastricht Treaty of 1993. This meant that millions of citizens of the former communist states to the east had good reasons to cross the border without work permits, in order to increase their earnings as undocumented workers. Conflicts in the Balkans and in Africa added to the stream of refugees from the Middle East in search of asylum, and had focussed governments’ concerns on supranational institutional innovations (Collinson 1994, p. 63), ahead of the free movement achieved under the Schengen Agreement. The authorities recognised that ‘the suppression of internal frontiers … could entail a risk that the absence of checks at internal borders will render any control of immigration impossible. … This has led Member States to recognise the need for a common approach’ (European Commission 1991, p. 8). So a programme was set up to co-operate over border control regimes, especially in Southern Europe, and to harmonise visa policies, asylum laws and admission procedures (Lavenex 2001), as well as various co-operative arrangements for police and border-agency activities. Simultaneously, negotiations with representatives of the Visegrad Group of candidate accession countries (Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia) established systems for acting as some kinds of buffers to migration from countries further to the east, with training programmes for border police forces (Jordan and Düvell 2002, p. 42). The right to free movement was presented as a part of the new European citizenship which accompanied the formation of the EU, along with political elements aimed at giving it democratic legitimacy. Thus the rhetoric of social inclusion and cohesion was deployed just when national systems for social integration were under the greatest strain, from mass unemployment and slow growth, especially in the newly re-­ united Germany. The European Social Model was criticised as an over-­ ambitious attempt to protect the earnings and security of employees, leading to a labour market which was incapable of adapting to competition from the newly industrialising countries of the Far East and South America. The UK had chosen a path of ‘flexibility’, with much more short-term and part-time work, mainly for young people and the high numbers of women who had returned to the labour market after having children. The economists who influenced its government policy had

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compared Continental Europe unfavourably with the USA, arguing that more inequality of salaries, easier hiring and firing, limited job security and social protection all enabled lower unemployment and faster growth (Tachibanaki 1994, pp. 2–3; Layard and Nickell 1994, p. 284). In the theories of this school, mobility was the key to labour-market flexibility. In the US version of these policies, local authorities and states sought to attract capital investment from the whole world, by investing in infrastructural facilities and public services, within an overall economic environment of mobility. They sought to minimise the costs associated with unemployment and local recessions through this mobile workforce (Wildasin 1997; Devillanova 2001). In the model underpinning such policies, politicians, bureaucrats and trades unions were all seen as seeking to maintain rigidities, inefficiencies and inflexibilities; curbs on mobility increased unemployment and slowed growth (Minford 1991). In these ways, the model espoused by market-minded Anglophone economists, and largely adopted in the UK, tried to reproduce the conditions for the post-war boom, with large numbers of workers moving from hard-pressed regions to more dynamic ones. They saw the European Social Model as to blame for the low growth rates of Continental member states of the EU, and for concealing mass underemployment through early retirement schemes and ever-expanding numbers claiming disability benefits. Although the whole rationale of European social policy resisted such approaches, the massive differential between wage levels in the former communist countries and those in the West created just the potential for this dynamic after 1989. Rather than allow differential wage rates to accelerate movement across the line of the former Iron Curtain, member states developed limited schemes for access of specific occupations, such as seasonal agricultural workers, and used the prospect of future membership of the Union to persuade Central European former communist states to make their borders more secure against irregular migration (Lavenex 2001; Cyrus and Vogel 2000). Following the decision of the West German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, to pursue unification with the former communist East, there was massive investment in the latter; subsequently German firms invested heavily in other post-communist states (Judt 2010, pp. 638–43). The Western world polarised between the US-UK model of privatisation in collective life (with an underclass of state serfdom), and ‘Fortress Europe’, with both

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social cohesion and free movement for citizens, but continuing impoverishment and the risk of disorder on its Eastern fringes. After the financial crash of 2007–08, most of the Continental countries proved resilient, with Germany bailing out Greece and other South European states through massive loans. With policies for social integration overstretched in the latter, the alternative of migration was attractive to many. It was the best-educated among the younger generation who could most readily adopt this life-strategy, leaving some districts and regions of their home countries in a depressed state.

Conclusions On 21 April 2020, the BBC World Service ‘Business Matters’ reported that irregular migrants from Asia and Africa, employed as domestic servants in the USA, were being laid off during the pandemic because of the reduced incomes of the households in which they were working. This encapsulated many of the issues raised by globalisation—the income inequalities embodied in the servants’ situation, their vulnerability as immigrants without proper status, and the impact of a rapidly spreading world pestilence. A similar situation was developing as poor Indian women were attempting to walk home, having been sacked by households in the oil-rich Arab states. This book aims to analyse the impact of recent decades of historical developments on the generation coming to adulthood in the past decade. Since the financial crash, the European Social Model has been less convincing as a blueprint for the integration of its younger citizens. Its rival, seeking greater flexibility, including the recruitment of migrants from other continents, pursued by the UK and USA, has also experienced problems, leading to the Brexit vote in the 2016 referendum on EU membership in the UK, and the election of Donald Trump as President of the USA. Above all, neither version has created sufficient decently paid employment for this generation, despite its improved standards of education. Instead, many have been forced to take temporary or part-time jobs, without prospects of career development or occupational qualification. In his account of the growth of this ‘precariat’ (a term first used in France), Standing (2011) points out that this is a world-wide phenomenon; as many as half the workforce in South Korea, and a third in Japan, could be seen as belonging in that category. Yet it was in North Africa and the Middle East that this economic demography led to the most disruptive political instability. The ‘Arab

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Spring’ of 2011 toppled the Tunisian and Egyptian regimes and led to the civil war against the Gaddafi government in Libya; refugees from these conflicts forced the EU to re-appraise its free movement rules. The French and Italian governments called for the suspension of the Schengen Agreement in the face of increased influxes of refugees (the most numerous from North Africa to Italy, but most bound for France and beyond, to Northern Europe or the UK). But the anger, alienation and anxiety which fuelled the Arab Spring was also evident in the demonstrations in Greece and Spain during May, 2011, blaming Social Democratic governments for their failure to integrate this generation into their economies, societies or polities. The stagnation of wages and salaries, even during periods when profits were growing fast, and financiers were getting fabulously rich, has been the characteristic of capitalism for several decades, and these demonstrations showed that the new generation were no longer willing to accept the situation. The rise of nationalistic parties, even in the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands, all questioned the EU’s project for reconciling social integration with free movement. The clearest winner from these developments was China, yet even there recent political issues in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and a slower rate of economic growth, have signalled issues over the sustainability of its model. In spite of its success as a supplier of infrastructural facilities all over the world, it may have reached a stage in its own economic development analogous to the 1970s in Europe. Above all, the stagnation or decline of the salaries of median earners in all the developed countries, including Germany (Kelly 2011), has posed a challenge to progressive political parties and the global reputation of liberal democracy. In the Iowa caucuses of the Democratic Party for the selection of an opponent for the presidency to Donald Trump, the large number of candidates struggled to make a convincing case for measures that could offer improvements in living standards and prospects. As in many other countries, Trump’s policies had reduced unemployment, but many were working in three or more jobs simply to cover their everyday costs. Curbs on immigration were, according to one commentator, for Boris Johnson ‘second only to EU withdrawal itself in establishing the foundations of the post-Brexit Britain over which he wishes to preside’, and the motivation for them ‘primarily political, not economic’. They were ‘about driving a wedge into the opposition parties’ and ‘to impress the voting

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public rather than to solve labour market issues’, because ‘arguments based on national identity are proving to be tailor made for splitting the social democratic constituencies that used to maintain parties like Labour’ (Kettle 2020, pp.  1–2). In other words, in the more recent context, opportunistic populist leaders could seek to undermine social cohesion for political gain, exploiting fears over immigration. Into this unstable situation, with social divisions and resentments expressed in demonstrations and protest over several years, that the coronavirus pandemic struck. It is not too fanciful to compare its impact with that of the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century, which killed more than a quarter of England’s population, and brought about the end of feudal economic relations, allowing the peasantry to become freeholders, and setting in train the centuries-long processes by which Britain became the first country to adopt liberal civil, and eventually political, rights (Macfarlane 1978). I shall therefore explore the possible role of the coronavirus, which has already caused the Trump and Johnson administrations in the US and UK to adopt measures for public health and income maintenance which they had previously foresworn, as a potentially radical turning point in economic and social policies. So my purpose in this book is therefore to examine the interactions between immigration and social cohesion as elements in the politics of democratic capitalist countries, and argue that present mainstream approaches, which have been threatening the liberal democratic order, are now suddenly under pressure from the pandemic. In order to avoid escalating disaffection, extremism and a public health catastrophe, radical new programmes will be required.

References Bader, W. B. (1966). Austria Between East and West, 1945–62. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Böhning, W.  R. (1972). The Migration of Workers in the UK and the European Union. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Buchanan, J. B. (1965). An Economic Theory of Clubs. Economica, 32, 1–14. Buchanan, J.  B. (1968). The Demand and Supply of Public Goods. Chicago: Rand McNally. Collinson, D. (1994). Europe and International Migration. London: Pinter/ Royal Institution of International Affairs.

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Cornes, R., & Sandler, T. (1986). The Theory of Externalities, Public Goods and Club Goods. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cyrus, N., & Vogel, D. (2000). Immigration as a Side-Effect of Other Policies: Principles and Consequences of German Non-immigration Policy. Paper Prepared for the Project ‘Does Immigration Matter?’ Oldenburg: University of Oldenburg. Devillanova, C. (2001). Regional Insurance and Migration. Scandinavian Journal of Economics, 103(2), 333–349. European Commission. (1991). Communication from the Commission to the Council and the European Parliament on Migration, SEC (19) 1855, Final. Brussels: European Commission. European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions. (1990). Mobility and Social Cohesion in the European Community: A Forward Look. Dublin: European Foundation. Freeman, G.  P. (1979). Immigrant Labour and Racial Conflict in Industrial Societies: The French and British Experience, 1945–75. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Haagh, L. (2019a). The Case for Universal Basic Income. Cambridge: Polity. Haagh, L. (2019b). Public State Ownership with Varieties of Capitalism: Regulatory Foundations for Welfare and Freedom. International Journal of Public Policy, 15(1/2), 153–184. Inman, R. P., & Rubinfeld, P. L. (1997). The Political Economy of Federalism. In D. C. Mueller (Ed.), Perspectives on Public Choice: A Handbook (pp. 73–105). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jordan, B. (1973). Paupers: The Making of the New Claiming Class. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul (Republished 2019). Jordan, B. (1987). Rethinking Welfare. Oxford: Blackwell. Jordan, B. (1996). A Theory of Poverty and Social Exclusion. Cambridge: Polity. Jordan, B. (2005). Social Policy for the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: Polity. Jordan, B. (2008). Welfare and Well-Being: Social Value in Public Policy. Bristol: Policy Press. Jordan, B. (2019). Authoritarianism and How to Counter It. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Jordan, B. (2020a). Automation and Human Solidarity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Jordan, B. (2020b). The Age of Disintegration: Nations, Collectives and Public Services. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Jordan, B., & Düvell, F. (2002). Irregular Migration: The Dilemmas of Transnational Mobility. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Judt, T. (2006). Post-War: A History of Europe Since 1945. London: Vintage Books. Judt, T. (2010). Ill Fares the Land: A Treatise on Our Present Discontents. London: Allen Lane.

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Kelly, G. (2011, May 22). Why the Squeezed Middle Is Here to Stay. The Observer. Kettle, M. (2020, February 20). The Tory Points System Won’t Work – Except at the Ballot Box. The Guardian (Journal), pp. 1–2. Kindleberger, C. (1967). Europe’s Post-War Growth: The Role of Labour Supply. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Krugman, P. (1991). Geography and Trade. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lavenex, S. (2001). The Europeanization of Refugee Policies: Between Human Rights and Internal Security. Aldershot: Ashgate. Layard, R., & Nickell, S. (1994). Unemployment in the OECD Countries. In T.  Tachibanaki (Ed.), Labour Markets and Economic Performance: Europe, Japan and the USA (pp. 253–295). New York: St. Martin’s Press. Lewis, W. A. (1954). Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour. Manchester School, 22, 159–191. Macfarlane, A. (1978). The Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property and Social Transition. Oxford: Blackwell. Markusen, J.  R. (1988). Production, Trade and Migration with Differentiated Skilled Workers. Canadian Journal of Economics, 21(2), 231–259. Minford, P. (1991). The Supply-Side Revolution in Britain. Aldershot: Edward Elgar/IEA. Power, A. (1997). Estates on the Edge: The Social Consequences of Mass Housing in Europe. London: Macmillan. Pulzer, P. G. J. (1995). German Politics 1945–95. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Standing, G. (2011). The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury. Standing, G. (2017). The Corruption of Capitalism: How Rentiers Thrive, and the Many Grow Poorer. London: Biteback. Tachibanaki, T. (Ed.). (1994). Labour Markets and Economic Performance: Europe, Japan and the U.S.A. New York: St Martin’s Press. Tiebout, C. (1956). A Pure Theory of Local Expenditures. Journal of Political Economy, 64, 416–424. Wildasin, D. E. (1997). Factor Mobility, Risk and Redistribution in the Welfare State. Scandinavian Journal of Economics, 97, 527–556.

CHAPTER 2

Solidarities Under Conditions of Mobility

Abstract  Post-war welfare states were systems of membership which assumed stable national populations. From the early 1970s, these assumptions have been increasingly unrealistic, and governments have been forced to take measures both to absorb immigrant populations and to adapt their public sectors to a global market for collective goods. This chapter analyses how these processes have been managed in an era of growing disillusion with democracy. Keywords  Collective goods • Public sector • Democracy The freedom to choose where to live and work is a fundamental right in modern liberal democracies, distinguishing them from feudal societies in which serfs were tied to specific estates, and authoritarian regimes where mobility is either limited or directed by rulers. The moral equality of persons is also a basic principle of democratic politics; yet liberal democracy has no coherent theory of boundaries, or how members are chosen for, or themselves select, political communities. These are the underlying reasons why liberal democracy faces serious problems in reconciling the economic decisions of footloose and competitive individual agents with the social needs of more sedentary and vulnerable populations (Jordan and Düvell

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2003, ch. 1). Pestilence knows no borders either; in a globalised economy, coronavirus invaded every continent in little more than a fortnight. More recently, an added dilemma has been posed by issues of environmental sustainability. For example, the livelihoods and relationships with their habitats of forest-dwelling tribes in Brazil and traditional villagers in woodland Romania are both threatened by the incursions of loggers, and the developers who are felling trees to make space for new houses, factories and farms (BBC Radio 4, ‘From Our Own Correspondent’, 6th February, 2020). Such conflicts of interest have been parts of the histories of capitalism’s advance in all nations, but the combination of globalisation and democracy makes them anomalous and ethically challenging in our present age. The theory of boundaries and mobility can be addressed from a number of theoretical perspectives. First, that of national sovereignty claims that secure borders and well-defined memberships are necessary conditions for the international as well as the democratic political order of states. This suggests that controls on immigration are necessary for equality and justice among citizens, since countries could ‘export’ their political dissidents by intentionally persecuting them, or deal with social problems by dumping needy or criminal minorities on their neighbours (Weiner 2000). Conversely, another school of thought argues that national boundaries are increasingly irrelevant under globalisation, since other systems of membership (international companies, with staff from many countries, producing world-wide, or global social movements to resist pollution and climate change) might be more relevant and effective for the understanding of both mobility and belonging (Oates 1999). The UK after Brexit has been presented by some (such as Professor Patrick Minford and Lord Lilley) as a potential leader in such a global development (Waldegrave 2019, p. 84 and chs 9–12). A third group of theorists point to migration as a contributory factor in rising inequality and poverty world-wide, as mobility undermines the institutional structures of welfare states. This might demand more extensive and effective transnational schemes for income maintenance and health care, with special attention to the developing countries (Bauman 1998; Cole 2000). This chapter will address these issues from the standpoint of the challenges to social cohesion posed by a continuing rise in global mobility, both economic and political. It will consider the role of financial interests

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in this process (Shaxson 2018), as well as ones of democratic effectiveness (Bartels 2016). Some forms of mobility, of course, do not involve people in physical movement between organisations or jurisdictions; electronic transfers allow individuals to switch allegiance from one fund, firm, brand or club to another without leaving their computer screens, and this applies particularly to movements of money, including international currency exchanges. But this chapter will focus on systems involving interactions between members, especially states and their citizens. Historically, nomadic peoples, who paid no attention to political boundaries, were a large proportion of the world’s population, and a few do still exist in border regions, causing some puzzles for political authorities. But in today’s world the main challenges to the sovereignty and power of states come from economic organisations and their mobility, not that of such tribes. The potential for these challenges arises from the fact that new technologies have allowed international companies to supply many goods and services, which required an expensive infrastructure of buildings and technology, and previously could not easily exclude those who had not paid for them from their use. These had previously been treated as non-excludable ‘collective goods’, and provided by states. The obvious example is telephone networks; governments bore the huge costs of installing wires and cables, but now innovations like satellites and mobile phones have enabled commercial companies to restrict access to all but their own subscribers, who pay for calls and for internet connections. More recently, governments have also chosen to contract out the tasks of education, health care and public transport to companies, along with many other formerly national and local government responsibilities, such as prisons and the supply of water and drainage. The optimum population and geographical size for each of these goods (from an economic standpoint) may vary between them—hence the diversity of organisational arrangements under which they have come to be provided. Much of the employment in infrastructure services was heavy physical labour, and over time in the UK, British workers were increasingly reluctant to take it. After 1989, many immigrants from the former communist states of Central Europe were recruited for these tasks. In 2011, it was revealed that in the previous year there were 310,000 fewer home-born people in employment in the UK, and 180,000 more foreign-born (BBC Radio 4, Today, 11th November, 2011). In addition, the National Health

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Service and the social care system relied heavily on professionals from the European Union and the Commonwealth (Jordan and Düvell 2002). As a result, the former public infrastructure facilities and the health and social care systems were, by this time, contributing to immigration as much as they were to social cohesion. These workers were valued, and for the most part their contribution to the economy and society was recognised, but their numbers, and their concentration in certain districts, created opportunities for populist nationalist political parties to mobilise those who felt insecure about their economic prospects (and who had never been enthusiastic for the European Union). All of this meant that immigration could be presented as a threat to social cohesion, even when the causes lay in the individual and political choices of UK citizens themselves. Some economic changes did affect native populations’ employment and earnings in adverse ways. In October, 2012, well into the ‘recovery’ from the financial crash of 2007–08, official figures on unemployment were down, but full-time employment levels in the UK were still below those of the spring of 2008. The increase was mainly in part-time work, a quarter of a million in all, and much of this was reckoned to have been involuntary; self-employment, mostly in a small way, had also grown (BBC Radio 4, Today, 16th October, 2012). The long-term impact of the recession also varied between age groups. In 2013, the Institute for Fiscal Studies reported that the incomes of people over 60 in the UK had risen by 1– 2 per cent since 2008, whereas those of people in their 20s had fallen by 12 per cent (BBC Radio 4, News, 14th June, 2013). In general terms, these conditions in the UK labour market continued to favour the opportunities for young, single men, especially those from the EU accession countries, to find work, often with the intention of returning to their homes after a few years. But many in fact stayed longer, and some were joined by their families and settled. In this chapter, I shall analyse how the boundaries associated with national sovereignty, and with the systems previously providing services such as education, health and environmental facilities, have become more porous, as those with money, or with roles in international firms or agencies, or in search of opportunities for higher wages, move between states; and how the political priority for individual choice over social cohesion has contributed to new forms of organisational mobility, and weakened

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community solidarities. It has also, of course, provided vectors for illnesses such as coronavirus. All this has also contributed to mass movements of people without proper immigration status, whose journeys are facilitated by the fact that capitalism has transformed itself into a system of constant global movement of commodities and employees (Jordan and Düvell 2002). Irregular migration is, in turn, used as a rationale for the rise of authoritarianism in national politics (Jordan 2019).

States and Social Cohesion Nation states have been winning their autonomy from ancient Empires ever since the Treaty of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years’ War in 1648, and this process was completed with the independence of African and Asian colonies of European powers from the 1950s onwards, and the breakup of the Soviet Union after 1989. Unlike Empires, states (with democratic claims on their citizens) sought cohesion through a wide range of institutions, cultural as well as political and economic, through which citizens could identify common interests with each other, even when they were competitors in many fields. Welfare states were the main means for forging the solidarities which characterised programmes to re-create cohesion after the traumas of the Second World War. Both globalisation and the privatisation of public-­ sector institutions now pose new challenges for cohesion-building, with the risk that economic insecurity and disillusion with political leaderships will contribute to populist, authoritarian movements. From the perspective of national governments in the context of post-­ war insecurity and austerity, when the memory of pre-war mass unemployment and the threat of political extremism were still vivid, welfare states offered the promise of social inclusion and greater equality of incomes. Labour markets were reconstructed so as not to be simply competitive; the Continental European model in particular was focussed on the growth of overall living standards and of productivity. Unemployment insurance had existed for many years, and it had not prevented employers from laying off huge numbers of workers during the depression; they were now required to make severance payments. The combination of these and minimum wages meant that firms were given incentives to improve productivity, rather than exploiting and then sacking their workers (Blanchard 2002).

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In spite of resistance by many Non-Government Organisations (NGOs), trades unions, professions and community groups, the privatisation agenda was pushed through, starting in the UK and USA, from the 1980s onwards, and national governments were forced to choose between resisting this process or promoting their own international companies. The collapse of the Soviet satellite states after 1989 provided a range of new opportunities for the latter strategy, and UK firms were quickly in the processes of transforming their public services, as well as those in developing countries. Along with the USA, the British specialised in health and education companies (Hatcher 2001), and these opportunities were expanded by the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). Although all these initiatives proclaimed their goal of dismantling inefficient and self-serving state monopolies, they themselves were often able to capture lucrative contracts which excluded other potential providers. In the former Soviet sphere, including Central and Eastern Europe, the initiatives were sponsored by the International Monetary Fund, in China by the World Bank (Stiglitz 2002, chs 5 and 7). Within this new institutional framework, there was much scope for political struggles between global and regional regulatory regimes, and national governments. Freedom of movement for tourism, study and business had been established virtually across the globe, and was guaranteed by international agreements. An international convention upheld the rights of those who fled war and oppression to humanitarian protection. But national governments still determined who could gain residence and the right to work. The consequence of this potential clash between global and national systems was that periodic ‘moral panics’ about immigration and asylum-seeking were fanned by the media, especially in the UK, while race relations and the cultural basis for their citizenship became the focus for political dispute in the developed world. National sovereignty was pitted against international organisations in these conflicts, with issues over the use of coercive detentions and deportations often surfacing. Populist parties exploited these developments to their advantage, and in the new century became forces to be reckoned with in democratic politics.

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Policies for Cohesion-Building For obvious reasons, the need to improve social cohesion, once recognised by governments, was pitting fairly feeble national resources against the massive global pull of peripheral financial, productive and human forces. Policies for social inclusion were simultaneously combatting a decades-long trend towards greater inequality of incomes and residential segregation (Jordan 1996), and towards increased trans-border movements fleeing poverty and political oppression. In the UK, both New Labour, with Tony Blair’s Third Way, and the Conservatives, with David Cameron’s Big Society, tried to offset individualist consumerism (which had become the central cultural feature of this society) with elements of communitarianism. This strand in political thought had been developed by philosophers who referenced the ancient Greek traditions of Aristotle and his followers, emphasising the ‘common good’ produced by citizens as a shared project of self-rule (Jordan 1989, pp. 69–73). These ideas had been revived by MacIntyre (1981), and were later developed by Sandel (2009, 2010). Community was an alternative source of well-being to consumption, and mutuality an alternative source of support to marketed services. Cameron was influenced by the author Phillip Blond, the self-styled ‘Red Tory’ (2010), who denounced free-market capitalism and the culture of competitive individualism. He argued for the revival of a ‘moral market’, in which co-operative enterprises and the promotion of personal relationships of loyalty and trust would give rise to higher levels of well-­ being (pp. 189–195). The policies through which these ideas were implemented were not pursued with sufficient vigour (or funding) to offset individualist consumerism; after the financial crash, attention quickly focussed on the banks, the economy and public spending cuts, and these initiatives were largely neglected. Since then, both in the USA and the UK, as well as on the European Continent, authoritarian ideas and populist movements have gained increasing support (Jordan 2019), with anti-immigration policies at their heart. It could be argued that this phenomenon was a sign that policies for social cohesion had either failed or not been implemented at all. The truth seems to be that there was never any clarity about how these policies should be carried through, or their success measured. Instead, there were

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half-hearted efforts to distribute funds to community groups, and to carry out community development work in very deprived neighbourhoods. However, ideas which go against the prevailing current can survive, and in turn re-appear as parts of the cultures of organisations outside the dominant, official mainstream. An example of this in the UK has been the notion of social value. This was first used to explain the differentiated distribution of well-being in societies (Jordan 2008a, b). It was clear from research (Helliwell 2003, 2006; Layard 2005) that the well-being levels of individuals depended to a very large extent on the quality of their relationships, including ones with close family members, friends and neighbours, and fellow-members of communities and nations. What was less well accounted for in these studies was how these accumulations of well-being were actually created. The concept of social value was deployed to describe how this occurred when people interacted with each other, and that this applied to intimate, neighbourly and civic relationship (Jordan 2008a, chs. 10 and 11). These interactions consisted of exchanges of social value, and allowed the recognition of a vital source of well-being which was quite different (in kind, and in its mode of creation) from the economic value accruing as ‘welfare’ (individual ‘utility’), which was related to individual earnings and consumption expenditures. Surprisingly, the concept of social value had first been deployed in 1908 by the famous economist Joseph Schumpeter, to distinguish between the value of collective facilities and that of private property and consumption goods. But no other economist seems to have used it subsequently, at least none who is remembered for doing so. I was unaware of Schumpeter’s (1908) essay when I coined the term in 2008, with a different meaning. The differentiation between value as utility in welfare economics, and social value in the processes of generating human flourishing, helped to explain why well-being levels seemed to have ‘stalled’ at their 1980s levels in the UK and USA, and some other developed economies (Layard 2005), despite the increases in national incomes in that period. Obviously this ‘stalling’ was importantly related to stagnating levels of salaries and higher returns to capital, and to the consequent increase in inequality (Wilkinson and Pickett 2009). But it was also related to the quality of relationships in these societies, especially the transition from industrial economies with large public sectors to ones in which most employment was in services, and the collective provision formerly supplied by states had largely been contracted out to commercial, often international, companies.

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It therefore seemed that, while services which involved many face-to-­ face interactions between workers and their clients/customers were clearly very important potential sources of well-being, it was the quality of these which was at stake in aggregate figures, forming the basis of comparisons between nations or social groups. ‘Stalled well-being’ could best be accounted for in terms of the effects of the commercial logic applied to service provision, including the former public services. This required workers, including professionals such as doctors, nurses, teachers and social workers, to account for their performances to managers in terms of outputs and attainments which could be measured in quantifiable, ultimately economic terms. As a consequence, the relational aspects of interactions in services tended to be discounted, to the detriment of the well-being of both workers and customers/clients. Not only were shops and supermarkets fitted with machines enabling the latter to check out their own purchases; even professional services deployed internet-based technologies for much of their business. Only quantifiable outputs counted in a world driven by economic efficiency. And yet the notion of social value has survived, rather surprisingly. In the UK, a large number of voluntary agencies have been using it as a standard for assessing their contributions to the communities they serve, and to plan their future deployments. As long as this continues to inform the work of an extensive network of organisations, spanning the whole country, it is capable of providing a way to re-evaluate social interactions more generally, and to reform public policies in the pursuit of improved well-being. But this very potential has already been spotted by commercial interests, intent on converting it to their use. While I was writing this chapter, I was astonished to receive an e-mail from the ‘Public Sector Executive (PSE)’—an agency for fostering partnerships with the private sector— illustrating this. Something calling itself ‘episode 005 of the #WeArePSE Podcast’ (27th January, 2020), proclaimed that ‘understanding the economic benefits of social value, embedding social value in how businesses deliver’ was available, and ‘social value is transforming the relationship between the public and the private sector’. The CEO of the Social Value Portal would speak about ‘the impact of this relationship, and how it can add an extra 25p per £1 spent in communities’. It concluded, ‘If you still consider “social value” to be a bit of a buzzword, and want to know the impact it can have on communities, this podcast is for you’. It described the podcast as ‘entertaining and original’ (see Chap. 4, pp. 53–54).

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What this seems to show is that the distinction between the well-being generated through relationships and gains in utility through markets is always vulnerable to predatory commercial interests. The repeated mention of ‘communities’ as targets for what is essentially a business initiative shows that the agency in question is aware that social value is a property of human interactions, including civic ones, but that it seeks to convert gains through relationships into cash. There is no pretence here of a concern for social cohesion-building, and I would expect this initiative to have the opposite effect.

Conclusions The previous section indicates that there does still exist another way to understand, evaluate and enable social interactions, besides that which promotes mobility and individual choice in markets. Yet in the present cultural, political and economic climate, these are certainly the dominant standards applied to decisions and policies, as illustrated with the last example. A disturbing instance of this was the revelation that tens of thousands of UK citizens suffering from dementia were being taken by their families to be placed in care homes in Thailand (BBC Radio 4, You and Yours, 5th February, 2020). Because the reform of financial support for social care for this group in our (ageing) population has been repeatedly postponed by successive governments, and costs have been rising exponentially in this country, this opportunity to find affordable care has been advertised and taken up for these very large numbers of old people in desperate need. It can hardly be overlooked that these placements, beyond the reach of the authorities who inspect and approve care homes in the UK to officially set standards, both isolates these residents from their previous social networks, and exposes them to risks of neglect and abuse. Another instance of serious jeopardy to the well-being of citizens has been the suicide rate of claimants of disability benefits as a result of their disqualification for these by officials of the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). This issue, highlighted in the Ken Loach film I, Daniel Blake, was a consequence of the Department for Work and Benefits contracting out assessment of ‘work capability’ to private companies. In 2014–15, a million claimants were re-assessed, and 591 suicides were recorded. The National Audit Office noted that the DWP did not check that disqualified claimants had been interviewed (several claimants who

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spoke on the programme said they had not), or attempt to identify trends such as suicides from reviews of the system. The Labour MP, Stephen Timms, Chair of the Work and Pensions Select Committee of the House of Commons, commented that there was a culture of getting people off their books in the DWP, without considering the consequences (BBC Radio 4, Today, 7th February, 2020). Such examples point to a culture of impersonal rule-enforcement in public agencies, which has prevailed as these values and standards became more and more dominant across the economy and society in the UK. Another manifestation of this was an enormous rise in County Court Judgement orders (CCJs) for debt, often involving small amounts, in 2019. Out of some one-and-a-half million such orders, 160,000 were against young adults, aged under 25. There appeared to be two main reasons for the steep rise in CCJs for this age-group: many were on ‘zero-­ hours contracts’ of employment, and so had very variable and unpredictable earnings; and—linked to this—many had taken out pay-day loans, or other expensive forms of credit. It was noted that local authorities were among the main bodies responsible for the rise in CCJs (BBC Radio 4, Moneybox, 8th February, 2020). Mobility and migration were behind the spread of the coronavirus in the early months of 2020. Originating in a fish market in Wuhan, China, it quickly reached other cities before quarantines and travel bans could be imposed by the central government, by which time it had killed several doctors and nurses, including the man who had first tried to raise the alarm about its deadly threat. Soon it had spread to countries in every continent, illustrating the reach of Chinese trade; the UK government organised air evacuation of its citizens and some of their families, as well as isolation camps for them on their return, but a few soon developed the virus. The relationship between the extension of the infection and mobility for economic purposes was illustrated by the visits to five countries by one UK businessman who eventually developed symptoms (BBC 1TV, The Andrew Marr Show, 10th February, 2020). There have, of course, been many benefits from increased mobility and human migration. In its World Development Report 2000/2001, Attacking Poverty, the World Bank (2001) claims that globalisation has raised living standards and benefitted whole populations. Some theorists of citizenship have argued that the concept can extend the benefits of its rights and protections transnationally (Bauböck 1994). But this chapter has illustrated the fragility of institutions for social cohesion in the face of mass

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immigration and the growth of inequalities among populations. The next chapter will develop these themes.

References Bartels, L.  M. (2016). Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bauböck, R. (1994). Transnational Citizenship: Membership and Rights in International Migration. Aldershot: Edward Elgar. Bauman, Z. (1998). Globalization: The Human Consequences. Cambridge: Polity. Blanchard, O. (2002). Labour Market Flexibility and Labour Market Institutions. Paper Presented at a Conference ‘Beyond Transition’, CASE Foundation, Warsaw, April 12–13. Blond, P. (2010). Red Tory: How Left and Right Have Broken Britain and How We Can Fix It. London: Faber and Faber. Cole, P. (2000). Philosophies of Social Exclusion: Liberal Political Theory and Immigration. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hatcher, R. (2001). The Business of Education: How Business Agendas Drive Labour Policies for Schools. Stafford: Socialist Educational Association. Helliwell, J. F. (2003). How’s Life? Combining Individual and National Variables Subjective Well-Being. Economic Modelling, 20, 331–360. Helliwell, J. F. (2006). Well-Being, Social Capital and Public Policy: What’s New? Economic Journal, 116(510), C34–C45. Jordan, B. (1989). The Common Good: Citizenship, Morality and Self-Interest. Oxford: Blackwell. Jordan, B. (1996). A Theory of Poverty and Social Exclusion. Cambridge: Polity (Republished by Rawat Publications, New Delhi, India, 2015). Jordan, B. (2008a). Welfare and Well-Being: Social Value in Public Policy. Bristol: Policy Press. Jordan, B. (2008b). Social Value in Policies for Children: Contract or Culture? Journal of Children’s Services, 3(3), 23–39. Jordan, B. (2019). Authoritarianism and How to Counter It. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Jordan, B., & Düvell, F. (2002). Immigration, Asylum and Welfare: The European Context. Critical Social Policy, 22(3), 498–517. Jordan, B., & Düvell, F. (2003). Migration: The Boundaries of Equality and Justice. Cambridge: Polity. Layard, R. (2005). Happiness: Lessons from a New Science. London: Allen Lane. MacIntyre, A. (1981). After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. London: Duckworth. Oates, W. E. (1999). An Essay on Fiscal Federalism. Journal of Economic Literature, 27, 1120–1149.

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Sandel, M. (2009, June). The Prospects for a Politics of the Common Good. BBC Reith Lectures, Radio 4. Sandel, M. (2010, April 20). Introduction: As Frustration with Politics Builds, It Is Time to Define What We Mean by a Good Life. The Guardian (Supplement on ‘Citizen Ethics’), p. 1. Schumpeter, J. (1908). The Concept of Social Value. Quarterly Economic Journal, 23, 213–232. Shaxson, N. (2018). The Finance Curse: How Global Finance is Making Us All Poorer. London: Bodley Head. Stiglitz, J. (2002). Globalization and Its Discontents. London: Allen Lane. Waldegrave, W. (2019). Three Circles into One: Brexit Britain: How Did We Get Here and What Happens Next? London: Mensch Publishing. Weiner, M. (2000). Ethics, National Sovereignty and the Control of Immigration. International Migration Review, 30(1), 67–93. Wilkinson, R., & Pickett, K. (2009). The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. London: Allen and Unwin. World Bank. (2001). World Development Report, 2000/2001: Attacking Poverty. Washington, DC: World Bank/Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 3

Global Capitalism, Inequality and Insecurity

Abstract  In countries as diverse as the USA, France, Germany, the Lebanon, Iran and Hong Kong, mass protests have been mobilised against governments about insecurity of employment and earnings. Apart from a small international financial elite, a growing proportion of citizens feel at risk, and recognise that their standards of living are likely to stagnate or fall. This chapter analyses the likely future course of such trends. Keywords  Protest • Risk • Finance Towards the end of the last century, theorists sought to classify varieties of capitalism and their characteristic welfare states (Esping-Andersen 1990). Others developed ‘world systems theory’ (Frank 1998; Arrighi 1994), analysing relationship between the global power of the USA and the rise of China. Then came the financial crash, and the programmes of cut-backs in social expenditures. In the past decade, the longer-term consequences of globalisation—growing evidence of inequality and insecurity among employees and those excluded from the labour market (Standing 2017)— were accompanied by mass protests in many countries world-wide (Malleson 2014). This has been evidenced by the demonstrations by younger people against the consequences of global capitalism all over the world. But it has also given rise to the cultural recognition of these issues, such as the © The Author(s) 2021 B. Jordan, Immigration, Social Cohesion and Political Reaction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52708-2_3

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Oscar-­winning South Korean film Parasite, receiving its award on 10 February 2020 (BBC Radio 4, News). In a study led by Professor Colin Mayer, a report by the British Academy found that the UK has the most extreme form of capitalism in the world, with the pursuit of profit for shareholders’ returns not mitigated by any other purposes (such as social justice or ecology). Any aims other than efficiency and shareholder value were considered anomalous (BBC Radio 4, Today, 27th November, 2019). The clearest expression of this was that richest 10 per cent of London residents were 280 times wealthier than the poorest 20 per cent (BBC Radio 4, Something Understood, 12th January, 2020). This did not necessarily reflect high levels of expertise among the one-and-a-half million employed in the burgeoning financial sector; in his broadcast of his Desert Island Discs, author Michael Lewis revealed that, when he was employed in the City as a financial adviser, he was ‘completely clueless’, yet was paid £200,000 a year; when he revealed this on social media, it caused a panic among his former superiors, not because they denied it was true but lest it became widely known. At the other end of the income scale, the BBC Radio 4 programme The Fix (15th January, 2020) found that 16 million UK citizens had less than £100  in savings, and one in ten was in significant debt. They were not covered for events such as the loss of a job, leading to borrowing, interest payments and rising debt. This could cause non-payment of rent and eviction from their homes; up to 40 per cent of council spending in one London Borough was on caring for children disproportionately from families in debt. It has serious implications for the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, as hundreds of thousands are laid off work, and the Universal Credit system is unable to respond promptly to their needs. In the follow-up programme on 22 January, this council’s attempts to address this problem were explored. A committee of financial experts, entrepreneurs and architects had produced a report, showing that overspending (often on a single event, such as a wedding) was as common a cause of these debts as persistent poverty, and that borrowing, often to pay interest on loans for items such as ‘white goods’, was very widespread. But most poverty and inequality did not stem from actions of this kind. On 20 June 2019, the BBC Radio 4 Today programme reported that there had been an increase from 13 per cent to 18 per cent of households containing at least one member in work with less than 60 per cent of median earnings; the increase in housing costs and cuts in Tax Credits were blamed

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for this deterioration in their position. A single father said that he was scarcely better off than if he had been unemployed. The consequences of the polarisation of incomes and rise in poverty in the UK were confirmed in a report on health inequalities by Institute of Health Equity, published on 25 February, 2020. The chair of this review, Professor Michael Marmot of University College London, said that it was ‘highly likely’ that the huge divergences between life-expectancy among income groups in different parts of the country were attributable to economic factors. For women in the poorest 10 per cent of areas, life expectancy has actually declined; the previous seven-year difference between that of both men and women in the richest and the poorest parts of England had increased to nine years for men and nearly eight for women, and life expectancy in a deprived area of the North-East is nearly five years lower than in a comparable part of London (‘The Long Shadow of Austerity’, New Statesman, 28th February, 2020, p. 5). There had already been plenty of evidence of the consequences of these trends. More than 1.6 million emergency parcels had been distributed by Trussell Trust Food Banks all over the UK in the year up to March, 2019. Rough sleeping had increased in England by 165 per cent since 2010. The proportion of members of working families in the UK living in poverty was at a record high (56 per cent), and child poverty had reached 4.5 million after rising for four years running (ibid.). But these phenomena were not unique to the UK; statistics for the Netherlands were very similar and only Denmark of the countries in North-West Europe achieved increases. Of the Mediterranean countries, Italy, Spain and Greece saw some improvements, despite austerity (BBC Radio 4, ‘Life Expectancy’, 10th September, 2019). All this points to a form of global capitalism which has led to such growth in inequalities, as the thriving financial sector makes income from the poverty of the bottom fifth of earners. The UK was, despite these phenomena, one of the developed countries with the fewest mass protests (since 2011) about capitalism and its consequences; in many others, these led to the fall of governments, or even of whole regimes. In this chapter, I shall investigate how these mobilised, and their consequences. In many ways, these protests were delayed reactions to the financial crisis of ten years earlier. Banks had irresponsibly built up mountains of credit, and their collapse in 2007–08, followed by government bail-outs, austerity and cuts in public benefits and services, left all but the rich (many of whom had caused the crisis) in an economically vulnerable situation.

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Because wages and salaries have stagnated since then, while the wealth of financiers and their followers has swelled, the anger is very understandable. The crash had exposed the myths on which previous illusory prosperity had been based. The housing boom in the USA, echoed in the UK, had created an illusion of ‘independent’ households and individuals, making choices from all the goods produced in global markets—opportunities derived from the almost magical capacity to make money out of money (Stiglitz et al. 2006), and prosperity out of debt, proclaimed as the ‘Third Way’ of Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Suddenly, this had been revealed to be an enormous bubble, and the relationships based on ‘information, incentives and contracts’ (Halpern 2010) which had been so elaborately constructed, to be fatally fragile (Jordan 2010). In the aftermath of these setbacks, the relentless expansion of the parts of labour markets consisting of insecure, part-time, occasional employment and self-employment has left people increasingly reliant on means-­ tested benefits such as Tax Credits, and vulnerable to coercion from the authorities to take such work, under threat of reductions in or disqualifications from these subsidies (Jordan 1996, 2005, 2010, 2019, 2020a, b). The increase in the use of these sanctions has been marked in recent years, in societies as diverse as the UK and Denmark (Haagh 2019a, b). Because the oldest generation has been least affected by these developments (for instance, in the UK the value of state pensions has been sustained by increases almost in line with inflation), there have been indications of a clash between this group and young adults, in which the Brexit referendum vote was an example. Twice as large a proportion of over-65s voted leave as under-25s; the latter blamed the former for creating debt and pollution, the former said that young people were childish (BBC Radio 4, ‘OK, Boomer’, presented by Rhys Jones, 3rd March, 2020). The programme pointed out that such generational conflicts had been part of Western history since the time of Aristotle’s Ancient Greece; wealthy Athens had overreached itself and had gone into decline after its conflict with Sparta in the Peloponnesian War, and power was seized from the democratically elected elite by ‘The Four Hundred’, young patriots who soon lost their control of the state, but left their mark. With unemployment among young people at 50 per cent in recent years, the lesson from the fifth century BC was relevant. Similar, though largely non-violent, generation clashes occurred in nineteenth-century Britain, in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars

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(political reaction versus liberal reform and a wider franchise), during the ‘railway age’, as older people struggled to keep up with the pace of industrial transformation, and later in the century, with the advent of Darwin’s theory of evolution and the collapse of religious faith. In the 1960s, a new generation in the USA rejected war, racial segregation and nuclear weapons, and marched for civil rights—the term ‘generation gap’ was coined. As the programme pointed out, most young people did not in fact support the new Left, and most voted in Richard Nixon as President in 1972. In many ways, Americans prefer to think of issues in terms of generational divides rather than class ones; the idea of belonging to a whole birth-cohort is appealing to them. But, as Karl Mannheim pointed out before the Second World War, such conflicts can signal incompatible responses to crises, and hence profound political problems. As in the 1930s, these recent developments help explain the global growth in authoritarian regimes (Jordan 2019). Insecurity and resentment by those just outside the earnings levels to qualify for such subsidies, yet at risk of falling into that situation, fuelled the demand for leaderships which gave them better living standards and were tougher on impoverished minorities, especially racial minorities. This was most obvious in the USA, with Donald Trump’s campaign defined in terms of a border wall against Mexican and South American immigrants, and Hungary, where Viktor Orbán’s government built a fence to keep out refugees from civil wars and persecutions in the Middle East. These protests did not all have a clear goal, and they were directed against a variety of leaderships, some of which had fairly recently been established in the wake of the previous round of demonstrations. But they were all pointing to the consequences of global capitalism—growing inequality and insecurity of incomes. These will be the focus of this chapter.

World-Wide Demonstrations Against Inequality Whereas the previous round of mass protests all over the world was against dictatorships and in favour of democracy, the most recent ones were for the fairer distribution of income and wealth in societies, some of which had recently become more democratic in their political constitutions. These included the Lebanon, Iraq, Iran and Hong Kong, where protesters risked violent police responses to demand these reforms. Iran was a particularly confusing example of a mixture between economic and political protest. A huge crowd attended the funeral procession

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for General Soleimani, killed by a drone attack in Iraq, organised by the USA, on the decision of President Trump. The demonstration was organised by Hezbollah, the international group sponsored by the Iranian regime, and militantly anti-Western in its religious loyalties. But it was also directed at the Iraq government, seen as corrupt and enriching itself at the expense of the people (BBC Radio 4, From Our Own Correspondent, 11th and 18th January, 2020). In Hong Kong, pro-democracy demonstrations over many weeks embarrassed the island’s government and the authorities in mainland China. The mobilisations took place in protest against the proposed deportation of dissidents to the mainland, under an Extradition Bill, and forced the authorities to back down (BBC World Service, News, 9th July, 2019). These actions were followed by protests in France and Spain, resisting ‘flexible’ use of labour power by firms such as Amazon, and in the transport industry, where traditional trades unions combined with student protesters, adopting the slogan ‘We’re Human Beings, Not Robots’, and rallying support from demonstrations in the USA also (Libération, 7th August, 2019, p. 4). In a French TV documentary called ‘The New Poor: When Work is not Enough’ (Channel A11, 28th January, 2020), claimed that a third the European labour market were now in situations of insecurity. One of the interviewees was Guy Standing, author of The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, in which he used this French term—coined by the celebrated French social scientist, Thomas Picketty (2014)—to chart the growth of a phenomenon which had been first identified as a ‘class’ in the UK in the early 1970s (Jordan 1973). He pointed out that their employment contracts gave them no social protection, making the smallest mistake, an illness or an accident into a catastrophe. He went on, ‘But even more seriously, there is the fact that no one any longer has a professional identity which allows him or her a definition of their life. And this contributes to the creation of what we sociologist call “existential insecurity”. When one lives only fragments of a life, one cannot make sense of it’ (Télérama 3655, 29th January, 2020). It also explains the sudden appearance of a previously invisible portion of the population in the mass protest movement, the Gilets Jaunes. The class of precarious workers had been expanding without forming an identifiable category; the new mass protest movement gave them a collective identity. The TV programme also identified a process through which such

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people had been systematically excluded from districts in France now occupied by rich people, a dynamic already experienced in the USA and UK in previous decades (Wilson 1987, 1989; Jordan 1973, 1996). However, the numbers of precarious workers were also closely related to immigration. For instance, in the UK, when she was Home Secretary, Theresa May promised to create a ‘hostile environment’ for immigrants without proper status. But this took no account of the desperate circumstances in which many asylum seekers had fled their countries of origin, or the lack of support or advice most of them had when they first arrived in the country. In a harrowing account (BBC Radio 4, Women’s Hour, 11th February, 2020), a lesbian asylum seeker from Cameroon, who had been raped by police while in custody in her own country, told how she managed to reach the UK with no contacts here, and no idea about her rights as a refugee. Having managed to apply for asylum, she was refused, and was therefore not only ineligible for benefits but also not allowed to work or rent her own accommodation, despite the fact that she had appealed against this refusal. So, without income or accommodation, sleeping on buses overnight, and sheltering in a library by day, eventually she resorted to prostitution, before being allowed to stay with a friend and receive £10 a week for household tasks. At the time of the programme’s interview with her, she was waiting for a hearing of her appeal for Leave to Remain. Commenting on this case, a solicitor working as an adviser to asylum seekers said that she knew of over 100 women who, as a result of having their first applications refused, had experienced this kind of destitution. She thought that the Home Office was more likely to disbelieve women’s stories than men’s; 80 per cent of the women she represented had experienced sexual violence, mainly from the police in their countries of origin. But some of these women were now forming groups for mutual support and campaigning for better implementation of their rights.

Conclusions The process of globalisation has been enabled by technological innovations, such as the internet. In this, the financial sector was given an advantage over trade in goods, and—immeasurably—over migration of people. By 2009, there was a secret building in New Jersey, USA, where high-­ powered computers, owned by banks and trading companies, kept in

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ultra-high secrecy cages, occupied an area the size of three football pitches. By being lined up close to each other, these machines can communicate each trade in stocks and bonds in a time of 30 millionths of a second (i.e. 4000,000 transactions a second). The algorithms with which they are programmed allow them to buy and sell within fractions of a second, with such a system, among the largest in New York stock exchange, being the equivalent at that time of the whole London market—all constructed within two years. High-frequency trading of this kind was reckoned to make up 70 per cent of the US market transactions by that time (BBC Radio 4, File on Four, 3rd November, 2009). No wonder, then, that the financial sector, which adopted such systems in every major centre with a concentration of banks, became the fastest growing in these countries. What became clearer over time, however, was that this form of finance capitalism was predatory on other sectors of the economies in which it grew. Like a cancer, it fed on other businesses, weakening and eventually destroying them. In his The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer (2018), Nicholas Shaxson writes that ‘the banks have gained a stranglehold over governments, already oversold on market economics, with a rhetoric of national competitiveness’ (p. 13). This has been deployed to gain tax cuts and financial deregulation, and enable the laundering of the proceeds of financial crime. Its methods have included sports and entertainment sponsorship, and hospitality for the aristocracy and plutocracy at high-status society gatherings and events, such as leading horse-­ racing meets. This whole strategy has successfully sold the concept of ‘UKplc’ as a global competitor, while actually enabling the rapid rise of Chinese financial institutions. Shaxson argues that this in turn ‘has led to some of our worst nightmares: poverty, soaring inequality, rising social conflict, economic crisis and stagnation, cross-border organised crime, and lawless elites lording it over the rest of us with impunity’ (p. 266). He quotes the Financial Times columnist Rana Foroohar (2018), saying that the big question for this century will be ‘which country will be better able to control its moneyed elite?’ This version of capitalism has transformed every aspect of global society, including migration and policies for social cohesion, and this in turn has enabled the rise of authoritarian politics. In their book, Le Triomphe de L’Injustice: Richesse, Évasion Fiscale et Démocratie (The Triumph of Injustice: Wealth, Tax Evasion and Democracy) (2020), Emmanuel Saez

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and Gabriel Zucman argue that a tiny proportion of the US population are devouring a growing proportion of the nation’s wealth, turning the country into an oligarchy—0.1 per cent of Americans now own the same proportion as 90 per cent of the remaining citizens. They trace the history of progressive taxation in the country from the time when President F.D. Roosevelt introduced it (at a maximum 93 per cent) during the Second World War, stating in 1942 that ‘no American should have an income after tax of more than $25,000’ ($1,000,000 in today’s terms), and that any greater concentration of wealth also denoted a concentration of power, a capacity to influence public policy and markets, to create monopolies to buy newspapers, and to impose an ideology. They show how Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, insisting that all the problems of the USA were problems of government, began the process by which the great mass of Americans now pay income tax at a rate of 25–30 per cent, whereas billionaires pay an effective rate of 23 per cent. In 1980, the 1 per cent of highest income earners gained only 10 per cent of GDP; this has doubled, while those of the 122 million Americans have remained the same in real terms. Today, some multi-billionaires pay proportionately less tax than their secretaries. The tech companies which have generated fabulous wealth for their founders have, of course, dispersed their operations to a variety of tax havens, such as Bermuda. There Google in 2018 declared 20 billion dollars’ profits (all transferred to banks on that island for the purpose of tax avoidance). As a candidate for the presidency, Bernie Saunders has promised to re-impose taxation on the richest of the proportions of the Roosevelt era, and Elizabeth Warren has followed suit. While these economic consequences of globalisation were the only issues at stake, political leaderships could point to the gains for the majority of their populations from globalisation, and adopt coercive policies for the stigmatised minorities who have lost out. But now the coronavirus pandemic has exposed the whole body of citizens, including the globally mobile rich, to the risks of infection, an entirely new dynamic has been introduced. The national state has become the main actor in protecting its citizens, and both measures for public health and the maintenance of the incomes of everyone in their societies, have emerged as urgent necessities. In the next chapter, I shall turn to the transformation of the institutions of civil societies.

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References Arrighi, G. (1994). The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times. London: Verso (2010). Esping-Andersen, G. (1990). The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity. Foroohar, R. (2018, July 1). US and China Must Find Ways to Control Their Elites. Financial Times. Frank, A.  G. (1998). Re-orient: Global Economy in the Asian Age. Berkeley: University of California Press. Haagh, L. (2019a). The Case for Universal Basic Income. Cambridge: Polity. Haagh, L. (2019b). Public State Ownership with Varieties of Capitalism: Regulatory Foundations for Welfare and Freedom. International Journal of Public Policy, 15(1/2), 153–184. Halpern, D. (2010). The Hidden Wealth of Nations. Cambridge: Polity. Jordan, B. (1973). Paupers: The Making of the New Claiming Class. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul (Republished 2019). Jordan, B. (1996). A Theory of Poverty and Social Exclusion. Oxford: Blackwell (Republished by Rawat Publications, New Delhi, India, 2015). Jordan, B. (2005). Social Policy for the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: Polity. Jordan, B. (2010). Why the Third Way Failed: Economics, Morality and the Origins of the ‘Big Society’. Bristol: Policy Press. Jordan, B. (2019). Authoritarianism and How to Counter It. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Jordan, B. (2020a). Automation and Human Solidarity. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Jordan, B. (2020b). The Age of Disintegration: Nations, Collectives and Public Policy. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Malleson, T. (2014). After Occupy: Economic Democracy for the 21st Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Picketty, T. (2014). Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Saez, E., & Zucman, G. (2020). Le Triomphe de l’injustice: Richesse, évasion fiscale et démocratie. Paris: éditions du Seuil. Shaxson, N. (2018). The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer. London: Bodley Head. Standing, G. (2017). The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay. London: Biteback.

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Stiglitz, J. E., Ocampo, J. A., Spiegel, S., Ffrench-Davis, R., & Najjar, D. (2006). Stability with Growth: Macroeconomics, Liberalism and Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wilson, W.  J. (1987). The Truly Disadvantaged: The Underclass, the Ghetto and Public Policy. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Wilson, W.  J. (1989). The Underclass. The Annals of the American Academy of Political Science, 501, 182–192.

CHAPTER 4

Family, Health and Well-Being

Abstract  Particularly in the USA, life expectancy has been falling, as rates of obesity, drug and alcohol abuse grow. Research has found that people feel rushed and family time is reduced, despite the potential for labour-­ saving technological innovations. This chapter sets out the evidence of studies on these issues, and how the quality of relationships might be improved, at the levels of households, neighbourhoods and wider communities. Keywords  Strain • Relationships • Community The stagnation of national levels of subjective well-being (SWB) since the early 1980s in the developed economies has been shown to be related to the quality of relationships of all kinds (intimate, family, community and civic), and to inequality of earnings and wealth (Layard 2005). This chapter will examine recent evidence of the origins of these trends, and how they have influenced overall social cohesion. In the USA, life expectancy for people of working age is falling. The causes of rising early death include obesity, alcohol and drug abuse and suicide. The highest rates of all of these are in the rustbelt states of former industrial production, now in economic decline (BBC Radio 4, News, 27th November, 2019). In the UK, in 2011 it had been announced that there had been a been a 75 per cent increase in the rate of patients © The Author(s) 2021 B. Jordan, Immigration, Social Cohesion and Political Reaction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52708-2_4

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returning to hospital after discharge since the turn of the century; this had been blamed on mechanistic target-setting and failures in the system of social care (BBC Radio 4, Today, 30th December, 2011); the latter still had not been reformed, despite repeated government pledges, by the end of the decade. Worldwide, 13 per cent of young people were unemployed in 2012, according to the International Labour Office (BBC World Service, News, 22nd May, 2012). All these instances fed into the failure of well-­being to increase during this period; the progress in fields such as health and education of the years after the Second World War had not been sustained. These facts focus attention on the micro-level constituents of social cohesion. It is clear that immigrants, many of them with strong commitments to their religious faiths and the moral codes (or at least to the formal cultural practices) that these prescribe, are entering societies in which the basic social units have been weakened by economic change, and the ideologies of those political movements which have applied the new logic of individualism and choice to collective life. Above all, these policies substituted the notion of market-like preferences among competing agents in the economy for ones of exchanges of esteem and mutual support between members of the social units of societies (Jordan 2008a, chs. 2, 11 and 12). Inevitably, this weakened cultural bonds and institutions for social integration, and strengthened consumerism and property-ownership, often to the reflective regret of those who acted under these forces, but looked back wistfully to an earlier age of more integrated societies (Pusey 2003; Jordan et al. 1994). Pusey conducted a survey of 403 white Australian citizens in all the major cities of the Eastern seaboard, all with household incomes below the top 10 per cent and above the bottom 20 per cent; he also held focus groups to discuss the issues they had raised. Between 1945 and 1980, Australia had had one of the most egalitarian income distribution patterns in the developed world, even more equal than that of Sweden, and this was the result of patterns of earnings, not state redistribution, achieved by systems of ‘wage-fixing and arbitration’ (Castles 1985). There were also import tariffs, which started to be removed between the 1960s and 1980s. But under Labour governments in the next two decades, Australia became among the three most unequal countries in the developed world, with the incomes of the lowest 70 per cent of households falling in real terms (Gregory 1996, p. 5), and with men’s earnings actually falling; this was compensated by higher female labour-market participation (Gregory

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1998). It also had the second-highest proportion of part-time and casual employment (Pusey 2003, p. 81). His interviewees constantly mourned the passing of the ‘fair go’ system of earnings equality during the post-war era, blaming large corporations, the government and the greed of rich individuals, regarding market forces as corrosive of family, community and civic relationships. Some blue-collar workers were ‘survivors’, who had adopted the new values; other ‘battlers’ denounced every manifestation of them. ‘North Shore people’ had gained from the transformation through links with banks and international companies, and ‘improvers’ (graduates in professional roles) were mostly critical of the social and political transformation. The most interesting finding was that the majority who lamented this also criticised the effects on civic behaviour (including their own), on solidarity and mutual support and on family life. Although they saw gains in women’s independence as positive, they deplored the economic necessity for them to take employment (Pusey 2003, pp.  84–88). Furthermore, they acknowledged their own preferences for activities and associations for individual ‘self-improvement’ (such as educational qualifications) over ones for social solidarity (p. 119). These findings were similar to the ones uncovered in the UK study of labour-market decisions in higher-income households in the mid-1990s (Jordan et  al. 1994). Here too, some members of aspiring households, whose decisions had prioritised ‘careers’ with promotions and pensions, and home ownership in sought-after districts, and especially those who had chosen private education for their children in order to give them the same advantages, recognised that these actions contradicted their values (equal citizenship in a democratic society, and social justice for all). One respondent even reflected ruefully on his own decisions, saying ‘I’m supposed to be a socialist!’ (p. 97). In his Reith Lectures in 2012, Niall Ferguson had drawn attention to the decline in those civil society organisations in the USA and UK which had predominantly working-class memberships. In his view, this was clearly a failure of public education; declining standards had in turn led to unemployment and passivity, he claimed. But capitalism, with its priority for consumption over cultural improvements, was also a major factor, he argued (BBC Radio 4, 10th July, 2012). In this chapter, I shall show how these features of social relations in Western societies, emerging at the turn of the century, have become more prominent in the past two decades, and how immigration has impacted

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upon them. Here, the greatest mobility is that of capital and its operatives in the financial sector, and its least mobile the poor in every society (even migrants who arrive with no resources in the West as refugees are mostly well-educated, come from middle-class backgrounds, and are quickly more employable than indigenous impoverished citizens). As one analysts of financial globalisation puts it, ‘choice’ over collective goods such as political infrastructures is largely reserved for the rich: In a world of rising inequality this kind of “competition” is always and generically harmful, for it rewards the big multinationals, global banks, wealthy individuals and owners of flighty capital, who can easily shift profits and themselves across borders, shop for the best deal, the lowest taxes, the least-unionised workers, the greatest secrecy for their financial affairs or the most lax financial regulations and threaten to go elsewhere if they don’t get state handouts. This “competition” systematically shifts wealth upwards from the poor to the rich, distorting our economies and undermining our communities and democracies. (Shaxson 2018, pp. 47–8)

Diamond (2019) asserts quite unequivocally that the developed country with the greatest inequality is the USA, where the richest 1 per cent earn 25 per cent of national income, the combined wealth of the three richest (Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett) is equal to that of the 130 million poorest (p.  365), and socio-economic mobility has been decreasing (p. 367). He sees this as signalling a crisis that requires fundamental changes not hitherto canvassed in mainstream politics. The impact of the coronavirus pandemic to some extent cuts across these inequalities. It is older people, and especially those who are least physically mobile, who are most at risk; they may be better placed to isolate themselves, but even this does not advantage them if they have to rely on others to supply them with the necessities of life. Younger people, despite their economic disadvantages, have lower mortality rates; it is unclear how the income and wealth inequalities of the USA relate to its position as the country with the highest number of deaths. This chapter explores the implications of new trends such as these in a global economy increasingly influenced by new technologies, but in which a growing proportion of the population has no stake in these innovations. Indeed, a proportion of them face the prospect of redundancy through these innovations; Frey (2019) shows that manual jobs are most at risk in

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the USA, and people with university degrees least at risk (Figs. 17 and 18, pp. 320–21), but overall nearly 50 per cent are susceptible to automation. But of equal significance is the growth of coercive systems to force those displaced from these employments into worse-paid service roles, to meet the needs of the rich (Jordan 2010, 2019, 2020). These measures will also be explored in this chapter. The price for economic insecurity and population mobility was paid by families with the fewest material and physical resources.

Household Strategies In mainstream households in the developed economies, women have played an ever-increasing role as earners of family income since the 1960s; the USA and UK led the way in this development, but European countries have caught up in this century. The last of the G7 countries to move decisively in this direction was Japan, where economic stagnation was also the earliest to set in. There women’s participation rate in 1999 was the joint lowest of the group, at 56 per cent; by 2019, it was highest, at 71 per cent. This was achieved by strong commitment to a programme of child-care facilities, and generous one-year parental leave for men or women after the birth of a child, with income support of 80 per cent of previous salaries. Although most women’s employment is still part-time, this represents a revolution in Japanese social relations, which has also had a measurably positive effect on the country’s economy, despite the shocks to the global economy in the new century. Yet there are still different expectations of men’s and women’s life-time trajectories in the developed countries. Given that women now hold academic attainments at least as good as those of men or better, they still on average take employments which do not constitute a ‘career’, with promotion to higher management, or access to full pension rights, compared with those of men. This can be understood as a manifestation of collective action by a group (in this case, men) to subvert the distributions of competition in markets (in this case, the labour market). Through the various political and economic organisations which give men power in societies, they collude to undermine the distributions which would occur spontaneously through Adam Smith’s (1762) ‘invisible hand’, and thus lead to maximal efficiency and growth (i.e. ‘Pareto-optimal’ outcomes) (Olson 1965; Jordan 1996, p. 52).

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It can be seen as ‘rent-seeking’ behaviour by men, a ‘rent’ in economic theory being the amount by which such collective action advantages men, and disadvantages others (women and other individuals who are not part of organised groups, such as poor people). This assumes that men can organise themselves so as to exclude women from their collective institutions by their rules, and poor people by the fees they charge members. Obviously what Olson (1982, p. 74) calls collusive organisations, or ‘distributional coalitions’, are not so crude as this; women now belong to most professional bodies and trades unions. But men do indeed hold a disproportionate number of posts of power in polities and in businesses, and their ‘careers’ in these (step-by-step promotions, involving increases in pay and pension rights) do indeed tend to disadvantage women, whose working life is subject to interruptions for child-bearing and care of children and older relatives. As men gain advantages through the accumulation of ‘job rents’ of this kind, they can rationalise their avoidance of family responsibilities for care, because they are contributing more to household income. Given that women have become more critical of this inequality in recent years, why have they not taken collective action to resist such unfairness? Since (over more than 20 years) around one in three marriages in the UK, and even more in the USA, have ended in divorce, why do they not try to find a more effective way to get an equal share of job rents? One possible reason is that, if they sought to enter the labour market in direct competition with men, rather than preserving a household bargain over the division of labour, they might compete away job rents altogether. As partners in households, women would then be worse off (Jordan 1996, pp. 146–7). It may even be that the higher rates of participation by women in recent years do in fact (at least in large part) explain the fact that capital has been gaining an ever-growing share of national income in the developed economies in the past 20–30 years, while the share of wages and salaries has fallen. Indeed, research interviews with partners in higher-income households in the UK (Jordan et al. 1994) suggested that women saw their lives as more fulfilling (in terms of study, sociability, cultural and associational participation and civic life) than those of their husbands, bound to the pursuit of their careers. The researchers also found that they were generally more interesting to interview. But the overall aim of the household strategies of those containing at least one job-rent holder has been to exclude poor people from a share of the benefits accruing from such rents. This relies on electoral support for

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policy measures to restrain competition from these outsiders, who include a proportion of immigrants, especially refugees. There would, in fact, be a third potential strategy open to women—to lead a grand coalition of outsiders, including the latter groups, to offer restrained competition with career-based job-rent holding men over their earnings and pensions advantages, in exchange for a scheme offering universal shares in these rents. A coalition of women and poor people—the latter a continuously growing proportion of the population in the USA and UK in particular, many coerced into low-paid work by the benefits authorities policing Tax Credit wage subsidies, now called Universal Credit in the UK—would have a clear electoral majority (Jordan 1996, p. 149). This could be achieved through the introduction of Unconditional Basic Income scheme, as an entitlement of all citizens and (once they achieved rights of settlement) immigrants, as an individual entitlement, unrelated to their household or labour-market roles (Jordan 1973, 1976, 1987, 1996; Walter 1988; Parker 1989; Dahrendorf 1989; Van Parijs 1992, 1995; Barry 1994). It was quickly recognised as in women’s collective interests, and taken up by political theorists from different sides of the left-right divide (Purdy 1995; Brittan 1995; Atkinson 1995). Furthermore, it has since been trialled in several developing states and nations whose windfall mineral wealth made them excessively unequal (Alaska, Namibia and Mongolia), and in Finland, and now also in several Dutch cities and in Glasgow (see p. 56). The implications of, and prospects for, this proposal will be more fully discussed in the final chapter.

Recent Developments A whole new set of issues for relationships of intimacy, respect and belonging has been raised by the potential uses of Artificial Intelligence (AI). For example, in his broadcast series ‘The Public Philosopher’ (BBC Radio 4, 26th August, 2019), one of the questions Michael Sandel asked the studio audience to debate was whether they preferred parental advice or computer dating in the choice of a marriage partner. Supposing they could honestly upload all relevant data about themselves onto a computer app, would they trust the machine’s selection of three possible life-partners from the data entered by others, over the opinions of their parents? Three quarters of the audience (most of whom were students at the London School of Economics) preferred the app’s advice to their parents’, because

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the computer would have more data about the relevant parties, but parents only knew what their offspring had told them. The minority favouring parental advice thought that they were more able to evaluate long-term loving relationships. Indeed, in the subsequent discussion, a few in the audience thought that the app would have better judgement because human beings relied too much on looks and first impressions, character flaws only emerging over time. In this way, a new generation seems to trust its own ability to make moral and social evaluations less than AI. Associational life, too, has come to be the prerogative of the middle classes, as economic insecurity has affected a larger proportion of the working class. Mary Harrington (2020) writes in the New Statesman (31st January, p.  27) of ‘a value-free social wasteland where absolute, aimless freedom is both enabled and micromanaged by an authoritarian state’, and where ‘marriage rates today are climbing among the wealthiest, according to the ONS, while between 2001 and 2012 the proportion of people from working-class families who married fell from 52 to 44 per cent’ (p. 27). Membership of trades unions among poor people (i.e. Class V) was only 6 per cent by the end of the last century (Bynner and Parsons 2003, p. 290, Fig. 10.9). These phenomena are not confined to the UK and USA. The Oscar-­ winning film Parasite conveyed the life of an impoverished underclass for which ‘sex is presented as a luxury that only the wealthy can afford’ and ‘the whole of the city is structured like an enormous snakes and ladders board, the slightest misstep prefiguring an ugly fall’ (review by Ryan Gilbey in the New Statesman, 7th February, 2020, p. 54). So women and their family relationships must be understood within class relationships, and the insecurities of labour markets as well as households; women were prominent members of the Gilets Jaunes demonstrators in France, for example. Gender relations may nowadays be more equal in terms of the opportunities open to women in labour markets, but the household assets (income and property) of the middle classes reflect the inequality of resources between these and poor people in societies, nor do women’s deficits in power as partners come close to the oppression of benefits claimants by the benefits authorities. However, when it comes to well-being (SWB), this priority is reversed; separation and divorce are much more damaging to this than the loss of as much as one third of income (Helliwell 2003). This illustrates the interactional content of SWB. Relationships are satisfying in so far as they involve

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exchanges of ‘social value’—love in intimate relations, respect in civil society, and belonging in membership of associations and communities (Jordan 2006, 2008a, b). Rich people have higher levels of well-being than poor ones, but they are almost equally vulnerable to these losses. The idea of social value as an important concept in the analysis and improvement in the well-being of individuals and communities and could be promoted by government was adopted in the UK in the Public Services (Social Value) Act of 2012, a short piece of legislation requiring public sector bodies, especially their procurement departments, to take account of their contribution to social, economic and environmental value. The new organisation Social Value UK has taken a lead in promoting social value since the 2012 Act. This is concerned with the benefits received by individuals from collective bodies, hitherto often unrecognised by the agencies themselves. One of the last public bodies to join this was the National Health Service, tied up with administrative reorganisation, interprofessional co-operation and improving efficient practice. But in 2020 membership was expanded to include members of the construction industry, confronted with the reality of their bad reputation for conservation, flood prevention and sustainability. So social value suddenly became a central preoccupation for every new public sector project. For example, a large new car park for a hospital in a county town considered not only the environmental impact, but also the recruitment from the local workforce (apprentices, young people not in education, employment or training [NEETs] and the proportion of local labour taken on). Dr Nick Watts of University College, London, will chair a new NHS Net Zero Expert Panel. He is a medical doctor and the executive director of Lancet Countdown, the independent international expert group that tracks the links between climate change and health. In 2020, a national Social Value Conference, hosted by Social Value UK and the Social Value Portal, took place, with 700 delegates, mainly from local authorities, the voluntary sector and the construction industry (but only a handful from the NHS). The latter is, however, now focussed much more on sustainability, both in relation to waste disposal, and in a ‘green travel plan’, staff sharing cars and acquiring electric vehicles. The service also has representatives on a Social Value Programme Group, addressing—for example—the carbon emissions of the NHS, at present at the same level as those of air transport, and is committed to an 80 per cent reduction by 2050, but intending to reduce this to net zero before then.

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It is also participating as an ‘anchor institution’, along with schools, universities and many others to address issues of social value. All this illustrates an extraordinary expansion of the use of social value as a criterion for decisions of all kinds in the public sector in the UK. But it is not clear that this is seen in terms of the quality of relationships between individuals and in communities. This is especially questionable in relation to the participation of the private sector. When the Social Value Portal proclaims that it is ‘a social enterprise on a mission to promote business and community well-being’, and gives its second priority as ‘to support regional businesses’, as well as quantifying the return to communities of each pound spent under its auspices, this sounds more like commerce than the quality of face-to-face relationships. Public policies in relation to women, such as equal opportunities, and for families, such as public child care facilities, are very important for well-­ being. As for immigrants, their well-being is best promoted by inclusive institutions which respect their patterns of family and kinship, their faith and their associational life. The price for failures in these policies may be very high, as isolated terrorist acts in London in the past three years have illustrated (see Chap. 5).

Conclusions The essential contribution of relationships to well-being is now widely recognised, and social value has come to be an acknowledged yardstick of this resource. It is too early to judge whether the commercial sector’s attempt to hijack the idea of social value in communities in the UK has succeeded in corrupting this, by making relationships among citizens quasi-transactional, in the market sense. Women’s formal equality with men in public life has yet to be completely transformational, but the long history of change in the relations between the sexes has become the focus for research and analysis. In the BBC Radio 4 series ‘Equal As We Are’ (a quotation from Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, addressing her chauvinist employer Mr Rochester), Laura Wade traced women’s claims through English literature since the Reformation (14th–25th February, 2020). Thomas Mallory wrote much of his epic poem Morte d’Arthur while in prison for rape and theft. Living at the end of the Wars of the Roses, he looked back nostalgically to the Age of Chivalry, starting with Sir Lancelot rescuing her falcon for a damsel in distress, but ending with a battlefield

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strewn with corpses. At the start of England’s emergence as a major power, Mallory’s retrospective view of courtly manners could not have encompassed the power of Queen Elizabeth the First, or the manners of her court. Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing portrays the duel of words between Benedick, a soldier returning from a campaign, and Beatrice, a feisty young woman who gives no ground in her exchanges with him. Laura Wade described their eventual marriage as ‘mutuality’ rather than equality—a companionate meeting of minds. This reflected the Protestant view of matrimony, still patriarchal, but negotiated rather than conforming to the sacramental Catholic version, where it functioned to contain lust, and the celibacy of the priesthood, monks and nuns represented the ideal. For Milton, a more extreme Protestant poet, Adam and Eve recriminate with each other in Paradise Lost. He blames her for her waywardness and headstrong self-indulgence; she claims the right to go her own way, and blames him for not forcing her to stay and obey. Milton himself married a very young woman and then divorced her; they took opposite sides in the Civil War. Adam and Eve stay together, but outside Eden; their well-being is permanently jeopardised. Britain’s commercial prosperity, based on naval power and trade, was established in the first half of the eighteenth century; London became a city of merchants, coffee houses and shops for luxury goods, but also the Gin Lane, drunkenness and poverty of Hogarth’s paintings. Samuel Richardson’s Pamela is a 15-year-old country girl who comes to London, where her employer, the much older, bachelor gentleman Mr B, attempts to rape her. She resists, quoting the fate of Lucretia, and earns the book’s subtitle—Virtue Rewarded. The novel was radical for its time, and made Richardson a celebrity—a kind of forerunner of the women’s ‘Me Too’ movement of the 2020s. In the Romantic Movement of the first two decades of the nineteenth century, Jane Austen’s novels (especially Northanger Abbey) were often satirical, with some characters adopting identities of artificiality and pretention, exaggerated in their expression of emotions. In Pride and Prejudice, the main characters are more preoccupied by issues of class and property. Fitzwilliam Darcy is a rich landowner, struggling to repress his attraction to the middle-class Elizabeth Bennett. His shockingly frank admission of this dilemma provokes a famously acerbic put-down, in which she points to his ‘ungentlemanlike’ attitude and actions, and rejects his proposal. Their later reconciliation and marriage owes much to her first

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sight of Pemberley, his stately home. Sadly, Jane Austen herself, who died in her early 40s, was never married, because neither her family nor her Irish neighbour, Tom Lefroy, with whom she had a close relationship, had the necessary resources (though he later became Chief Justice of Ireland). The coronavirus pandemic and it consequent compulsory domestic isolations have put a strain on relationships between partners and between generations. It has required parents to engage directly with their children’s on-line classes, and couples to negotiate more detailed divisions of their household tasks. At the time of writing, the consequences of this are not yet clear; however, it may be that, for those who actually experience improvements in their relationships, the advantages of the kinds of replacement state incomes that have been paid in lieu of their employment earnings in the UK and USA may lead them to support the future payment of unconditional Universal Basic Incomes (see Chap. 7). This chapter has reviewed the cultural and societal influences on cohesion in societies experiencing economic change, and specifically increasingly globalised capitalism. Jane Austen’s richer characters (for instance, in Mansfield Park) are often slave owners with interests in the Caribbean. Social cohesion was seen as enhanced by clear definitions of the reciprocal duties of the social classes, as well as the sexes; Dickens was among the first English novelist to explore social mobility, having himself experienced both his father’s bankruptcy and his own enrichment. In the present-day world, high rates of divorce and economic insecurity have contributed to sudden losses of well-being. Research points to quality of relationships as the component of social value most amenable to improvement; people can choose to give higher priority to these, once they become conscious of their vital importance. But the challenge is to deal with underlying political issues in close relationships; in today’s world, these are more likely to be the ones portrayed in Thomas Hardy’s novels than Jane Austen’s, and the potential for tragedies is often present. My own family on my mother’s father’s side, downwardly socially mobile since the eleventh century, seems to have managed this after a fashion, despite many divorces in recent generations. These disruptions are now part of the culture, and families have better cultural resources to manage them. But the coronavirus lock-down has caused marked strain on relationships and on mental health. Vulnerable children have reported increased anxiety, and a domestic abuse help-line reported a 9 per cent increase in calls, despite overwhelming support for the policy (BBC Radio 4, ‘The Briefing Room’, presented by David Aronovitch, 18th April, 2020).

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References Atkinson, A.  B. (1995). Public Economics in Action: The Basic Income/Flat Tax Proposal (The Lindahl Lectures). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barry, B. (1994). Justice, Freedom and Basic Income. London: London School of Economics. Brittan, S. (1995). Capitalism with a Human Face. Aldershot: Edward Elgar. Bynner, J., & Parsons, S. (2003). Social Participation, Values and Crime. In E.  Ferri, J.  Bynner, & M.  Wadsworth (Eds.), Changing Britain, Changing Lives: Three Generations at the Turn of the Century (pp.  261–294). London: Institute of Education, University of London. Castles, F. C. (1985). The Working Class and Welfare: Reflections on the Political Development of the Welfare State in Australia and New Zealand, 1890–1980. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Dahrendorf, R. (1989, April 27). The Underclass and the Future of Britain. Tenth Annual Lecture. St George’s House, Windsor Castle. Diamond, J. (2019). Upheaval: How Nations Cope with Crisis and Change. London: Allen Lane. Frey, C. B. (2019). The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gregory, R. (1996). The Shann Memorial Lecture: Growing Locational Disadvantage in Australian Cities (Discussion Paper 96-14). Canberra: Australian National University. Gregory, R. (1998). Competing with Dad: Changes in Intergenerational Income Distribution of Male Labour Market Income. Canberra: Australian National University. Helliwell, J. F. (2003). How’s Life? Combining Individual and National Variables to Explain Subjective Well-being. Economic Modelling, 20, 331–360. Jordan, B. (1973). Paupers: The Making of the New Claiming Class. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul (Republished 2019). Jordan, B. (1976). Freedom and the Welfare State. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul (Republished 2019). Jordan, B. (1987). Rethinking Welfare. Oxford: Blackwell. Jordan, B. (1996). A Theory of Poverty and Social Exclusion. Cambridge: Polity. Jordan, B. (2006). Social Policy for the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: Polity. Jordan, B. (2008a). Welfare and Well-Being: Social Value in Public Policy. Bristol: Policy Press. Jordan, B. (2008b). Social Value in Services for Children: Contract or Culture? Journal of Children’s Services, 3(3), 23–39. Jordan, B. (2010). Why the Third Way Failed: Economics, Morality and the Origins of the Big Society. Bristol: Policy Press.

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Jordan, B. (2019). Authoritarianism and How to Counter It. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Jordan, B. (2020). Automation and Human Solidarity. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Jordan, B., Redley, M., & James, S. (1994). Putting the Family First: Identities, Decisions, Citizenship. London: UCL Press. Layard, R. (2005). Happiness: Lessons from a New Science. London: Allen Lane. Olson, M. (1965). The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Economics of Groups. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Olson, M. (1982). The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation and Social Rigidities. New Haven: Yale University Press. Parker, H. (1989). Instead of the Dole: An Enquiry into the Integration of the Tax and Benefits Systems. London: Routledge. Purdy, D. (1995). Citizenship, Basic Income and the State. New Left Review, p. 208. Pusey, M. (2003). The Experience of Middle Australia: The Dark Side of Economic Reform. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shaxson, N. (2018). The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer. London: Bodley Head. Smith, A. (1762). The Theory of Moral Sentiments. In H. W. Schneider (Ed.), Adam Smith: Writings on Moral Philosophy (pp.  7–280). Oxford: Clarendon Press (1948). Van Parijs, P. (1992). Competing Justifications for Basic Income. In P. Van Parijs (Ed.), Arguing for Basic Income: Ethical Foundations for a Radical Reform. London: Verso. Van Parijs, P. (1995). Real Freedom for All: What (If Anything) Can Justify Capitalism? Oxford: Clarendon Press. Walter, T. (1988). Basic Income: Freedom from Poverty, Freedom to Work. London: Marion Boyars.

CHAPTER 5

Terrorism and Instability

Abstract  The internationalisation of terrorism, evidenced by the two murderous attacks by Islamic extremists in London, has contributed to fears about the threats from immigrants and the problems over their absorption into democratic life. This chapter will address the consequences of this destabilisation, including reactions such as the murder of over 100 environmental activists world-wide by gangs representing the interests of developers. Keywords  Extremism • Integration • Revolt Globalisation and the accelerated mobility of populations have caused the erosion of economic security among sedentary populations, leading to the rise of Far Right populist, nationalist parties, and to mass protests by those who feel threatened with falling living standards. But these phenomena have all also fed into the rise in extremist movements of several kinds, including those who have used terrorism against civilian populations. This chapter will analyse the factors contributing to these developments, and how they in turn have contributed to the rise in authoritarian politics. The Arab Spring, a revolt by citizens of countries which had been ruled by dictators or oligarchs for many decades, soon gave rise to civil wars, of which those in Syria and the Lebanon caused the most loss of lives, and lasted longest (mainly because of the intervention of external military © The Author(s) 2021 B. Jordan, Immigration, Social Cohesion and Political Reaction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52708-2_5

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powers). Refugees from these conflicts flooded across Turkey towards Greece, and then on towards North-Western Europe, while others from Libya were crossing the Mediterranean in small boats to reach Italy. By the beginning of March 2020, there were around four million refugees from Syria, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and other parts of Asia and Africa in Turkey; many of them were making their way on foot towards the Greek border, or by boat to EU island Mediterranean states. The Greek authorities had erected a wire fence against incursions on its long border, but the Turkish government enabled large numbers of refugees to be bussed up to this barrier, and some of them cut through the wire and entered Greek territory. Two hundred were arrested over the preceding week-end, arrested and returned to Turkey, which will continue to try to enable their access, via Greece, to the North-Western EU countries and the UK (BBC Radio 4, News, 2nd March, 2020). Among these tides of vulnerable families were some who became the angriest critics of the West, and who joined with other Muslim dissidents in denouncing the decadence of their host societies; one or two individuals among these became terrorists, and hundreds joined militant Islamic movements. In the aftermath of the financial crash of 2007–08, the rise in support for Far Right parties indicated that liberal democracy and the traditional ruling parties had suffered a backlash and were failing to offer a convincing vision for the future. In some countries, such as France and Italy, new parties came to power, at least in part because they were not associated with past failures and with the continuing stagnation in the real value of wages and salaries. Germany was one of the few countries in which this did not occur, but even there both the Greens and the Alternative für Deutschland gained ground in many states. In the USA, the election of President Trump followed a campaign in which he proclaimed his own special abilities and potentials, and his intended measures on immigration control and trade with China, rather than aligning himself with the policy programme of the Republican Party. So both political and economic upheavals world-wide had created a greater sense of insecurity in Western countries, including over issues of defence. Ahead of a European security conference in Edinburgh, President Macron of France bemoaned the decline of Western co-operation over this, clearly targeting President Trump’s withdrawal from aspects of NATO’s co-ordination (BBC Radio 4, The World at One, 16th February, 2020). The fragmentation of a strategic alliance which had been the

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cornerstone of the post-war rivalry with the Soviet Union’s subversive programme was threatening to Europe’s sense of protection against such threats. It remains to be seen how the heavy toll of coronavirus in Iran in particular, and the Middle East and Africa more generally, will influence the future of those societies’ jihadi groups, and of the West’s responses to them. This chapter will examine the origins of new forms of extremism and the violent acts they inspired, against a background of these tensions in relations between liberal democratic states. Although the perpetrators were mostly isolated individuals, investigation showed that they had been inspired by on-line sites promoting hatred and denouncing the moral corruption of the West. Disaffected citizens who demonstrated in protests against the failures of traditional politics may have unwittingly created a climate in which such extremism gained a foothold.

Individual Acts of Terrorism The new wave of terrorist atrocities, committed by individuals with an agenda of extremist politics, was set off in the most unlikely setting. Whereas the USA had a long history of politically motivated assassinations and mass killings, which continued in the past decade, it was in Norway (of all places) that the first atrocity carried out in the name of a right-wing ideology took place. On 21 July 2011, Anders Breivik, a 28  year-old drifter, killed eight people by detonating a van bomb in Oslo, and then shot dead 69 participants in a Workers’ Youth League summer camp on the island of UtΦya. Breivik became a cult hero for white terrorists world-wide. For instance, a manifesto quoting various Far Right racist terrorists, including Breivik, was found to have been influential in the massacre by an Australian, Brenton Harrison Tarrant, of 51 worshippers in a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, on 25 March 2019, and in an Islamic Centre three miles away. Tarrant had accessed on-line extremist posts, which targeted isolated individuals, seeking to increase their frustration, and channel this into fantasies of becoming ‘fascist supermen’. Some commentators drew attention to the normalisation of racism by populist politicians, and to the fact that President Trump had tweeted against anti-fascist demonstrators. Partly in retaliation for that attack on their co-religionists, there were two atrocities by Muslim terrorists in London late in 2019 and early 2020,

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both by men who had recently been in prison for less serious terrorist offences. The first of these started in a conference at Fishmongers’ Hall, near London Bridge, where academics were hosting an event on the rehabilitation of these prisoners incarcerated for plotting such attempts. Usman Khan, who had been arrested in 2010 over a plot to bomb the London Stock Exchange and had been freed on licence half-way through his sentence, was carrying the telephone number of the ‘hate preacher’ Anjem Choudary, later described as his ‘friend’, on 29 November, when he was shot by police; he had stabbed to death two of the postgraduate organisers of the conference. He had also been in touch with Al-Mahajiroun, a British group promoting an Islamic state (caliphate) in the UK, ending democracy and imposing Sharia law through a violent uprising. With Choudary, he took part in street protests and distributing propaganda during his early teenage years, calling non-Muslims ‘Kaffar’ and ‘dogs’. Coached by Choudary (who was finally sentenced to imprisonment in 2015) in the law, he was able to evade arrest; Usman Khan was eventually arrested and imprisoned for having planned to visit a terrorist camp in Pakistan, as well as for the Stock Exchange bomb plot, in December, 2010 (Watson 2020). Sudesh Amman, aged 20, who stabbed shoppers in Streatham High Street before he, too, was shot dead, was actually being followed by plain-­ clothes officers, after being released on parole from prison. He was found to have downloaded sermons by Abdullah-al-Faisal (born Trevor William Forest) who was also believed to have influenced the would-be shoe-­ bomber Richard Reid, and two of the 7/7 bombers who killed 52 people on the London Underground in 2005. He had been deported in 2007 and was living in Jamaica. In the USA, with its long history of assassinations, there were fewer terrorist incidents than there had been in the 1970s, but a report by the Government Accountability Office in 2017 said that between 75 per cent of those taking place were by right-wing extremists, causing 106 deaths. In 2019, the El Paso shooting by a right-wing terrorist killed 22 people, the perpetrator blaming the ‘Spanish invasion’ of Texas; he was said to have been inspired by the New Zealand mosque massacre (BBC Radio 4, Today, 5th August, 2019). In Germany, a 42-year-old man shot nine Kurdish people dead in two attacks on shisha bars in Hanau, near Frankfurt-am-Main, Hesse, on the evening of 19 February 2020. He was later found to have killed his 72  year-old mother and himself at his flat. Some German media

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commented that the police had become too pre-occupied with Islamic extremism, and had shifted resources away from right-wing terrorism; a ‘manifesto’ written by the assassin said that some racial minorities should be ‘wiped out’ if they could not be deported, and was a xenophobic rant against African and Asian people. Professor Peter Neumann of Oxford University commented that this atrocity had echoes of one on a synagogue in the former East Germany, which in turn had copied the El Paso shooting in the USA (BBC Radio 4, Today, 20th February, 2020). Both jihadi and white supremacist terrorism have fed into the political instability that has been a feature of Western societies since the financial crash. The combination of such incidents and demonstrations by those facing declining living standards has been a formidable challenge for liberal democracy; the coronavirus pandemic adds a dimension to this challenge.

Saving Democracy? In the aftermath of all these manifestations of anti-democratic passions, some authors have proposed reforms and re-orientations. Adrian Pabst’s The Demons of Democracy (2019) bemoans the loss of social bonds and civic ties on which liberal democracy relies for an underlying commitment to the common good. By giving priority to freedom over solidarity and individualism over reciprocity, recent developments in political economy have created binary divisions in polities (Leave/Remain, Trump/Clinton), and reduced people and nature to ‘commodities circulating in unmediated space’. The plutocratic power of monopolies such as Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and other tech companies restrict free speech as well as economic competition, and feed into demagogic politics, exploiting the insecurity of the public; the result is a loss of what Orwell called ‘common decency’, with social groups demonising each other, interpersonal trust and co-operation declining, and civic ties weakening. He describes what de Tocqueville in Democracy in America (1836–8) called a ‘tyranny of voluntary servitude’, which is all-encompassing. With the additional means supplied by new technologies, ‘surveillance capitalism’ (Zuboff 2018) can manipulate populations using mass data. He demands the breakup of these companies, fines for fake news, and a new ethos for public discourse, along with revived concern for mutual flourishing, shared values and civic ties, greater participation in

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associations and co-operatives (the latter supplying education and health care, funded by workers and service users), associative democracy and investment in communities. Finally, he recommended a Universal Basic Dividend (unconditional income) for all, funded out of taxes on companies and tax-avoidance schemes—this proposal will be discussed much more fully in the final chapter of this book. A more radical challenge to the prospects for a democratic world has been posed by the response of the mainland Chinese government to the attempt by pro-democracy activists to resist what they see as a stalling in the 50-year process of reaching a full integration between the island and the mainland by 2047. In a radio programme recorded before the most violent suppression of these protests by the police, a newly married couple, the man from Hong Kong, the woman from the mainland, discussed their hopes and fears for the future (BBC Radio 4, ‘Hong Kong: Love in a Divided City’, 18th February, 2020). One third of current marriages are of this kind, as 90 per cent of the recent growth in the city’s population stems from newcomers from the mainland, who speak a different language (Mandarin, rather than Cantonese), and are experienced as a kind of ‘invasion’ by Hong Kongers. The latter are seen as rich and educated by the new arrivals, the mainlanders as poor and uncritical in their culture by the citizens; ‘mixed’ marriages result in early divorces in many cases. As more liberal and independent Hong Kongers became more resistant to newcomers and critical of their culture after 2014, he became pessimistic about starting a family, she felt less welcome in the city. They tried to get to know each others’ friends, but recently grew more uncomfortable with them. Half-way through the 50-year transition to full integration, he looked back to the high point of optimism during the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and now supports the protests and the civil disobedience movement; she still hopes the mainland may gradually move to democracy, but fears that his involvement in ‘The Movement’ may make it difficult for them to visit her family on the mainland. As the protests against the Chief Executive, Carrie Lam, grow and become more violent, she becomes worried about injuries to the democracy activists, and thinks they still have plenty of freedom and should ‘compromise’. He thinks they now have nothing to lose, as the most the mainland regime will concede is ‘pseudo-democracy’. The programme ends with them identifying the forces driving them apart, and vowing to go on ‘talking, listening and loving’.

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Threats to aspirations for democracy in the Middle East, Central Europe and Latin America all signal a political climate which can be exploited by those authoritarian forces which favour control and suppression of dissent. It is a period in which some of the gains made in the past decade are at risk. The start of the coronavirus pandemic in China and its spread throughout the world have cut across these developments. In little over a fortnight, it killed record numbers of peacetime victims in every continent. The relative efficiency with which authoritarian China brought down its rate of infections, compared with the chaos in India, where 470 million rural migrant workers in the cities began to flee back towards their home villages (in many cases hundreds of miles away), evicted by their landlords or sacked from their jobs, but in accommodation unsuitable for indoor quarantine, was poignant. It made it clear that the Indian ruling elite was largely unaware of the plight of the poor and indifferent to it (BBC Radio 4, Today, 31st March, 2020).

Conclusions I have described how migration has played a part in the more tenuous hold of liberal democracies on support from their citizens. Meanwhile, in Russia a more overt anti-democratic line has been pursued by the Putin regime, as it deals harshly with critics and introduces more measures for censorship and detention, while actively attacking any measures to advance democracy in northern Syria. Protest against Putin have become very thinly attended, as he has extended his period in power by constitutional changes, and critics have developed attitudes of resignation; a demonstration demanding his impeachment in Ekaterinburg, a city of over one-and-­ a-half million inhabitants, mustered only about 200 marchers (BBC Radio 4, From Our Own Correspondent, 13th February, 2020). Issues over immigration have played a major part in the growing distrust by populations of their political representatives; in the UK, this has extended from doubts about the real processes and motives by which the country entered the conflict in Iraq (where no evidence of plans to attack the West were discovered), to misleading re-assurance about the extent of likely immigration from the new EU states, especially Romania and Bulgaria, after their accession. In a review of this history, ‘The Age of Distrust’ (BBC Radio 4, 29th February, 2020), Laura Kuensburg started from those aspects of the Blair premiership, as events gradually unfolded in the middle years of the first

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decade of the century, contradicting his optimism over both the war and its refugee aftermath, and the labour-market consequences of EU expansion. The government had speculated that only tens of thousands of immigrants would arrive, but some 400,000 of working age came, seeking employment, and most were quickly absorbed into the workforce. Critics quickly argued that free movement, introduced in the UK and Ireland before the rest of the EU countries, had been a political mistake, driving down salaries in services, and overstretching the public infrastructure, especially housing and the NHS. There was a notorious conversation between Gillian Duffy, a middle-aged Lancastrian woman, and Gordon Brown, by then Prime Minister, during the 2010 election campaign, in which he was recorded afterwards calling her a ‘bigoted woman’, despite an apparently friendly exchange between them. Looking back, Brown thought that people like her and millions of others felt that their concerns were not being listened to, that elites (such as bankers and the metropolitan professional classes) were benefitting from the new arrivals (for instance, as gardeners and child care workers), and that no-one had been allowed to speak out against it. Deborah Mattinson, a pollster, said that Labour’s subsequent electoral defeat was not down to political apathy, but to anger; the public thought that none of the London elite cared about their ideas and experiences. The frayed bonds of trust between the privileged few and the mass of citizens had been further weakened by the financial crash and its aftermath, as tens of billions of pounds were spent on bailing out the banks from the consequences of their reckless lending, and the political parties tried to blame each other for the consequent need for austerity and cuts in public services. The crisis was symbolised for many by the queues of citizens lining up outside branches of the collapsing Northern Rock bank, trying to withdraw their savings. This was the moment when the London elites appeared most hapless and powerless—so much for the new ‘Office for Budget Responsibility’— and trust in politicians was further eroded by the MPs’ expenses scandal, in which hundreds of thousands of pounds were revealed to have been claimed by representatives of both parties for items of dubious connection with their constituents’ needs, as the Daily Telegraph leaked details about a moat around a mansion, £14,500 a year for a housekeeper and the notorious duck-house. The rationalisation that MPs were compensating themselves for having failed to get a substantial pay-rise sounded hollow to constituents living on a small fraction of their current salaries.

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In retrospect, Mattinson said that trust had been gradually eroding since the turn of the century; they were now even less trusted than those in the advertising industry, having declined from 19 per cent to 14 per cent in the decade (compared with a rise in trust for civil servants from 56 per cent to 65 per cent). Politics and politicians were no longer regarded as occupying a world of mystique and reverence. In other words, the mistrust on the issue of immigration, regarded as having exposed the ineffectual hold of governments on a crucial aspect of policy, was re-inforced by the perception of those supposed to be representing the public interest as corrupt and venal. The stage was set for a period in which isolated acts of terrorism were seen to encapsulate the dilemmas of immigration, and governments’ helplessness in the face of this all over the world was exposed. With so many migrant workers serving the requirements of global business, and the rise in refugee flows from civil conflicts (especially the millions from Syria), it had become almost impossible for governments to identify every one of the few dozen individuals who posed imminent terrorist threats, given the vast volume of social media rants and extremist rhetoric at any one time. In fact, the security services do manage to arrest and lock up many of them before they put their plots into operation, but inevitably a few slip through. The remedies are long-term ones—more effective integration of individuals through policies for social cohesion and community support. The background to these attacks has been a shift in global power (Gowan 2010). The USA’s attempts to sustain its hegemony through its invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were counter-productive. Military spending in China, Russia and India increased rapidly between 2007 and 2016, at a time when both USA and UK were spending less (Fouskas and Gokay 2019, p. 23). This created a ‘power vacuum’ (p. 41), into which authoritarian political parties and leaders such as Donald Trump and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán have stepped (ch. 6). In the next chapter I shall turn to issues of sustainability and the environment.

References de Tocqueville, A. (1836–9). Democracy in America. London: Collins (1968). Fouskas, V. K., & Gokay, B. (2019). The Disintegration of Euro-Atlanticism and the New Authoritarianism: Global Power-Shift. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Gowan, P. (2010). A Calculus of Power: Grand Strategy in the Twenty-First Century. London: Verso. Pabst, A. (2019). The Demons of Democracy. Cambridge: Polity. Watson, R. (2020, February 21). The Long Tail of Terror. New Statesman, pp. 31–35. Zuboff, S. (2018). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and the Fight for a Human Future at the Frontier of Power. New York: Profile Books.

CHAPTER 6

Policies for Sustainability

Abstract  The increased publicity attracted by Greta Thunberg and the involvement of large numbers of younger people in demonstrations over climate change, along with the destructive effects of fires in the Australian bush, have brought this issue to the forefront of political debate. This chapter analyses the relationship between global warming and the movement of populations over future decades. Keywords  Environment • Climate change • Global warming The rise of Green Parties in the past decade has signalled the growing awareness of the threat from global warming as a result of human activities, and particularly the burning of fossil fuels. In step with reduced support for traditional conservative (Christian Democratic) and socialist (Social Democratic/Labour) parties, and matched by increased support for the populist Far Right, environmentalism and sustainability have emerged as major issues, in the media and in politics. A recent indication of the rise of the Greens was given on 21 October 2019 when the party doubled their vote in the Swiss parliamentary election. This followed the increased support for the Greens in Germany; in the state of Hesse, where the Christian Democrat prefect of the Kassel district, Walter Lübcke, had been assassinated on 2 June and a member of a Far Right neo-Nazi NPD arrested for this atrocity early the following © The Author(s) 2021 B. Jordan, Immigration, Social Cohesion and Political Reaction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52708-2_6

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month (Tagesspiegel, 15th August, 2019), the Greens became the main opposition to the Alternative für Deutschland Party, which already had 100 deputies in the Bundestag, and were especially strong in the former East German states of Saxony, Brandenburg and Thuringia. In France, the Citizens’ Assemblies, set up by President Macron after the Gilets Jaunes mass demonstrations, were tasked with (amongst other things) reconciling ecological sustainability with social justice. At the end of August, as climate change activists demonstrated outside its meeting in Biarritz, the G7 declared the Amazon Basin at the top of global environmental concerns, because of President Bolsonaro’s clearing and burning of the forests (75,000  in one month); and fracking for oil and gas was stopped in the Blackpool area of Lancashire because earth tremors were exceeding prescribed limits (Channel 4, News, 27th August, 2019). Meanwhile, huge swarms of locusts were observed, having hatched during unprecedented rains in the Lebanon, consuming crops, grasslands and the leaves on trees, leaving desolation across Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia, Tanzania and Uganda. Spraying from the air was having limited success in controlling their predations (From Our Own Correspondent, 20th February, 2020). The previous month, the highest-ever temperature in the UK (37.2 C) had been recorded in the Botanical Gardens in Cambridge (BBC Radio 4, The World at One, 29th July, 2019). Tree-planting policies to mitigate carbon emissions were announced for the UK, with plans for planting a trillion trees world-wide on degraded land (unsuitable for agriculture), in the hope of reversing global warming; this could be monitored through an Artificial Intelligence system surveying sites all over the planet (BBC World Service, Science in Action, 8th July, 2019). Partially balancing this, it was announced that by the beginning of 2020 more power would be generated from renewable sources than from conventional ones, with wind power up from 1 per cent of output to 19 per cent in a decade, and a similar increase in solar energy—the latter seeming to make feasible Robert Stayton’s (2019) vision of an economy in which every citizen would receive a ‘solar dividend’ (an alternative version of Pabst’s ‘Universal Basic Dividend’, see p. 64), financed from the massive deployment of solar panels, and enabling a far shorter working week. So the future political map of Europe seemed to feature a match-up between Greens and populist, Far Right parties, as the latter more than tripled their support in elections in the past 20 years—they had representatives in the governments of 11 of 31 European states, and more than

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one in four votes in 2017 elections (The Guardian, 21st November, 2018, p. 1), including more than 40 per cent, ten times their support in 1998, in the election in the Czech Republic that year, despite having almost no immigrants in that country (ibid., p. 10). What is required, and has been since the start of this century, is a set of global policies (promoted by organisations like the United Nations and the World Bank) for reconciling agriculture and the extractive industries with stewardship of the environment. As the concerns of the governments of developed countries are more and more over ‘abstractions’, such as money, and ‘invisibles’, such as services (i.e. highly mobile on the one hand, and interchangeable between locations on the other) those of the developing world are about assets, resources and activities connected to land and territories. So the connection between political authority and territorial rule, and also with physical and natural resources, cannot be avoided, and it requires interactions between large global actors and small local producers (and subsistence survivors). Furthermore, governance must link informal interactions in families, communities and associations with global capitalism and national democracy. Mass movements of population occur all the time within countries, mostly between rural and urban districts (as in the UK in the early nineteenth century, the USA and Western Europe later in that century and China since the Second World War), but also, with civil wars and more accessible, cheaper modes of transport, from poor countries to richer ones, and war-torn to peaceful ones. But pestilence, such as the Black Death in the fourteenth century, was often another factor in accelerating mobility, both social and geographical; at present, the coronavirus pandemic is causing similar population movements (see p. 15). One new aspect of policies for managing all these aspects was set out in the World Bank’s World Development Report (2001); in order to limit vulnerability to natural catastrophes, achieve sustainable environments and slow the despoliation of forests and predation of rare species, as well as including indigenous rural populations in processes of managed economic development, a new institutional structure was required, to help poor people get improved returns on their assets, and make these more reliable in the longer term (pp. 34–41). The aim was for these to take the form of a kind of ‘social contract’ between states and their citizens (chs. 5 and 6). It prescribed an enhanced role for NGOs, but the main thrust was to enable those engaged in huntergathering or subsistence production to join in market relations and state

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institutions (p. 121), and this involved some redistribution of land. While the growth rates of countries like Brazil and Indonesia in this period suggested some successes from these measures, dictatorships severely limited political freedoms, and many refugees and young graduates with dissident political views emigrated to the USA and Europe. The authoritarian regime in Brazil, from which many such people fled to Europe, aimed to accelerate economic development with a leading role for the state and the armed forces (Becker and Egler 1992, p. 83). Inequality was very extreme, with the bottom 20 per cent of the population receiving only 2.4 per cent of national income (World Bank 1990). Urbanisation was achieved by ‘forced migration’ of rural population to enable the mechanisation of agricultural production, with almost 75 per cent of the population classified as living in cities or towns by 1989, and a rapid growth of an educated middle class (Becker and Egler 1992, p.  124), whose members were then among the most likely to flee political oppression. In our study of irregular immigration to the UK (Jordan and Düvell 2002), we interviewed migrants from Brazil (mostly young professionals and university students) about their reasons for coming, their strategies for survival, and their future plans. Some had simply seen it as part of a process of gaining more life-experience and some excitement; another group wanted to improve their education and marketable skills, so as to earn more when they returned; a third focussed on saving up for their futures, for instance to buy a house back home (pp. 100–1). They remained without the legal immigration status to work, many as bogus students in language schools whose main income was from migrants who never attended their classes (p.  129). Our interviews with officers of the Immigration Service Enforcement Department showed that they were well aware of this strategy, but did little to interfere with these schools (at that time), or to seek irregular workers, unless they were denounced by their compatriots (Chap. 7). This study suggested a set of paradoxes about the relationship between sustainability and migration. The policies of an authoritarian government in a developing country, Brazil, both then and now, involved forest clearances and pollution-causing fires and bulldozing, in order to accelerate development and economic growth. A small, educated elite oppose these policies and the political regime and leave the country to study or work abroad. They may have problems with their immigration status, and this may lead to their participation in the informal (illegal) economy. In this way, they swell the proportion of the population, already large and

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growing, who form the ‘precariat’ (Standing 2011) of workers, often claiming means-tested benefits, and perceived as threats to their living standards by those in regular (if insecure) work (Jordan 2019, 2020a, b). But, as shown in Chap. 2 in relation to social value, the attempt to strengthen policies for sustainability were increasingly combined with the agendas of business investment, in the EU as well as national regimes. For instance, announcing the Third Joint EU Cohesion Policy Conference— ‘Maximising the Opportunities for Cohesion Policy in Challenging Times’ (Zagreb, Croatia, 11th–13th May, 2020) to prepare the ground for the new cohesion policy for the 2020s, the organisers were seeking ‘plans for a “smarter” and “greener” Europe, creating favorable conditions for investment’. But a third aspect of EU policy was, in effect, a denial of the human consequences of global warming and the failure to adopt policies for sustainability. It was estimated that 20 per cent of those who embarked from the baking shores of Libya for the hazardous boat trip to Europe were never seen again, and that migrants were taking ever-increasing risks to attempt the crossing. Charles Heller and Lorenzo Pezzano, French researchers in a project for ‘Forensic Oceanography’, characterised this as an EU regime of exclusion, ‘in total contradiction of the dynamic of migration’ (Le Monde: Idées, 29th June, 2019, p. 32). So, sustainability and migration were linked in the realities of present-­ day policy issues, yet these connections were seldom made explicit (except by the climate change protesters). If the world is to reach peaceful solutions to the climate challenge, it will have to make provision for millions to take refuge in the temperate zones while these measures are put into effect.

Conclusions Even in the UK some of these challenges are already manifesting themselves. Just before Christmas, 2019, heavy rain in South Yorkshire, falling a protracted spell of wet weather, caused flooding in the village of Fishlake. Because the district had been stripped of forests and hedges, and the soil pressed solid by mechanised agriculture, the rain in the hills around Doncaster rushed down streams and flooded houses and commercial premises.

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In an article in the New Statesman, (21st February, 2020), Sarah Longlands, director of the Institute for Public Policy in the region (IPPR North) wrote that with the right investment and proper management, a healthy natural environment can help protect homes and reduce the need for public money spent on hard flood infrastructure and the cost of repair. In addition, restoring peatlands, planting trees and reclaiming low-grade land for nature can provide the North with a clean and inexpensive water supply, draw down carbon from the atmosphere and host a wide ecosystem of plant and animal life, as well as slowing water flow. Bringing nature into urban areas, especially the poorest neighbourhoods, can improve air quality, and provide places for people to relax, socialise and exercise. (pp. 27–8)

Her recommendations were not intended to contradict the government’s Northern Powerhouse initiative, through which the Conservatives seemed to have gained such an advantage in the North of England in the General Election of December, 2019. Instead, she linked environmental protection and sustainability with a wider strategy of investment for the sake of collective well-being, including new institutions (such as metro mayors) and Transport for the North, and a ‘far greater focus on social infrastructure and economic justice. But it should also include a radical plan for nature at the very heart of efforts to build northern, and national, prosperity’ (p. 28). Sustainability is often seen as a policy goal which is in tension with, and possibly in contradiction to, economic growth. This article linked them together as complementary parts of a development strategy. But many of the elements in this are one-off infrastructure projects, which do not necessarily supply long-term employment or industrial expansion. In the longer view, hard choices will have to be made about the priority of sustainability, not fully accounted for in the super-optimistic accounts of those who see the salvation of human kind in renewable sources of energy, such as Stayton (2018), in his vision of massive growth in solar energy supply, or Bastani (2019), in his of Fully Automated Luxury Communism. With the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, growth is no longer an option. As the illness has brought about the closures of businesses and the lay-off of workers, there has been a visible improvement in the atmosphere around cities all over the world, and it will take some time before the recession that has come about will be reversed. It will also, of course, provide an opportunity for those advocating a better balance between productivism and sustainability to argue their case. Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, China’s enormous industrial expansion, and its infrastructure projects across Asia and much of

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Africa, pay little heed to such considerations. For instance, the Belt and Road initiative currently under construction cheats on the UN Framework on Climate Change, and 60 per cent of all its emissions come from such new projects, despite its protestations of being a model of sustainability for developing countries, and a solution to all the world’s problems. Chinese hegemony often defies international law, and challenges international organisations to resist its longer-term vision of a world-wide communist-­ state dominance (BBC World Service, News, 26th October, 2019). The rise in concerns about sustainability has been charted in the increased support for Green Parties in Europe, but not in the USA, and less in the UK than on the Continent, while—despite the devastation from fires—there has been limited political support for environmental radicalism in Australia too. The Green vote in the UK General Election of December, 2019, was proportionately one-tenth of Germany’s in its recent elections, and resulted in only one Green MP, Caroline Lucas in Brighton. A historical overview of the Green Movement (BBC Radio 4, Analysis: Why Aren’t the Greens More Popular?, 24th February, 2020) traced the origins of the mass movement to the 1960s, an age of mobilisations which sought to operate outside traditional party politics (such as the Women’s and Peace Movements). The early environmentalist in the UK defined themselves in terms of rural conservation and protecting farmland from developers, while the US movement included many Republican staff, but more left-wing activists. Today, support in Brighton is fairly typical of the movement—cosmopolitan, younger, mainly female and well-educated. Among the UK electorate, amid rising poverty and inequality—with life expectancy rises stalled, and actually fall for women in many poor districts (BBC Radio 4, News, 25th February, 2020)—issues of environmental sustainability are seen as something of a luxury. In spite of this overall picture in the UK, active campaigns by Greens in some working-class districts in the North of England have shown large gains in support at local elections. In Burnley, Lancashire, for example, such voters feel left behind and neglect by politicians in the two main political parties, and despite stereotypes of Greens as sandal-clad hippies, voters have returned members of the party to the local council. Greens are recognising that, in such places, support increases through drawing attention to celebrities and respected figures from other fields who have adopted environment-friendly principles. Councillors in Burnley said that national policies should be introduced to make Green choices

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easier, as in Continental countries; if the right systems can be seen to make life better, then these behaviours will be widely adopted by citizens. Above all, the largest polluters, the rich and businesses, whose intercontinental and domestic air travel contribute most to carbon emissions, should no longer be subsidised by ordinary taxpayers, including poor people, but should pay the actual costs (including those to the environment) of their journeys. Only by increasing the price of waste and over-­ consumption, says campaigner Zak Goldsmith, will behaviour change; it is a case of market failure, since it is profitable for firms to turn trees from the Amazon rain forest into toilet paper. Green outcomes require global culture-changes, and a start has been made in Germany, where the Greens have become the second-largest party, taking advantage of the decline in support for the Social Democrats; the proportional representation system of Continental countries has favoured their rise, and it will be more difficult in the UK. But the increase in their representation in local government may well cause the traditional parties to pay more attention to issues of sustainability in the near future. The coronavirus pandemic could also be a factor in the greater priority for sustainability. Economic growth has had to be sacrificed for the sake of survival, as millions of workers have been laid off to reduce contagion. The impact has been mainly on people without savings, while income maintenance schemes have been slowly introduced. The only positive immediate consequence has been the obvious improvement in air quality with the closure of factories, especially in China. As normality eventually returns, there will be an opportunity for these gains to influence future policies for the environment.

References Bastani, A. (2019). Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto. London: Verso. Becker, B. K., & Egler, C. A. G. (1992). Brazil: A New Regional Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jordan, B. (2019). Authoritarianism and How to Counter It. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Jordan, B. (2020a). Automation and Human Solidarity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Jordan, B. (2020b). The Age of Disintegration: Nations, Public Services and Collective Organisations. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Jordan, B., & Düvell, F. (2002). Irregular Migration: The Dilemmas of Transnational Mobility. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Longlands, S. (2020, February 21). Nature’s Vital Role in the Northern Economy. New Statesman, pp. 27–28. Standing, (2011). The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury. Stayton, R. (2019). Solar Dividends: How Solar Energy Can Generate a Basic Income for Everyone on Earth. Santa Cruz: Sandstone Publishing. World Bank. (1990). World Development Report, 1989/90. Washington, DC: World Bank. World Bank. (2001). World Development Report, 2000–01. Washington, DC: World Bank.

CHAPTER 7

Alternative Scenarios or Back to the Future? The Case of the UK

Abstract  The challenges of globalisation and climate change are sufficiently fundamental to demand radical new political programmes; the rise in authoritarian leaderships and the advance of China’s continental ambitions are also challenging for liberal democracies. Yet the Democrats in the USA and Labour in the UK have both chosen leaders aged in their 70s, with policy programmes from the 1970s, in recent years. This chapter examines the economic and social forces behind these political phenomena, and the implications for the future of developed, democratic societies. Keywords  Inequality • Liberal democracy The threat of climate change is clearly the greatest challenge of the present century, posing as it does the issue of the very survival of life on the planet. But the second-greatest challenge is that of inequality, not simply of income and wealth but also of freedom and status as citizens, in liberal democracies as well as dictatorships of various kinds (Mounk 2018; Fouskas and Gokay 2019; Jordan 2019). In this chapter, I shall trace the recent story of how inequality, stemming from the dominance of free-­ market capitalism, gave rise to systems for the coercion of poor people, and how this in turn contributed to the rise of authoritarian leaders, who support neither environmental policies nor equality of citizenship. In the © The Author(s) 2021 B. Jordan, Immigration, Social Cohesion and Political Reaction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52708-2_7

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UK, this has been a slow process, but it has been accelerating in recent times, and demands urgent attention if dangerous outcomes are to be avoided. The crucial decisions were made back in the early 1970s, when the government of Edward Heath was faced with a crisis over whether or not to join the European Community (as it then was). It was a moment when inflation was reaching galloping proportions, and the UK’s status as a global power was at risk, in more obvious ways than before. Despite dissident voices in his party—such as Enoch Powell—Heath chose to join, but at the same time to deal with the emerging issue of poverty among households with at least one member in employment (the focus of campaigns by the Child Poverty Action Group) not by a large and expensive increase in Family Allowances (universal payments for each child in a family after the first), but instead through selective, means-tested payments of Family Income Supplements (later called Tax Credits). The effect of this was to divide the working class between those who qualified for such payments (and therefore had their incomes determined by the state) and those who were ‘independent’ and paid income tax to support the former group. This created a ‘claiming class’ (Jordan 1973), analogous with the labourers supported out of the local rates under the Speenhamland System during the Napoleonic Wars, a policy denounced by the Poor Law Commissioners’ Report of 1834, as having demoralised this whole class, turning them into scrounging drunkards, feckless partners, and irresponsible parents to broods of children they could not afford. Although this analogy was rejected by social policy commentators at the time, much the same analysis has been made by Guy Standing in his influential book The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (2011), based on his data from a number of countries all over the world. What had therefore changed in those 40 years was that the numbers claiming these payments to subsidise the low wages provided by their employers (and the increased numbers of part-time and irregular-hours employments) had risen enormously, and similar subsidies to these employers had been adopted in the USA and most European countries. In other words, the potential for a revolt by the unsubsidised working class was omnipresent, as better-paid industrial jobs shrank through globalisation of production, inequalities of earnings increased, service work was poorly paid, and wage levels stagnated all over the developed world (Jordan 2019). It was this smouldering resentment that had contributed to the

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protest movements of 2011 and to the rise in authoritarian parties and presidents that decade. One obvious feature of systems for wage subsidisation is that their means tests create disincentives for increasing earnings, because of the deduction of benefits/credits as pay increases. This ‘poverty trap’ was well known as long ago as the 1970s, but has been overlooked by successive governments and is now a structural feature of systems; in the UK, it extended to as many as 80 per cent of working households with children in 2011, causing the Cameron government to cut the rates of tax credit support, when 90 per cent would have been eligible if they had applied, and the cost had risen to £30 billion, the largest such scheme in Europe— in 2014 they still formed 28 per cent of all UK spending on benefits. It also created disincentives to take low-paid and part-time work, and this in turn led to regimes of ‘sanctions’ (cuts in, or disqualifications for, unemployment benefits payments) by the officials administering these systems. These were not unique to the UK; they were also very widely deployed in Denmark, for example, though there they were combined with constructive schemes for education and training of claimants (Haagh 2019a, b). By 2011, 24 per cent of unemployed claimants were sanctioned for failing to take employment opportunities in the UK and Denmark. However, the UK regime was more punitive than that in Denmark, where rates of benefits were in any case higher by about 300 per cent. A high proportion of UK claimants were already living in poverty before claiming, so the impact of sanctions was often traumatic; there were high mortality rates in the year following the imposition of sanctions in the UK (Department of Work and Pensions 2015), and this has continued until the present day. For example, an inquest into the death of a disabled claimant, Tony Salter, found that his suicide was directly linked with the withdrawal of his benefits when a Department of Work and Pensions review found that he was fit to work. His sister told the BBC that the family had not been allowed to see the Department’s records on which this decision had been made and thought there had been a cover-up. Stephen Timms MP, interviewed afterwards, said that families should have the right to see the review records of deceased claimants, and that in this case, after being disqualified, he had become so depressed that he killed himself. The Department was destroying records after five years, citing data protection legislation, but Mr Timms said that this legislation did not specify how long the period in question was. The National Audit Office had suggested that there were no assessments of review processes

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happening in the Department at its last audit, and that it was secretive about reviews. The MP pointed to the Department’s reluctance to admit that it contributed to deaths, and that even now it was accepting that this had been happening, it was still unwilling to be open; he said he will ask for clarification or call for a Parliamentary Inquiry (BBC Radio 4, Today, 26th February, 2020).

The Parliamentary Election of December 2019 The most striking feature of the Parliamentary election of December 2019 was the Conservative landslide in the North of England. Before the election was called, Prime Minister Boris Johnson had secured a deal with the EU over the country’s withdrawal from the Union, but had failed to get a Parliamentary majority for its implementation in the September of that year. Surprisingly, the Scottish Nationalists and the Liberal Democrats gambled on gaining from an election; Jo Swinson, the leader of the latter fatally guessed that it would increase her party’s (Remain-supporting) vote. Labour was wrong-footed by this move, but Jeremy Corbyn rallied his shadow cabinet with a message of optimism and confidence. They were far from united, reflecting the party at large; his supporters thought they would gain from the long period of austerity and the promise of higher public spending, his critics sceptical about such a response. Boris Johnson faced some protests on the stump, but in some places got an ovation—for instance by the whole staff of a Kwikfit centre in one town. But his biggest boost came when Nigel Farage announced that the Brexit Party would not contest any of the 317 seats where the Conservatives held a majority. It seemed that an understanding had been given not to extend the implementation of Brexit any further, and to seek a free trade agreement with the EU, rather than any closer relationship. The immediate effect was that polls revealed a growth in Conservative support, and a falling off of that for the Brexit Party. Overall, the caution and vagueness of the Conservative’s pledges seemed to have paid off, while Labour’s attempt to conjure up the threat to the National Health Service of a trade deal with Donald Trump did not gain traction. Further damage was inflicted on Labour by a renewed accusation of anti-Semitism in the party’s membership by the Chief Rabbi, while the Liberal Democrats lost more credibility when Jo Swinson said she was aiming for the prime ministership. Boris Johnson pocketed a journalist’s mobile phone when shown a picture of a child lying on the floor of

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an admission ward in a Leeds hospital, but Labour was more damaged by the broadcast of a telephone call between shadow cabinet member John Ashworth and a friend, which the latter was secretly recording, predicting a heavy defeat for his party. In the final week, the Conservatives issued well-honed negative messages about Labour’s leader, no doubt directed by their Australian mastermind, Isaac Livido, who had directed the Liberal Party’s victory in his own country’s recent elections. In retrospect, several Labour members saw their big defeat as devastating, possibly signalling the death of their party. Michael Gove reflected that the Conservatives had taken so many seats from Labour in the North of England (including turning over some which had not elected anyone from his party for decades, and gaining handsome majorities, as in Blyth, for example), saying that his party should no longer be seen as representing the winners from globalisation, but for the whole nation; it had challenged conventional wisdom on political demography (BBC Radio 4, ‘The Election 2019’, presented by Anne MacElvoy, 25th February, 2020). Immigration played little overt part in the debates between the parties, or in their campaigns, yet it was clearly a big underlying issue. The only one which was likely to make great play of this, the Brexit Party, had boosted the Conservative vote by not contesting the seats already held, and this meant that many of its supporters in the Brexit referendum and the 2017 election voted Conservative in this one. Above all, the North of England deserted Labour, and this is likely to have been related to immigration issues, the main factor in Brexit, even though there were so few immigrants in constituencies like Blyth.

Conclusions In the UK, concerns about social cohesion began to be expressed in 2001, following the first manifestations of Islamic extremism; the New Labour government sought to take measures to integrate immigrants in 2002 introducing ‘Citizenship Tests’ for those wanting to gain this status. The motive for these was more related to concerns about immigration among the native population, and critics feared that failure might cause immigrants to experience stigma rather than inclusion. The questions were easy for those from the Old Commonwealth countries, since they could brush up on English history and folklore, but harder for those from Afghanistan,

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Iran or Iraq, refugees who had neither been educated in English nor been familiar with these subjects. Survey data showed that 40 per cent of immigrants passed their tests in six years, but those who did not apply, or failed theirs, had become equally involved in associational and civic life, and in political debates. The tests themselves were about typical school subjects, not about active participation—obedience rather than involvement, submission rather than real integration in civic life. David Bartram, himself an immigrant, says that the tests were based on an incorrect diagnosis of the causes of the Northern Riots of 2001, which ignored the class, inequality, deprivation and social exclusion that affected all, natives and immigrants alike (BBC Radio 4, Thinking Allowed, presented by Laurie Taylor, 26th February, 2020). In the same programme, a researcher who had been a teacher in a white working-class district talked about the 2014 requirement for schools to teach ‘fundamental British values’, supposed to promote democracy and social cohesion. This policy had been introduced in 2014 by the coalition government of David Cameron, after schools in Birmingham had been found to have been infiltrated by militant Islamists and was part of the counter-terrorism strategy ‘Prevent’. Her research found that there had been little consultation, explanation or training on how to teach this subject, and teachers were cynical about its introduction into the curriculum; it had already become a marginal element in the education process, despite guidance that it should inform school assemblies, religious education and classes on citizenship. Schools inspectors from Offsted had criticised the way values were taught and the use of posters in primary schools depicting stereotypical symbols (including royal anniversaries and nuptials); some teachers said that the whole idea was exclusionary and monocultural, ‘Nation-freezing’ and backward-looking. Immigration has transformed UK politics in several stages, with ‘moral panics’ at specific moments (such as terrorist attacks) leading to longer-­ term shifts in policies and in the support for parties. While 80 per cent of terrorists in recent years came from Muslim backgrounds, the police have also made fatal errors based on misperceptions and stereotypes, such as the shooting dead of a completely innocent young Brazilian on the London Underground. The ‘profiling’ of criminality, and the parallel use of databases and AI, can institutionalise racist assumptions; 70 per cent of those accused of gun crimes are black, but 90 per cent of young victims of

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murderous attacks are black also (BBC Radio 4, ‘The Moral Maze’, presented by Laurie Taylor, 26th February, 2020). The danger is that trust in fellow citizens will be undermined, as political leaders seek to win support by emphasising their credentials on the issue of ‘security’, and less attention given to inequality, deprivation and poverty as causes of criminality and support for Far Right extremism. Private companies have made huge profits out of installing various technological devices for street and public buildings surveillance, but both crime and extremism are more clearly related to economic and social factors than to the presence or absence of such measures. Some of the UK’s most important services are reliant on highly-skilled and qualified immigrants for their staffing, and this is most clearly the case for the NHS and social care. A quarter of NHS doctors were born overseas, and one in eight of all workers in that service; chefs, cleaners and night porters were among the latter, and 60,000 employees among current NHS staff would not be eligible if they applied under the new ‘points-­ based’ system proposed to come in with Brexit (BBC Radio 4, Today, 8th November, 2019). The coronavirus pandemic underlined this reliance on immigrant workers for essential services, as the flows from the Continent slowed to a trickle, and some workers returned home. However, at the same time some 20,000 doctors and nurses volunteered to return from retirement, to join as many as 750,000 volunteers in other roles, prompting Boris Johnson to remark (contradicting Margaret Thatcher) that ‘there is such a thing as society’ (BBC Radio 4, News, 30th March, 2020). The USA was (along with Finland, Japan, Chile, Indonesia, Germany and Australia) one of the countries selected as case studies by Jared Diamond in his Upheaval: How Nations Cope with Crisis and Change (2019). Some of these crises were the aftermath of military defeat and occupation, some of dictatorships overthrown, and some of civil wars; the UK’s was not any of these situations. Diamond’s analyses work on an analogy with personal crises, as theorised by those who practise ‘crisis therapy’ (Caplan 1985; Greenstone and Leviton 2011; James and Gilliland 2016). He starts with a list of twelve ‘factors related to the outcomes of personal crises’, these are: acknowledgement that one is in crisis, acceptance of one’s responsibility to do something, building a fence to delineate one’s individual problems needing to be solved, getting material and emotional help from other individuals and groups, using other individuals as models of how to solve problems, ego strength, honest self-appraisal, experience

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of previous personal crises, patience, flexible personality, individual core values and freedom from personal constraints (Table 1.1, p. 39). He goes on to use the analogy from these criteria to analyse the crises in the nations selected as his case studies, as if they were individual human beings. It is easy to see how the same methodology might be applied to the present situation in the UK—the whole unravelling of the institutional and political settlements of the post-war and post-EU membership periods, first slowly, and then at an accelerating pace since the 2016 referendum. Arguably almost all European nations have experienced some such process in recent years, but the EU has not (so far) disintegrated. Diamond’s book is a series of stories of recoveries, but longer-term histories tell of nations which have not survived and whole empires which have disintegrated—such as Burgundy, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Byzantium, Borussia, Sabaudia, Galicia and Etruria (Davies 2011). The UK itself is now threatened with disintegration, through Scottish Nationalism’s preference for independence with EU membership, and Irish Nationalism’s for integration with the Republic. As President of France, Emmanuel Macron has emphasised the values and beliefs shared by Europeans, and called on them to act as a ‘vanguard of progress’. But the rise of nationalism is still a limitation on the capacity of the EU to increase integration between member states. Thompson (2020) dates this tendency to the fall of the Soviet Union, and predicts the continuing assertion of nationalist claims throughout the Continent. Similar issues afflict countries like Spain and Italy, whose upheavals have been, if anything, more fundamental; we are living in an age of disintegration (Jordan 2020). But the underlying issues causing these phenomena are socio-economic as much as political, and demand fundamental internal reforms in the relations between citizens of all political units. In the final chapter, I shall turn to some of the radical changes which seem to be required to reverse these damaging threats to the political economies of the developed countries, and particularly the UK.

References Caplan, G. (1985). Recent Developments in Crisis Intervention and the Promotion of Support Service. Journal of Primary Prevention, 10, 3–25. Davies, N. (2011). Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe. London: Penguin Books.

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Department of Work and Pensions. (2015). Mortality Statistics: Employment and Support Allowance, Incapacity Benefit and Severe Disablement Allowance. London: Department of Work and Pensions. Diamond, J. (2019). Upheaval: How Nations Cope with Crisis and Change. London: Allen Lane. Fouskas, V. K., & Gokay, B. (2019). The Disintegration of Euro-Atlanticism and New Authoritarianism: Global Power-Shift. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Greenstone, J. L., & Leviton, S. C. (2011). Elements of Crisis Intervention: Crises and How to Respond to Them (3rd ed.). Belmont: Brooks Cole. Haagh, L. (2019a). Public State Ownership with Varieties of Capitalism: Regulatory Foundations for Welfare and Freedom. International Journal of Public Policy, 15(1/2), 153–184. Haagh, L. (2019b). The Case for Universal Basic Income. Cambridge: Polity. James, R., & Gilliland, B. (2016). Crisis Intervention Strategies (8th ed.). Boston: Cengage. Jordan, B. (1973). Paupers: The Making of the New Claiming Class. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul (Republished, 2019). Jordan, B. (2019). Authoritarianism and How to Counter It. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Jordan, B. (2020). The Age of Disintegration: Nations, Collectives and Public Bodies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Mounk, Y. (2018). The People Versus Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Standing, G. (2011). The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury. Thompson, H. (2020, February 28). Europe Is Still Struggling to Contain the Nationalist Forces Unleashed by the Fall of the Soviet Union. New Statesman, p. 11.

CHAPTER 8

The Growth in Coercion

Abstract  The rise of populist, nationalist authoritarianism in the developed countries did not come out of a clear blue sky; it owed its long-term origins to the growth of inequality, poverty and exclusion, and to coercive policies to enforce low-paid service work. In the short term, the combination of financial crises, stagnating earnings and the increased flows of refugees from war in the Middle East supplied the ideal conditions for its apparently sudden outburst—some of the same circumstances as had seen the rise of Fascism and Nazism in the interwar years. Keywords  Means-testing • Basic Income Understandably, governments in the UK, USA, Germany and Australia, where the traditional ruling parties have continued to exercise power, though in severely modified terms, have tried to minimise the extent of institutional changes. However, as I shall argue in this chapter, the compromise solutions they have adopted have turned out to be fraught with contradictions and problems, and are very unlikely to be capable, by tinkering, to achieve the changes that can realise their goals. In this chapter, I shall consider the example of taxation and income maintenance. The principle of social insurance was adopted by all the developed capitalist societies, starting with Germany in the period of Bismarck’s Chancellorship (the 1880s), then in other European countries © The Author(s) 2021 B. Jordan, Immigration, Social Cohesion and Political Reaction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52708-2_8

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and New Zealand, and finally in France, the UK (just before the First World War) and the USA (in the 1930s). But—as we have seen—the impact of globalisation, leading to de-­ industrialisation in these countries, and the privatisation of public services, leading to the growth of low-paid private service employment (both reflecting and re-inforcing polarisation of earnings), brought about the continuous expansion of means-tested schemes to subsidise poorly paid employment, and maintain household incomes. There always were alternative policies, such as increased universal child allowances and disability benefits, but these were never systematically adopted. This has meant that governments have faced the decision whether or not to hope that earnings can somehow be raised (an increasingly distant possibility, except in a few prosperous regions), or to introduce some rationalised, expanded version of means-testing. In the UK, the second option has resulted in the introduction of Universal Credit, first proposed by the Conservative former leader, Iain Duncan-Smith in 2011, or a much more radical new concept, unconditional Universal Basic Incomes, for all citizens. Meanwhile, something akin to universal Basic Incomes had come into existence, by an entirely unexpected route, and in societies which were far from being the most economically developed. As I shall show, they were introduced in societies which combined indigenous populations of hunter-­ gatherers or nomadic herders with windfall discoveries of mineral wealth, as a way to distribute the latter which avoided grotesque inequalities of status and freedoms, rather than to create equalities of incomes. This does, of course, raise questions about the access to these payments of recent immigrants to those states, which will be discussed below. But the origin of the idea of unconditional incomes for all citizens was first proposed immediately after the First World War, by two Englishmen, Donald Milner (1920), a pacifist Quaker, and Major C.H. Douglas (1920, 1930), a military engineer. They were named ‘social dividends’ and ‘national dividends’ respectively, and the idea was later taken up by the socialist G.D.H.  Cole (1929), and by a former environmentalist scoutleader, John Hargrave, who brought organisation and quasi-­militarism to a movement for ‘Social Credit’, eventually turning this into a militant organisation, the Greenshirts, which engaged in street fights with Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts (Drakeford 1997). As the Social Credit Party of Great Britain, it succeeded in having one candidate, Lady Juliet RhysWilliams, elected to Parliament before the Second World War and the

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Beveridge Report, the foundational document of the welfare state; her son Sir Brandon Rhys-Williams MP (Conservative), was still advocating the idea in the 1980s. Apart from his continued commitment to it, the principle disappeared from social policy debate, political and academic, until it was again proposed by the hippy movement in California, and adopted by the Claimants’ Unions in the UK in the early 1970s (Jordan 1973). Sir Brandon’s researcher, Hermione Parker, an economist, published an authoritative argument for it in 1986, and co-founded the Basic Income Research Group, later to become the Citizens’ Income Trust (Torry 2014). This joined up with a new movement of academics and a few trades unionists in Europe (Van Parijs and van der Veen 1985; Van Parijs 1995) as the Basic Income European Network (BIEN), eventually a world network (Standing 2011). Guy Standing (a re-incarnation of the energetic John Hargrave in some respects) has contributed hugely to the adoption of the idea in pilot projects in the developing world, and its access to mainstream politics, notably through Green Parties (see Chap. 5). The rationale for this proposal, and the prospects for its adoption in the developed capitalist societies, will be discussed in the final chapter. This chapter will chart the faltering course of Universal Credit’s introduction in the UK, a doomed attempt to find a simplified and more employment-friendly way to subsidise low earnings without recourse to the radicalism of a Basic Income scheme.

The Tribulations of Universal Credit It is extraordinary to recall that the origins of the Universal Credit system in the UK, which will not be finally rolled out for all eligible citizens (after repeated delays) in 2024, can be traced to 2009, when the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), which had been set up by the former Conservative Party leader, Iain Duncan Smith, published a report advocating an amalgamation of all the many means-tested benefits systems which might be claimed by unemployed, disabled claimants and low-paid workers. The goal of the reform was to enable a more advantageous and seamless transition from outside the labour market for claimants with other responsibilities and costs, especially lone parents, to enter employment, perhaps for a few hours a week. As Secretary of State for Work and Pensions after 2010, Duncan Smith introduced a modified version of the report’s plan, together with an extensive welfare-to-work initiative, the Work Programme,

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under which large companies contracted to prepare claimants for employment, and to qualify for fees if they found them lasting jobs. The CSJ stressed the importance of improving work incentives, but the Coalition government enacted its measures to enforce work ‘obligations’ before the first tentative steps to try out Universal Credit (UC), to make employment more advantageous for claimants. One way of looking at this was that, in consolidating all the means-­ tested schemes into one, UC was a first step in the direction of an unconditional Basic Income (Jordan 2010; Jordan and Drakeford 2012, p. 10). But such optimism did not fully anticipate the rise of authoritarian political leaderships, for which coercion and social division were the very life-­ blood. In the USA and UK, there are no signs of a transition from means-tested earnings subsidies towards unconditional citizenship-based payments. Not all means-tested benefits were included when UC was introduced (in a few trial districts); some cuts and caps were introduced, and the withdrawal rate as earnings rose was 65 per cent. The Conservatives in government were more attentive to the rate of income tax for the highest earnings band (50 per cent) than the effective rate of deductions from poor households’ incomes. Furthermore, the labour market into which claimants were being coerced was one which reflected the renewed financial crisis, and which had never recovered from the first—either low-paid ‘entry’ jobs (even for recent graduates) in which they got stuck, or successive short-term contracts. This suited employers in fields such as cleaning, hospitality care and other low-paid occupations. In one notorious case, a young graduate, Cait Reilly, was forced to take a job staking shelves in a supermarket as a condition for continuing to receive Jobseekers’ Allowance. Her lawyers sought judicial review to test whether this constituted forced labour, a violation of her human rights; the case was taken up by the Daily Mail (12th January, 2012), and even featured in the Sydney Herald Sun in Australia and the Huffington Post in the USA. Universal Credit expanded exponentially in subsequent years; between November, 2015 and November, 2019, the numbers of claimants in the UK grew by 70 per cent to 2.3 million, of whom 33 per cent were in employment and 41 per cent ‘seeking work under conditionality regimes’ (Official Statistics, Universal Credit Statistics, April 2013–July 2019). The accompanying commentary stated that ‘Universal Credit requires a

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broader span of people to look for work. New claimants availing or appealing work capabilities assessments are being required to work.’ But there were problems with this process at every stage. On 12 November 2018 the BBC Radio 4 Today programme reported that debt was four times higher in districts where it had been introduced than where it had not. Three days later, the same programme reported that 20 per cent of those being moved to UC were waiting longer than five weeks and up to twelve weeks to receive their first payment, while loans to destitute claimants were being reclaimed at rates of 40 per cent of their monthly payment. All this had led to a further delay in full implementation of the transition. Thorsten Bell of the Resolution Foundation criticised the whole process, and said that monthly payments did not match claimants’ accustomed habits of budgeting out of weekly or fortnightly pay packets. On 8 February 2019 the Huffington Post carried ‘calls for UC to be to be replaced with Basic Income after a Finnish trial’. In a document issued through the House of Commons, Andrew Powell wrote that, ‘The OBR (Office for Budget Responsibility) has estimated that JSA (Job-Seekers’ Allowance)-style conditionality will be extended to around 300,000 additional claimants’ (p. 3), and that ‘conditionality also extends to UC claimants who would otherwise have claimed Education and Support Allowance. The OBR estimates 150,000 claimants will be required to look for work as a result’ (p. 5). This explained the rise in the claimant count, he stated (Briefing Paper no. 7927, 21st January, 2020). But the system was found to have many flaws, above all the delays between claims and the receipt of payments. A series of three programmes, ‘Universal Credit: Inside the Welfare State’, on BBC 2 TV (4–25th February, 2020), focussed on one benefits office in Lancashire, highlighting how difficult it was for dedicated and well-meaning staff to make the system work for a variety of claimants. In the first of these, a man who had been unemployed for ten years, and sanctioned twice, was politely made to take a job cleaning trains. He said that this was quite unsuitable for him, and only persisted in it under the threat of a further six months of benefits disqualification. The second programme showed Job Centre staff (‘work coaches’) telling claimants recently made redundant that they must spend 35 hours a week seeking 35 hours of employment. One claimant who found a part-­ time job was required to sign in weekly report his earnings. In the third programme, claimants were shown trying to manage the first five weeks of their claim, during which no payments are made. A woman already in

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substantial debt took out a loan from the office, but could not afford the repayments made; already fewer were moving onto UC than anticipated, as news of these problems circulated. The introduction of Universal Credit was motivated by the desire for a simpler system, which would facilitate transitions to employment and increased working hours, but the rate of withdrawal as earnings grew was still a substantial disincentive, and the continued use of sanctions and disqualifications of claimants showed that the improvement was marginal. The plain truth is, first, that all means-tested systems, however constructed, are inherently complex, and many eligible citizens feel deterred by this from claiming them; and second, that the disincentives built into their withdrawal, even at the less drastic rate per pound earned achieved by UC, was an inescapable negative feature of them all. As shown in the television programmes, this meant long delays in payments, as staff struggled with the complexities, and frustration for claimants, often followed by anger when their benefits were withdrawn or reduced because they had not shown sufficient enthusiasm to seek work or increase their earnings. All this, together with the inordinate length of time to roll out the scheme nationally, has combined to discredit it in the eyes of the public.

Conclusions The use of coercion in benefits systems was not the only example of an increase in such methods in liberal democracies which has accompanied the rise in poverty and inequality. For instance, in the USA there has been a huge rise in rates of imprisonment, with black and other minority people the main components. At one time, one million prisoners there made the US the most punitive regime among the developed states, but the rate is now over two million, seven times the average for Europe, with 160,000 serving whole-life sentences, including many juveniles. In one small city in Colorado, boasts nine prisons; overall, there are over half a million ‘corrections staff’ in the country’s penitentiaries (BBC 4 TV, ‘America, with Simon Reeve’, 29th March, 2020). Remarkably, a former Black Panther, released after 43 years, said he ‘forgave’ those who had beaten and abused him (BBC World Service, Hard Talk, 30th March, 2020). However, for most of the population of liberal democratic societies, the most common experience of coercion is through the conditions for benefits and earnings supplements. UK governments of both parties since the

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1970s have been reluctant to accept that means-testing can never be made compatible with a society of equal citizens, living together under conditions of social justice. Nor have they recognised that the coercion involved in welfare-to-work measures has been one of the factors which fed resentment in deprived and excluded communities, leading to the mass demonstrations of 2011, and the continuing high rates of truancy, delinquency and deviance in such districts. The UK is an extreme example of these features by European standards. For many years British governments prided themselves on having lower rates of unemployment than their Continental neighbours, including Germany. However, this was achieved by drastic forms of deregulation, in which wage rates were allowed to stagnate for decades, while City bankers accumulated millions, and the professional classes prospered, as the value of their properties soared. Poverty was accompanied by the highest rates of imprisonment in Europe, and by the reversal of many of the achievements of the post-war welfare state. Whereas benefits claimants of the 1930s and 1970s organised themselves, and supported each other in co-operative projects and with advocacy over benefits (Jordan 1973), the new recipients of earnings subsidies were individualised by the systems which supplemented their incomes; yet they finally came together in protest in more recent years. Unlike the Claimants’ Unions, they had no vision of an alternative, which might break down the barriers of stigma and resentment that divided them from their ‘independent’ fellow citizens. But such a possibility does exist, and in a form which has already been tried and tested. This will be the topic of the concluding chapter. The impact of coronavirus has exposed the fragility of the UK economy and the inefficiency of the Universal Credit system in response to a crisis. Whereas Donald Trump opted for a kind of unconditional Universal Basic Income of $1200 a month for all citizens and $500 for each child in the USA (opposed by the Democrats in Congress, but carried after a brief delay), the UK government chose to use the Universal Credit system, slightly modified, with another slow payments system through the Revenue and Customs system for the self-employed, based on their tax declarations for 2018–19. Many exceptions and mixed cases arose, and in spite of taking on an extra 10,000 workers to administer all this, telephone calls requesting clarifications blocked the lines for many hours as callers tried to supply evidence to the authorities. Banks were more concerned to claim interest on loans to those who could not

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survive without them, and drove many small companies out of business. During the recovery, whenever this happens, the experiences of the USA and UK will be compared, and the merits and defects of the two systems will influence future policies.

References Cole, G. D. H. (1929). The Next Ten Years in British Social and Economic Policy. London: Macmillan. Douglas, C. H. (1920). Credit Power and Democracy. London: Cecil Palmer. Douglas, C. H. (1930). The Monopoly of Credit. London: Chapman and Hall. Drakeford, M. (1997). Social Movements and Their Supporters: The Greenshirts in England. London: Palgrave. Jordan, B. (1973). Paupers: The Making of the New Claiming Class. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul (Republished 2019). Jordan, B. (2010). Why the Third Way Failed: Economics, Morality and the Origins of the ‘Big Society’. Bristol: Policy Press. Jordan, B., & Drakeford, M. (2012). Social Work and Social Policy Under Austerity. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Milner, D. (1920). Higher Productivity by a Bonus on National Output: A Proposal for a Minimum Income for All Varying with National Productivity. London: Allen and Unwin. Standing, G. (2011). The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury. Torry, M. (2014). Money for Everyone: Why We Need a Citizens’ Income. Bristol: Policy Press. Van Parijs, P. (1995). Real Freedom for All: What (If Anything) Can Justify Capitalism? Oxford: Clarendon Press. Van Parijs, P., & van der Veen, R.  J. (1985, March). A Capitalist Road to Communism? Theory and Society.

CHAPTER 9

Conclusions

Abstract  A survey conducted four weeks before the UK General Election of December 2019 revealed that one-third of citizens thought that the whole system was rotten; four out of five said that the country was going in the wrong direction. They had no idea about how to take effective action within the political order to change it. Yet they remained fairly optimistic about their own lives, and this was reflected in the fact that levels of Subjective Well-being (SWB) had not declined. The commentator in a BBC Radio 4 PM programme, Matthew Taylor, director of the influential Royal Society for the Arts, said that elections used to be about policies; now they were about which ‘tribe’ would prevail, and this was not amenable to calculated assessment. In all, he said, some 30–40 per cent of the electorate had reason to feel that way; economic insecurity now went right up the income scale, and political analyst and statisticians were only just coming to grips with this challenge, adapting their messages and methods to a new, incoherent mood (11th November, 2019). Keywords  Debt • De-industrialisation • Institutional change • Unconditionality • Basic Income This was reflected in the manifestos of the major parties at the election; the Labour Party looked to past policies and institutions, such as nationalisation of infrastructural services, and the Conservatives pandered to popular opinion in de-industrialised regions like the North of © The Author(s) 2021 B. Jordan, Immigration, Social Cohesion and Political Reaction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52708-2_9

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England, where they ultimately gained unexpected mass support. Only the Greens put forward radical proposals, on both climate change and income maintenance, and they did very badly in the ballot (see pp. 69–70, 75–6). Yet there is clear evidence that inequality has reached unacceptable proportions, and that the introduction of Universal Credit, and the coercive policies that have accompanied it, have added to the burdens on poor people. In a BBC Radio 4 broadcast ‘The Fix’ (15th January, 2020), it was reported that 16 million households have savings of less than £100, and one in ten is in significant debt, even where there is more than one earner. They are unprepared for events such as loss of a job, which leads to more borrowing, and frequently to court orders and more borrowing to pay off these. Those in rented accommodation, including social housing, face eviction, as councils now sanction these; debts increase still further. A report from Barking and Dagenham (a borough in which 80 per cent of the population in 2001 was white British, though there has been some immigration since then) said that 40 per cent of council spending in that borough was on looked-after children, disproportionately from families in debt. The economic background to poverty in this borough was a classic example of de-industrialisation under conditions of globalised capitalism. The Ford factory now employs only 3000 workers, as its operations have been relocated, mainly in the Far East; earnings have flat-lined for 20 years, falling in real terms. The council was trying hard to anticipate and counter these problems, but facing an uphill task. In this book, I have tried to trace the origins of situations like this, to look at how they relate to immigration and measures for cohesion, and to propose ways in which they might be remedied. The advocates of an unconditional Universal Basic Income would certainly not claim that it could address all these issues, but I shall argue that it would be an important first step towards ameliorating them. Above all, it would end the absurd attempt to create ‘bullshit jobs’, and the use of coercive means to make of poor people do them, often in the service of the luxurious rich. One of the very few positive consequences of the coronavirus pandemic is that it has provided glimpses of an alternative future.

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From Utopian Visions to Pilot Studies Although the principle of Basic Income has been around for centuries (Van Trier 1995), and was part of the political debates of the 1920s and 1930s in the UK, it went out of serious discussion during the era of post-­ war welfare states, when the social insurance principle came to dominate income maintenance schemes. In recent years, the idea of unconditional Universal Basic Incomes has made a rapid transition from philosophical analyses, such as those of Philippe Van Parijs (1995), feminists’ prescriptions, such as those in Pateman (1988) and Lewis (2003), and environmentalists’ pleas, such as Fitzpatrick’s (1999), to detailed schemes and experiments. This was encapsulated in the title of Rutger Bregman’s Utopia for Realists and How We Can Get There (2017), originally published in the Netherlands as Gratis Geld voor Iedereen in 2014, but an international best-seller in its English translation, Guy Standing’s Basic Income and How We Can Make It Happen (2017), Downes and Lansley’s It’s Basic Income: The Global Debate (2018), as well as Brian Barry’s ‘The Attractions of Basic Income’, in Franklin (ed.) (2018), the last of these authors having been converted from previous scepticism. Bregman’s book gives dozens of examples of experiments, some on the scale no larger than a city, all over the world, not all of which were strictly unconditional or universal in scope. For instance, a ‘Schooling-Conditional Cash Transfer Programme’ in Malawi (Baird et  al. 2013), was seen to affect young women’s sexual behaviour, and the Basic Income Grant in Namibia (Haarman et al. 2009), confined to one district, helped women move into employment, and their children stay on at school. Leading tech entrepreneurs Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Angus Deaton were reported to be in favour of it, and supporting trials in North American Cities (‘Benefit or Burden? The Cities Trying Out Basic Income’, The Guardian, 27th July, 2018). The Business Insider carried a story on 23 July 2018 that, inspired by the Alaskan scheme, Chicago, Illinois and Stockton, California, were about to launch pilots; and the Huffpost (8th February, 2019) reported that there were demands for more trials in the UK because of the notorious setbacks in the implementation of Universal Credit. Trials in the Dutch cities of Groningen, Tilburg, Deventer, Nijmegen and Wageningen started late in 2017 (De Roo 2018). A review of the various European and American experiments by Shaan Ray was published on the website Hackernoon in October, 2018.

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But the climate of opinion overall did not favour unconditionality. The better-known Finnish experimental programme for testing the consequences of a Basic Income involved the selection of unemployed male claimants from all over the country, and compelling them to participate on pain of losing all income support. It was conducted against growing political backing for coercion and workfare schemes (Lehto 2018, pp. 165–6); the outcomes showed no improvement in employment rates, but some in health and self-assessed well-being (ibid., pp. 168–9). By far the best-known instance of the actual implementation of a Basic Income scheme was in Alaska, where windfall mineral wealth had created sudden grotesque inequalities between largely immigrant employees of drilling and mining companies, and local populations of Inuit ice-­fisherfolk. When Alaska became a state of the USA in 1959, its constitution had laid down that ‘the legislator shall provide for natural resources to be used for the maximum benefit of the people’ meaning that they could not be privately owned. As a result, the oil companies were required to set up the Alaska Permanent Fund, setting aside $65 billion for the future use of the community and initially deployed for education and health services. In 1981, the governor, Jay Hammond—like every subsequent one, a Republican—established the scheme to pay out what was in effect an unconditional Basic Income to all citizens who qualified after a period of one year’s residence, allowing only about 100 days’ absence for study or vacation. Over time the amount (around $1600 a month) varied but its popularity was established, so even drastically cost-cutting administrations over the following decades could not get rid of it. The consequence has been that, despite the presence of a substantial population of native Americans and hunter-gatherer Inuits, Alaska is the least unequal US state; poor women spend more time with their children than elsewhere in the US, and their children are less likely to be obese (BBC Radio 4, ‘Universal Basic Income, Alaska style’, presented by Mark Whittaker, 24th March, 2020). Equally unlikely has been the adoption of the principle of unconditional Basic Incomes following windfall mineral resources in Mongolia, a society of small cities and wide expanses of plains, ranged over by nomadic yak-herders. Despite its authoritarian government this scheme too was rather successful in sustaining traditional ways of life and reducing the worst consequences of these inequalities of income. Of all the countries of the European Union, Germany seemed the least likely to adopt the idea, because of its continuing prosperity. But a recent

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article in the daily newspaper Der Tagesspiegel (29th March, 2020), ‘Es braucht der Debatte uber ein bedingsloses Grundeinkommen’ (‘We Need a Debate about an unconditional Basic Income’) by Stephan-Andreas Casdorff, made a case for discussing whether the proposals had advantages for its economy too. Germany has suffered few of the oppressive consequences of means-tested benefits, and very little public debt, so this was a surprising suggestion; other EU countries had more urgent reasons for such a debate, with trials already under way in Italy and Spain. There was also support from such unlikely sources as the Public Banking Institute (Ellen Brown, ‘An Unconditional Universal Basic Income is Essential and will Work’, Counterpunch, 20th April, 2020). Unconditional Basic Incomes have demonstrated their value by allowing a diversity of ways of life rather than imposing a single rationale— employment, for its own sake—on one section of the population (those with low earning power), and enabling the best-off to profit from this, either by using them as cheap labour (servants, gardeners, chauffeurs), or by using the services in which they are forced to work, and which are effectively subsidised through the state (in the form of, for example, Universal Credit). In between these extremes, the majority of the population pay income tax, a substantial part of which funds income supplements for poor people; authoritarian politicians exploit their resentment of this, and gain support from their anger—so the whole circle of economic and political forces re-inforces itself at every point. An unconditional UBI would be a crucial step in breaking this circle.

Conclusions So the arguments for an unconditional Basic Income, both economic and political, are strengthening. From an economic standpoint, there is an obvious environmental case; sustainability and the threat of climate change demand a shorter working week, in order to reduce carbon emissions. Yet the idea commands little support from businesses or trades unions. In one discussion among a group of the former, the case made for this by a pioneering owner of a recruitment firm who had stopped Friday activity of all kinds was strongly resisted by other business people, in the name of ‘flexibility’. The average working week for men in the UK is still 39 hours, for women 35  hours (BBC Radio 4, ‘The Bottom Line’, presented by Evan Davies, 29th February, 2020).

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Automation and AI offer ways in which the time spent in paid employment could continue to be reduced, with the UBI rising as this occurs, so long as taxes are not spent on systems for coercing claimants into ‘training’ or ‘work experience’ which contribute nothing to economic efficiency. Instead of allowing inequalities to continue to increase, as part of a policy for enabling the better-off to get cheap services from low earners, governments could focus on projects for work to increase well-being and social value. Globalisation is likely to be the long-term direction of change, even if it can be steered; protectionism may slow it, but not reverse it. Migration will continue to challenge the institutions of societies in many ways. The aim should be, first, to humanise its consequences, and then to harness its opportunities, as envisioned in the utopian writings of Bregman (2017), Stayton (2019) and Bastani (2019) all advocates of UBI. The coronavirus pandemic, an example of the worst consequences of globalisation, has paradoxically resulted in emergency schemes for Basic Incomes, though political leaders have assiduously avoided using this term. On 25 March 2020 Congress approved President Donald Trump’s scheme to supply $1200 per month for all adult citizens, and $500 for each child. Although the pandemic will have many adverse effects (on life expectancy of poor people in particular) through the decline in earnings, the principle will become established, and experience of its advantages will increase its political popularity. The UK has responded with absurdly complex versions of what amounts to the same principle, though at different rates and under different names for employed, self-employed and non-­ employed citizens; but here again the actual fact of the income will make lasting changes, for instance to support for the Green Party. Danny Dorling (BBC Radio 4, ‘Start the Week’, 30th March, 2020) points out that growth has been slowing in each decade since the 1930s, and that only radical change can head off conflict and extremism. If protectionism and populist nationalism are the spirit of the age, there have also been some encouraging signs of international co-operation. Globalisation has raised living standards in the developing world, but it has also enabled the rapid world-wide spread of terrorism and infectious illnesses. The outbreak of coronavirus all over the world illustrated both its dangers and its advantages for co-ordination between national governments in response. While the escalation of international travel which accompanied this phase in world economic development has enabled the rapid spread of the virus, this concerted action has reduced even worse outcomes. The political road to such outcomes is less clear, especially in the USA and UK; it may only be when the negative economic consequences of

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present policies become more obvious, and the environmental threats more pressing, that programmes with those aims will get wider electoral support. Authoritarian regimes gain power from divisions and resentments, and pursue policies which intensify these. But even on the African continent, attacks on immigrants have signalled similar sentiments. In Johannesburg, South Africa’s largest city, small businesses owned by Nigerian immigrants were attacked and burnt by local residents; a woman was shot and killed. Twenty years previously, 20 immigrants from other African states had been killed in riots, despite the support that their countries of origin had given to the struggle against the apartheid regime (BBC Radio 4, From Our Own Correspondent, 5th March, 2020). Furthermore, the Trump presidency is more concerned to do trade deals with autocratic states than to challenge them; he was, for instance, reluctant to condemn Putin’s incursions into the Ukraine. Both Paul Mason (2014) and Guy Standing (2017) write of ‘the corruption of capitalism’; there is little evidence that a new mass movement will embrace the combination of policies which I have argued are required for sustainability and social justice. Tom Malleson encapsulates the current paradox with the observation that the political economy of liberalism and free markets ‘seems strangely both invincible and doomed. … The system seems at once both unlikely to continue but unable to change course’ (2014, pp. 214–5). He gives a lukewarm endorsement to UBI. The distinguished Emeritus Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at Oxford University, Robin Dunbar, argues (from long-term anthropological and historical evidence) that there are time constraints on how quickly we can adapt our institutions to radical economic changes, such as those introduced by social media and mobile technology (Dunbar and Sosis 2018). One is reminded of the terrible centuries of conflict in Europe which accompanied the invention of printing, and the breakdown of medieval forms of bonding and collective identity in the European Catholic order (BBC Radio 4, Belonging, 3rd December, 2018). The lesson from history seems to be that it is better to try to harness such social convulsions, rather than muzzle them. Machiavelli (1517) thought that periods of authoritarianism, such as our present one, alternated with ones of good, accountable government. History is full of gloomy examples of the former, such as the 1930s of the last century. It may take good fortune, as well as political skill, to negotiate the next few years, giving time for adapted forms of capitalism and democracy to emerge. This is where the internet and social media can be a blessing; they allow networks of people with dissident and unorthodox ideas to survive, and ultimately to grow in influence.

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Index

A Abdullah, Al-Faisal, 62 Afghanistan, 60, 67, 83 Africa North, 5, 8, 13, 14 South, 103 Alaska, 51, 100 Alcohol, 45 Algeria, 4 Algorithms, 40 Al Mahajiroun, 62 Alternative für Deutschland, 60, 70 Amazon, 38, 63, 70, 76 America South, 11 Amman, Sudesh, 62 Apartheid, 103 Arab Spring, 13–14, 59 Aristotle, 25, 36 Arrighi, G., 33 Artificial Intelligence (AI), 3, 51, 52, 70, 84, 102 Ashworth, J., 83 Asylum, 2, 11, 39 Atkinson, A.B., 51

Australia, 46, 75, 85, 89, 92 Austria, 7 Authoritarianism, 4, 23, 103 B Bader, W.B., 7 Banks, 6, 25, 35, 39–41, 47, 48, 66, 95 Barking, 98 Barry, B., 51, 99 Bartram, D., 84 Bastani, A., 74, 102 Becker, B.K., 72 Beijing, 64 Belgium, 9 Benefits, 4, 8, 12, 27–29, 35, 36, 39, 50–53, 73, 81, 90–95, 100, 101 Berlin, 6 Bermuda, 41 Bezos, G., 48 Biarritz, 70 Big Society, 25 Black Death, 15, 71 Blackpool, 70

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INDEX

Blair, T., 25, 36, 65 Blanchard, O., 23 Blond, P., 25 Blyth, 83 Böhning, W.R., 9 Bolsonaro, J., 70 Bonn, 6, 9 Borders, 2, 3, 10–12, 20, 21, 37, 48, 60 Borussia, 86 Boundaries, 19–22 Brazil, 20, 72 Bregman, R., 99, 102 Brexit, 13, 20, 36, 82, 83, 85 Brighton, 75 Brittan, S., 51 Brown, G., 36, 66 Buchanan, J.M., 10 Buffett, W., 48 Bureaucrats, 12 Burgundy, 86 Burnley, 75 C Cambridge, 70 Cameron, D., 25, 81, 84 Cameroon, 39 Cantonese, 64 Capitalism, 14, 20, 23, 25, 33–41, 71, 79, 98, 103 Caplan, G., 85 Care child, 49, 50, 54, 66 social, 22, 28, 46, 85 Careers, 13, 47, 49, 50 Caribbean, 5, 8, 56 Castles, F.C., 46 Cecchini Report, 9 Chicago, 99

Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG), 80 Children, 11, 34, 47, 50, 56, 80, 81, 98–100 China, 14, 24, 29, 33, 38, 60, 65, 67, 71, 74, 76 Choudary, Anjem, 62 Christchurch, 61 Christian Democrats, 6, 69 Claimants’ Unions, 91, 95 Classes, 7, 37, 38, 52, 55, 56, 66, 72, 80, 84, 95 claiming, 80 Clinton, B., 36, 63 Clubs, 10, 21 Coalitions, distributional, 50 Coercion, 36, 79, 89–96, 100 Cole, G.D.H., 20, 90 Collective goods, 10, 21, 48 Collinson, S., 9, 11 Commonwealth, 9, 22 Communitarianism, 25 Contracts, 21, 24, 36, 38, 92 Corbyn, J., 82 Corporatism, 7 County Court Judgement Orders (CCJ), 29 Crime financial, 40 organised, 40 Cyrus, N., 12 Czechoslovakia, 11 Czech Republic, 71 D Dahrendorf, R., 51 Daily Telegraph, 66 Darwin, C., 37 Davies, E., 101

 INDEX 

Davies, N., 86 Debt, 29, 34, 36, 93, 94, 98, 101 Dementia, 28 Democracy, 3, 8, 14, 19, 20, 37, 48, 60, 62–65, 71, 79, 84, 94, 103 Democratic Party (US), 2, 7, 14 Demonstrations, 8, 14, 15, 33, 37–39, 63, 65, 70, 95 Denmark, 35, 36, 81 Department of Work and Pensions, 81 Deportation, 24, 38 Detention, 24, 65 Deventer, 99 Devillanova, C., 12 Dictatorships, 7, 8, 37, 72, 79, 85 Disqualifications, 4, 28, 36, 81, 93, 94 Dissidents, 20, 38, 60, 72, 80, 103 Divorce, 50, 52, 56, 64 Dorling, D., 102 Douglas, C.H., 90 Drakeford, M., 90, 92 Drugs, 4, 45 Duffy, G., 66 Dunbar, R., 103 Düvell, F., 11, 19, 22, 23, 72 E Edinburgh, 60 Education, 10, 13, 21, 22, 24, 46, 47, 53, 64, 72, 81, 84, 100 Ekaterinburg, 65 El Paso, 62, 63 Empires, 9, 23, 86 Environmentalism, 69 Equality, 19, 20, 23, 47, 54, 55, 79, 90 Esping-Andersen, G., 33 Europe, 4, 6–9, 14, 61, 70, 72, 73, 75, 81, 91, 94, 95, 103

113

European Commission, 11 European Foundation, 5 European Social Model, 6, 11–13 European Union (EU), 1–6, 11–14, 22, 60, 65, 66, 73, 82, 86, 100, 101 Evolution, 37 Extradition Bill (Hong Kong), 38 F Facebook, 63 Family, 9, 22, 26, 28, 29, 34, 35, 45–56, 60, 64, 71, 80, 81, 98 Family Allowances, 80 Famines, 2 Fascism, 2, 3 Ferguson, N., 47 Finland, 7, 51, 85 Fishlake, 73 Fishmongers’ Hall, 62 Fitzpatrick, T., 99 Flexibility, 11–13, 101 Ford Motors, 98 Forests, 70–73, 76 Forooha, R., 40 Fortress Europe, 12 France, 4, 5, 7–9, 13, 14, 38, 39, 52, 60, 70, 86, 90 Frank, A.G., 33 Freedom, 19, 24, 52, 63, 64, 72, 79, 86, 90 Freeman, G.P., 5 Frey, C.B., 48 G Gaddafi, M., 14 Galicia, 86

114 

INDEX

Gates, B., 48 Germany, 2, 3, 7, 8, 11, 13, 14, 60, 62, 69, 75, 76, 85, 89, 95, 100, 101 Gilets Jaunes, 38, 52 Glasgow, 51 Globalisation, 2–4, 10, 13, 20, 23, 29, 33, 39, 41, 48, 59, 80, 83, 90, 102 Goldsmith, Z., 76 Google, 41 Gowan, P., 67 Greece, 5, 8, 9, 13, 14, 35, 36, 60 Greenstone, J.L, 85 Gregory, R., 46 Groningen, 99 H Haagh, L., 4, 36, 81 Halpern, D., 36 Hammond, J., 100 Hargrave, J., 90, 91 Hatcher, R., 24 Heath, E., 80 Heller, C., 73 Hezbollah, 38 Home Office, 39 Hong Kong, 14, 37, 38, 64 Hungary, 3, 4, 11, 37, 67 I Incentives, 23, 36, 92 India, 65, 67 Indonesia, 72, 85 Industry, 4, 7, 38, 53, 67, 71 Information, 36 Infrastructure, 7, 21, 22, 48, 66, 74 Inman, R.P., 10 Insecurity, 4, 23, 33–41, 49, 52, 56, 60, 63

Institutions, 7, 23, 29, 40, 41, 46, 50, 54, 72, 74, 97, 102, 103 building, 6 International Labour Office (ILO), 46 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 24 Internet, 21, 39, 103 Intimacy, 51 Inuits, 100 Iowa Caucus, 14 Ireland, 2, 3, 5, 66 Iron Curtain, 10, 12 Israel, 4 Italy, 2, 5, 7, 14, 35, 60, 86, 101 J Jamaica, 62 James, R., 85 Japan, 13, 49, 85 Jihadis, 61, 63 Johannesburg, 103 Johnson, B., 14, 15, 82, 85 Jordan, B., 3–5, 11, 19, 22, 23, 25, 26, 36–39, 46, 47, 49–51, 53, 72, 73, 79, 80, 86, 91, 92, 95 Judt, T., 6, 8, 9, 12 Jurisdictions, 21 K Kassel, 69 Kelly, G., 14 Kenya, 70 Kettle, M., 15 Khan, U., 62 Kindleberger, C., 7, 8 Kohl, H., 12 Korea, South, 13 Krugman, P., 10 Kuensburg, L., 65 Kwikfit, 82

 INDEX 

L Labour-markets, 11, 12, 15, 22, 23, 33, 36, 38, 46, 47, 49–52, 66, 91, 92 Labour Party (Australia), 46 Lam, Carrie, 64 Lavenex, S., 11, 12 Layard, R., 12, 26, 45 Lebanon, 37, 59, 70 Left, new, 37 Lehto, A., 100 Lewis, J., 99 Lewis, M., 34 Lewis, W.A., 7, 10 Liberal Democrats (UK), 82 Life expectancy, 35, 45, 75, 102 Lithuania, 86 Livido, I., 83 Loach, K., 28 Locusts, 70 London, 8, 34, 35, 40, 53–55, 61, 62, 66, 84 Longlands, S., 74 Lübcke, W., 69 Lucas, C., 75

Microsoft, 63 Milner, D., 90 Minford, P., 12, 20

M Maastricht Treaty, 11 Macfarlane, A., 15 Macron, E., 60, 70, 86 Malleson, T., 33, 103 Mandarin, 64 Mannheim, K., 37 Marmot, M., 35 Marseilles, 4 Marshall Aid, 6 Mason, P., 103 Mattinson, D., 66, 67 May, T., 39 Mayer, C., 34 Membership, 4, 5, 8, 9, 12, 13, 20, 47, 52, 53, 82, 86

O Obesity, 45 Olson, W.E., 49, 50 Orwell, G., 63

115

N Namibia, 51, 99 Napoleonic Wars, 36, 80 National Audit Office, 28, 81 National Health Service (NHS), 22, 53, 66, 82, 85 Nazism, 2 Netherlands, 7, 14, 35, 99 Neumann, P., 63 New Jersey, 39 New York, 40 Nixon, R., 37 Non-Government Organisations (NGO), 24, 71 North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), 60 Northern Powerhouse, 74 Northern Rock, 66 Norway, 61 Nottingham, 8

P Pabst, A., 63, 70 Pandemics, 1–15, 34, 41, 48, 56, 63, 65, 71, 74, 76, 85, 98, 102 Parasite, 34, 52 Pareto optimum, 49 Paris, 8, 9 Parker, H., 51, 91 Pateman, C., 51, 99 Peasants, 2

116 

INDEX

Peleponician War, 36 Pensions, 36, 47, 49–51 Pezzano, L., 73 Picketty, T., 38 Poland, 11 Police, 8, 11, 37, 39, 62–64, 84 Pollution, 20, 36 Poor Law (1834), 80 Portugal, 5, 7–9 Poverty trap, 81 Powell, E., 80 Power, A., 5, 10 Power, 3, 5–8, 21, 23, 33, 36, 38, 41, 49, 50, 52, 55, 60, 63, 65, 67, 70, 80, 89, 101, 103 Precariat, 13, 73 Privatisation, 12, 23, 24, 90 Productivity, 23 Professions, 24 Prostitution, 39 Protests, 4, 8, 15, 33, 35, 37, 38, 59, 61, 62, 64, 65, 81, 82, 95 Public Sector Executive (PSE), 27 Purdy, D., 51 Pusey, M., 46, 47 Putin, V., 65, 103 R Race Relations Act, 9 Refugees, 2, 3, 11, 14, 37, 39, 48, 51, 60, 66, 67, 72, 84 Relationships, 3, 9, 20, 25–29, 33, 36, 45, 47, 51, 52, 54, 56, 72, 82 Religion, 2 Rents, economic, 50 Republican Party (US), 60 Rhys Williams, Lady J., 90 Rhys Williams, Sir B., 91 Romania, 20, 65 Roo, A. de, 99 Roosevelt, F. D., 41 Russia, 2, 3, 65, 67

S Saez, E., 40 Sanctions, 4, 36, 81, 94, 98 Schengen Agreement, 11, 14 Schumpeter, J., 26 Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP), 82 Sharia, 62 Slovakia, 4 Smith, A., 49 Social Democrats, 76 Social Value Portal, 27, 53, 54 Soleimani, General, 38 Solidarities, 3, 19–30 Somalia, 70 Sovereignty, 20–22, 24 Soviet Union, 2, 23, 61, 86 Spain, 2, 5, 7–9, 14, 35, 38, 86, 101 Speenhamland System, 80 Stalin, J., 6 Standing, G., 4, 13, 33, 38, 73, 80, 91, 99, 103 Stayton, R., 70, 74, 102 Streatham, 62 Students, 2, 4, 38, 51, 72 Suicide, 28, 29, 45, 81 Sustainability, 14, 20, 53, 67, 69–76, 101, 103 Swinson, J., 82 Syria, 59, 60, 65, 67 T Tachibanaki, T., 12 Tanzania, 70 Tarrant, B. H., 61 Taxation, 41, 89 Tax Credits, 34, 36, 51, 80, 81 Taylor, A. J. P., 84, 85 Telephones, 21, 62, 83, 95 Terrorism, 59–67, 102 Thirty Years’ War, 23 Tiebout, C., 10 Timms, S., 29, 81

 INDEX 

Torry, M., 91 Trade, 5, 9, 29, 39, 40, 55, 60, 82, 103 high-frequency, 40 Trades unions, 6, 12, 24, 38, 50, 52, 101 Trees, 20, 70, 74, 76 Tribes, 20, 21 Trump, D., 2, 13–15, 37, 38, 60, 61, 63, 67, 82, 95, 102, 103 Turkey, 5, 8, 9, 60 U Uganda, 70 Underclass, 12, 52 Unemployment, 3, 4, 10–12, 14, 22, 23, 36, 47, 81, 95 United States of America (USA), 2–4, 6, 10, 12, 13, 15, 24–26, 33, 36–41, 45, 47–52, 56, 60–63, 67, 71, 72, 75, 80, 85, 89, 90, 92, 94–96, 100, 102 Universal Basic Income (UBI), 2, 56, 90, 95, 98, 99, 101–103 Utility, 26, 28 UtΦya, 61 V Value, social, 26–28, 53, 54, 56, 102 Van Parijs, P., 51, 91, 99 Van Trier, W., 99

117

Visegrad Group, 11 Vogel, D., 12 W Wageningen, 99 Wages, 4, 12, 14, 22, 23, 36, 50, 51, 60, 80, 81, 95 Wall, border, 37 Walter, T., 51, 69 War, 2, 3, 24, 37, 66, 71 Warren, E., 41, 48 Watson, R., 62 Well-being, 25–28, 45–56, 74, 100, 102 Westphalia, Treaty of, 23 Wildasin, D. E., 12 Wilkinson, R., 26 Wilson, W. J., 39 Women, 11, 13, 35, 39, 47, 49–52, 54, 55, 75, 99–101 World Bank, 24, 29, 71, 72 Wuhan, 29 Y Yorkshire, South, 73 Yugoslavia, 8 Z Zero-hours contracts, 29 Zuboff, S., 63 Zucman, G., 41