Digramas UML

The Thatcher government pursued a political ideology informed by the neo-liberal

ideology of the New Right. At the heart of this political dogma was a critique of the welfare

state which argued that the state had grown to unsustainable proportions, represented an ineffective way of coordinating human activity and services, and an economic drain on the country; furthermore, the welfare state was morally flawed by fostering welfare

dependence, sapping self-initiative and undermining the sense of responsibility and freedom as autonomous individuals (Clarke and Newman, 1997). Consequently it was argued that people had to be ‘freed’ or rescued from the stifling grasp of an ‘overbearing, intrusive and paternalistic state’. The government felt it necessary, therefore, to intervene by cutting welfare services and redressing the balance of rights and responsibilities – what Clarke termed, the ‘responsibilisation’ of citizens (Clarke, 2005:449). Thatcher’s policies, then, represented a major departure from the ‘post-war welfare settlement’ of the welfare state (Taylor-Gooby, 1988), and resulted in the beginning of a phase of gradual erosion of the social rights of citizenship (Twine, 1994) - although it has been argued that the conditions for the ‘crisis of the welfare state’ were already evident from the late 1970s due to political-economic, social and organisational changes and pressures (e.g. Clarke and Newman, 1997:13). While the public sector came under attack, the New Right elevated the private sector with its market principles and managerialism as the ‘antidote’ to monolithic state services (Newman and Clarke, 2009:13), promising greater efficiency and responsiveness to the ‘consumer’ needs of citizens. Many state services were privatised, and others, like the NHS were opened up to private enterprise (creating an ‘internal market’). Citizens were construed as the ‘consumers’ of public services and encouraged to look to the private sector for alternative provision for their pension, health and education.

By exercising ‘choice’ they were deemed to not only be liberated from the paternalism of public sector professionals but to contribute to the transformation of the state, as part of a wider drive towards greater public service efficiency and responsiveness (Clarke and Newman, 1997).

The ‘citizen consumer’ principle became a guiding theme for John Major’s reform of public services. His Citizen’s Charters were to empower citizens and to drive up service standards by giving people the right to expect better and more accountable services, giving them the right to complain and to demand information on performance (Major, 1992), guided in some areas by the publication of ‘league tables’ (Clarke and Newman, 1997). In one of John Major’s speeches (Major, 1992) he put forward the idea of the ‘democratisation of choice’ (later to be echoed in Tony Blair’s phrase ‘choice for the many, not the few’, Blair 2003) as a tool for greater social equality and justice (Root, 2007, in Newman and Clarke,

2009:159). As Clarke (2005:449) noted, the government tried to position itself as the People’s Champion, against ‘recalcitrant, inflexible or incompetent’ public service providers, but he also pointed out that the Charters were not establishing ‘substantive’

citizen rights, merely procedural rights for ‘citizen-consumers’. Critics of these neo-liberal policies argued that the means-testing, stigmatising and abandonment of the poor to the vagaries of the market would undermine not only their social inclusion but also social cohesion more generally (Twine, 1994) – in other words, unbalancing Marshall’s three-legged stool of citizenship (social, civil and political rights) (Powell, 2013).

These policies could be seen as conforming with a narrow, liberal representation of the citizen as a rational, self-regarding and self-interested individual whose responsibility it was to make the ‘right choices’ for themselves and their families, to work hard and to

‘strive’ in the economy to maximise their success and contribute to the nation’s wealth creation and fulfil their obligation as taxpayer (Crick, 2002). However, Thatcher also claimed, ‘[w]hen you have finished as a taxpayer, you have not finished as a citizen’ (cited in Heater, 1991), and '[t]here's no such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation' (1987, cited in Davies, 2012). Even though Thatcher famously denigrated the value of social solidarity by denying the existence of society, by the end of the 1980s, the Tories were associated with a culture of greed and individualism, so they were keen to restore their image. By the end of the decade social inequalities and poverty rates had grown to unprecedented heights, on the one hand causing social unrest, but on the other, a hardening of social attitudes towards the principle of income redistribution and social welfare benefits for the so-called ‘undeserving poor’(Taylor-Gooby, 1988).

It was in this context that the Conservative Home Secretary Douglas Hurd introduced the concept of ‘active citizenship’ onto the political stage at the 1988 Conservative Party conference. Active citizenship was presented ‘as a way of overcoming the lack of a sense of community, lawlessness and overdependence on the state' (cited in Davies 2012:8).

Unsurprisingly, it was received by critics on the left with scepticism, e.g. as a ‘policy ploy to defy Opposition attempts to equate conservatism with material self interest’ (Allen, 1997:20), especially as the Conservatives’ notion of this ‘active citizenship’ encompassed a particularly narrow conception focussed on volunteering, philanthropy and charity. Derek Heater, for example, saw in the Conservative’s vision of the active citizen a return to Victorian values:

‘The active citizen is the person who seeks out opportunities to succour the needy, protect the environment, administer schools and defend, through neighbourhood watch schemes, the local community against the depredations of the burgeoning criminal class. Much of this citizenly activity will take place at the local level. This is both convenient and desirable; it is part of the process of the whittling down of state power and interference, a cardinal item on the Thatcherite agenda.’

(Heater, 1991: 141)

As with Thatcherite policies in general, the active citizen was in the singular (as later expressed so poignantly in John Major’s Citizen’s Charters), with an emphasis on individual rather than collective participation. With the promotion of excessive individualisation and values emphasising wealth accumulation (or ‘greed’, as some would have it), there were real concerns by the end of the 1980s about the long-term impact the New Right’s discourse and policies would have on the social fabric of the country. The Conservative ideals of the active citizen and of private capital sustaining philanthropy were unable to fill the gaps left by a ‘rationalised’, i.e. partially dismantled welfare state (Clarke and

Newman, 1997). Thinkers on the centre-left, such as Ralf Dahrendorf, defended the welfare state against further encroachment by the market, arguing that it was in the collective interest to have public, not privatised, services, and to safeguard the state as the guarantor of welfare rights (Marinetto, 2003).

The Conservatives thus construed the ‘active citizen’ in very narrow terms, as part of a neo-liberal ideology which prioritised the ‘good’ citizen, i.e. law-abiding, tax-paying and altruistic, but suppressed the political dimension of active citizenship. This became

apparent in the report of the Speaker’s Commission on Citizenship (1990), which proposed ways in which ‘Active Citizenship’ could be encouraged, developed and recognised through citizenship education, particularly in schools. Bernard Crick, political theorist and long-standing advocate for political literacy education in schools, commented scathingly:

‘…. there was marked tendency at the time to take over the term “active citizenship” to mean only, or mainly, civic spirit, citizens’ charters and voluntary activity in the community; but not how individuals can be helped and prepared to shape the terms of such engagements.’ (Crick, 2001:7)

It was not just in light of the civil protests against Conservative policies (including that against the poll tax that contributed to Margaret Thatcher’s resignation (Boix, 1998;

Reitan, 2003), but foremost on theoretical grounds that numerous critics deplored the lack of substance of the ‘Hurd-Patten’ concept of active citizenship (Heater, 1991:154; Allen, 1997; Crick, 2000). It was argued that by neglecting the political dimension of citizenship and especially ‘active’ citizenship, the Conservatives’ depoliticised image was not only an impoverished, truncated vision but also a contradiction in terms in a democratic context. It was argued that a politically literate, reflective and critical citizenry is at the very heart of democracy; if citizens are to be active, political participation and dissent should form a core part of democratic practice – rather than merely ‘volunteering’ in the community, and should be actively promoted, including through education. Successive Conservative governments, however, not only omitted any reference to ‘political activism’ from their definition, but were also hostile towards including political literacy in their citizenship education policies (Heater, 1991; Allen, 1997; Crick, 2000). In contrast with such

democratic aspirations, the Conservatives’ impoverished image of active citizenship was likened by one critic to

‘….a feature of totalitarianism since the obligations are those of a loyal and dutiful subjects acting out a single political image. Active citizens do not have obligations to the preservation and extension of rights, obligations which, according to Dahrendorf, are a feature of free citizens of the democratic state. Robespierre, Stalin and Pol Pot would happily live with the Hurd-Patten concept.’

(Allen, 1997:21)

Chiming with Crick, Allen insisted, therefore, that active citizens ‘in a healthy and

genuinely representative democracy’ had to be treated, by definition, as political subjects and that they should have access to ‘a range of alternative conceptions of active

citizenship’ which would include dissent (Allen, 1997: 26). The question was whether New Labour would fulfil this expectation when it came to power in 1997.