The detrimental outcomes from a lack of participation in mainstream society and its institutions and practices is the focus of this discourse. The fundamental and overriding participation is that of the labour market. Moving people from unemployment into paid work is the central response of this discourse to integrating those who are detached from society.
This analysis highlights the discursive flexibility of the exclusion concept enabled through its ambiguous nature. What then does the New Labour’s representation of social exclusion reveal when examined using a framework of RED, SID and MUD or Silver’s triplet of paradigms? Significantly, the analysis of both Levitas (1998) and Fairclough (2000) present New Labour’s discourse as primarily consisting of a dominant SID in combination with aspects of MUD. This
orientation offers an insight into the function that social exclusion plays in the schema of New Labour’s governmentality. The scarcity of RED exposes New Labour’s retreat from egalitarian aspirations of equality, as equality of outcome, characteristic of Old Labour, towards a conception of equality as equality of opportunity (Brown, 1996). The presence of MUD is indicative of the influence of communitarian thought on New Labour’s and, in contrasts to Old Labour, a new willingness to seek to govern the cultural and moral order.
Considering two of Atkinson and Hills (1998) dimensions of exclusion, relativity and agency, spotlights another aspect of the discursive flexibility contained within the concept of social exclusion. Through the construction of discourses of exclusion it is possible to present exclusion as a status relative to some datum or as a process that foregrounds causes or agents of exclusion (Berghman,1995). For example, it is possible to represent helping the ‘unemployed’ back into work as a remedy for exclusion, or to represent the shortage of suitable employment as the reason people experience exclusion form the job market. This capacity of the exclusion concept to slide between exclusion as social status or process is important in understanding its use in policy narratives. In relation to Levitas’ three discourses it is possible to generalise SID and MUD tending to construct exclusion in terms of status or condition while obfuscating considerations of agency. RED contains a relationship to critical social analysis with a focus on agency. In common with the prevalence of SID and MUD in New Labour’s policy narratives, social exclusion is present within its discourse predominantly in the guise of status or condition.
In considering the two texts under analysis, together with WTW text, in relation to the triplet of paradigms distinguished by Silver, all three operate in harmony to represent what exclusion is, what it is that individuals are excluded from, its consequences and antidotes. The texts operate discursively without fitting neatly into any of the paradigms elaborated by Silver. At the surface level SID
would seem to correspond to elements of a solidarity position, monopoly would in the main align with RED and key elements of MUD can be drawn from sectors of the specialisation paradigm. There would at face value seem to be a stronger relation between classical social democracy, monopoly and RED as outlined by Levitas. The desirability of insertion and the active role of the State in this process unite SID and the Solidarity paradigm. However, unlike French republicanism’s emphasis on a moral political community of citizens, New Labour’s use of SID would seem to rest more on the integrating benefits of participation in the economic, drawing more from endogenous growth theory and supply side economics than an abstraction of the social order as ‘external, moral and normative’ (Silver, 1995:66). The form of MUD outlined by Levitas would seem to align more closely to the morally deficit underclass position associated with Charles Murray. In the texts, the third way state reveals itself as willing to enforce civic behaviour, assuming a dual posture that is both enabling and where required authoritarian. The form of MUD that is present in the texts above would seem to articulate with the softer communitarian aspects of specialisation and its emphasis on the need to balance the interests of the community with individual rights. A second aspect of communitarianism that finds resonance in the depiction of the estate is a belief that the cultures and values of communities condition the individuals who live in them.
The basis of this modern civic society is an ethic of mutual responsibility or duty. It is something for something. A society where we play by the rules. You only take out if you put in. That’s the bargain. In concrete terms that means:
• Reforming welfare so that government helps people to help themselves and provides for those who can’t, rather than trying to do it all through government.
• Where opportunities are given, for example to young people, for real jobs and skills, there should be a reciprocal duty on them to take them up.
• We should encourage people like single mothers who are anxious to work but unable to, to get back into the labour market. This is empowerment not punishment.
• We should root out educational failure, because it is the greatest inhibition to correcting poverty.
• We should enforce a new code of laws that crack down on crime and other antisocial behaviour (WTW, Blair, 1997)
Levitas (1998) is at pains to locate the New Labour turn to social exclusion
within a Durkheimian concern for social integration, cohesion and solidarity. The twin concerns of social integration and moral regulation in the schematic of New Labour’s governmentality have a strong Durkheimian inflection. New Labour’s revision of social democracy, the ‘new social democracy,’ repudiates the social disintegration and growing separations in the social fabric viewed as a
consequence of the programme of the New Right. This orientation is both objectively, and in terms of New Labour’s narrative around its own identity, a continuity with, and source of claim on, the heritage of classical social
democracy. The centrality of the importance attached to understanding and maintaining social cohesion in the thought of Durkheim, his concern for solidarity and the dangers of anime, find a clear echo in the themes of the texts above. Etzioni (1993), in his articulation of communitarianism cites Durkheim, indeed Levitas (from the left) characterises Etzioni’s concern for the moral order in maintaining the social as a reading of Durkheim from the right. Without
contesting the sources of New Labour’s social theory: in its reading of the social order New Labour has arguably turned towards a set of Durkheimian concerns and has responded by incubating a particular form of government reason, a third way governmentality.
In summarising New Labour’s construction of social exclusion it is productive to return to Giddens (1998), a guiding light for the architects of the New Labour project. The concept of social exclusion is central to aspects of Giddens’ articulation of Third Way politics. What the use of the social exclusion concept permits and facilitates for New Labour is a movement from a position of
equality, the reduction of social inequalities stance in the narrative of Old
Labour, to this new flexible term that allows greater scope in narration. Giddens argues that in the context of globalisation there is no possibility of electoral success on a platform of redistribution. He therefore sets out a role for
government in redistributing what he calls ‘possibilities.’ Whereas the discourse of Old Labour painted a canvas of the social world marked by inequality, and therefore remedied by some shape or form of redistribution, social exclusion in the narrative of New Labour allows a range of treatments to be prescribed for social inequality that do not foreground or draw attention to questions
concerning the origins of social inequalities or redistribution as an essential counter.
Social exclusion at the bottom is not the same as poverty. The majority of those who are poor at any one time would not be ranked among the excluded. Exclusion contrasts with being ‘poor’, ‘deprived’ or ‘on a low income’ in several ways. It is not a matter of differing from others in degree-having fewer resources-but of not sharing in opportunities that the majority have. In the case of the worst urban areas or
neighbourhoods, exclusion can take the form of a physical separation from the rest of society. In other instances it may mean lack of access to normal labour market opportunities (Giddens, 2000:105).
In the Giddens’ formulation of social exclusion it is possible to clearly discern a discontinuity among those at the bottom of society in terms of income and disadvantage. It is not that the excluded are the poorest of the poor. Simply living on a low income, to the extent of being in poverty, does not confer the status of being excluded. Individuals may live lives characterised by multiple deprivation, but again this is not the same as being excluded. A defining element in Giddens’ conceptualisation is the operation of ‘opportunities.’ In his
construction of a Third Way social theory, the two central opportunities are employment and education (Giddens, 1998). This Third Way model of society presupposes that citizens can be poor, technically in poverty, but have access to civil and political rights, have a way into wider social institutions and have a hope of some future participation in education or labour markets. The excluded, in comparison, are marooned on an island off the coast of the ‘strong, active community of citizens’ (Blair, 1997), separated by having no future prospect of rejoining the mainland. Giddens’ solution for their release is to construct a temporary bridge by the redistribution of opportunities.
Notably, Giddens (2000:106) follows his discussion of exclusion by approving the New Democrat formulation of welfare; that it should offer a ‘hand-up and not a hand-out.’ New Labour’s retreat from redistribution and egalitarian aspirations of equality is neutralised and made less contentious by establishing a new representation of the social. This shift is detectible in the way the three texts above work to signify the social order. The heritages of socialism and social democracy have been fashioned by their dependence on, and employment of,
what could be term classical stratification theory. This tradition was founded on the identification, within modern industrial capitalism, of class categories by Marx, and their development by Max Weber (Edgell, 1993). Weber agreed with Marx’s fundamental distinction between those who owned property for exchange and those who did not. Both theorists demarcated in their writing a more
extensive hierarchy of classes. Weber acknowledged the primacy of social class but sought to accommodate the advantages of skill and education into the social structure, along with other qualities that served to endow ‘status’ and produce status groups (see Figure 9.4).
While it must be noted that Giddens is something of an authority of social structure (see Giddens, 1979) the model of the social inherent in his exposition of Third Way shies away from class, or a more elaborated social hierarchy, in favour of an uncomplicated mainstream/exclusion model. This can conceivably be placed in the context of populist political texts (Giddens, 1998 and 2000) and the undertaking of providing Third Way with a coherent and creditable
intellectual framework. Having said this, it is important not to simplistically equate Giddens’ thinking with New Labour’s policy stream around exclusion. There has, for example, been no attempt by New Labour to constrain elite self- exclusion (Young, 1999), an issue of concern to Giddens. The texts above work to establish an uncomplicated dualistic social order that constructs the excluded as detached from ‘mainstream of society’ (See Figure 10.4). At the same time the nature of stratification within the mainstream is obfuscated under a political vision of ‘one nation.’ This representation became the settled formulation in the early period of New Labour’s administration and can be understood as a
significant abstract element of third way governmentality. The establishment in the wider societal and sociocultural context of the perception of a dualistic representation supports, for New Labour, a revision of the responses of classical social democracy to a structurally unequal social order.
Vertical Stratification
Karl Marx 1818-83
Max Weber 1864-1920
Figure 10.4: Schematic of Giddens’xxxviii and Third Way Models of the Social Order
Tony Giddens
The Socially Excluded ‘Mainstream society’
Elite self-exclusion