Austerity Parenting
Article appears in Soundings (Volume 55), published Winter 2013 Austerity parenting Tracey Jensen
Narratives of austerity are central to an agenda that seeks to link poverty to fecklessness. Since the financial crash, fiscal discipline has been positioned as the ‘solution’ to the current crisis of capitalism: the correct response to a precarious future is to shrink the state, compact and condense public spending, become lean, pursue ‘efficiency’ and eliminate ‘waste’. The austerity narrative is crucial to this positioning, and has now become powerfully anchored within the public imagination across policy, popular culture and media commentary. The financial crisis (caused by the banking and financial sector) has been transformed into a fiscal crisis (caused by ‘unsustainable’ levels of public debt), and the economic problem of how to restore market stability has been transformed into a political problem of how allocate blame: a process of intensive ideological work that John
1 Clarke and Janet Newman have called ‘the alchemy of austerity’. Through this
alchemy, the social problems of poverty, social immobility, economic inequalities and disadvantage are magically transformed into problems of ‘welfare dependence’, ‘cultures of entitlement’ and ‘irresponsibility’. In many ways this narrative is a revitalisation of Thatcherism; and it is embedded in the increasingly conditional, targeted and punitive strategies of a new welfare regime. The austerity architects have rapidly put the financial crash to ideological work, arguing that the post-war social contract - the commitment by the state to support its citizens from cradle to grave via the provision of welfare in times of need - has become too costly to continue to fund publicly. The welfare state has been (re)imagined as a negative form of ‘big government’, distended by ‘welfare culture’ and a sense of entitlement that must now be purged. Austerity policies are thus ‘necessary’, not because of a failure of capitalism or the excesses of global neoliberalism, but because we have had it too good.
If we look closely we can see that the process of undermining social protections was begun many years before this current austerity project - and that the latest financial crisis is better seen as a catalyst than as the origin. Across Europe, the neoliberal consensus has taken the form of reduced minimum wage levels, ‘liberalisation’ of public sector employment (that is, making it easier for employers to fire employees), reduced benefits and higher consumer taxes. In Britain, even before the global recession a large-scale movement was underway to replace significant parts of the welfare state with forms of volunteerism and private enterprise. The austerity project has simply accelerated these processes. To understand how this alchemy of austerity has worked, we must explore not only its economic dimensions but also the emotional life of austerity.
The establishment and extension of ‘Broken Britain’
The austerity narrative perhaps coalesces more substantively and intensively around regime - a lattice of reduced public spending, welfare benefit restrictions and sanctions, together with precarity and escalating living and housing costs - is effecting an economic squeeze on families, and particularly on families with low incomes, single-parent families, families with disabled children, large families and families who are precariously housed. Some recent calculations estimate that 80 per cent of the
2 public cuts enacted so far have hit single parents.
Clearly there is a broader project at work here around what kind of families will have a claim to social protection in the welfare landscape of the twenty-first century. We must ask why, and with what effect, these parents are being hit by austerity policies. Through an analysis of policy, together with broader analyses of cultural and media accounts of economic crisis and solution, we can begin to understand how ‘austerity’ works on material, social and emotional levels. ‘Austerity’ is producing accounts of waste and inefficiencies, moral conduct and lifestyle, work, worth and labour, within which parents are imagined as key actors of both blame and change. While ‘feckless’ parents act as scapegoats for moral and economic decline, ‘good’ parenting is offered as the solution to the social impact of welfare rollback and stagnant class mobility. In the globalised world of the twenty-first century, economic polarisation has reached unparalleled depths, including in countries such as Britain - ostensibly the beneficiaries of the epochal shift from industrial to neoliberal modes of capitalism. As Danny Dorling pointed out in 2007, ‘in Britain today chances in life are now more determined by where (and to whom) they were born as compared to any other date in
3 the last 651 years’.
How we might understand and act upon such inequalities remains a site of contestation. Indeed, how we even measure such inequalities is contested. Thus recent proposals to adjust the ways in which child poverty is measured - through the inclusion of other dimensions of deprivation, such as worklessness, parental skill level and family stability - have been robustly criticised by experts in the field. Charities and researchers have argued that, although it is true that child poverty is indeed multidimensional, these kinds of adjustments serve to obscure the structural roots of poverty: they misrepresent the experience of poverty, and portray it as something that
4 can be ameliorated through ‘better’ choices and personal responsibility.
Moral narratives about ‘poor parenting’ as the root cause of poverty first emerged in Britain under the New Labour government of 1997 to 2010. New Labour introduced punitive policies that were designed to manage ‘failed citizen-parents’ through limiting financial and/or material aid, in the belief that this would make citizens ‘take responsibility’ for their own welfare by finding work and ‘being more aspirational’ for their children. It established the Family and Parenting Institute, and oversaw an explosion of third-sector parenting training programmes. Media representations of ‘poor parenting’ and attendant therapies (such as the reality TV phenomenon
Supernanny on Channel 4) further cemented the notion of problem or deficit
parenting, through which social and economic failure was understood to be transmitted across the generations. Within the space of a decade the potent national myth had become established that poverty of aspiration and failure on the part of parents to make the ‘right choices’ were to blame for poverty and stagnant social
5 mobility. The stitching together of parenting practice and material disadvantage has intensified since the formation of the Coalition government in 2010. David Cameron, positioning his Conservative Party as the party of renewal, shamelessly plagiarised from New Labour as he launched his campaign for what he called ‘a new morality’ to fix ‘Broken Britain’ in 2008. Promising to ‘heal the wounds of poverty, crime, social disorder and deprivation that are steadily making this country a grim and joyless place to live for far too many people’, Cameron’s election campaign continued New Labour’s project to reconfigure poverty as a matter of poor choices and bad culture, but also demonstrated an appetite for intensifying the stigmas attached to
6 worklessness and receipt of welfare.
In particular, the moral fix upon parents and parenting has been ratified through the re-energised category of the ‘troubled family’. Estimates of how many ‘troubled families’ there are in Britain have been revised up from 50,000 (Gordon Brown, in 2009) to 120,000 (David Cameron, in 2011). While the original 2004 Families At Risk research upon which this figure is based was concerned with measuring ill health, poverty and poor housing, the current (mis)use of the research re-defines ‘troubled families’ as those involved in crime or anti-social behaviour, with truanting children, or with ‘a culture of disruption and irresponsibility that cascades through generations’ (Cameron, 2011).
In this way present government policy uses research from 2004 which measured families with troubles (multiple and severe disadvantages, mostly associated with ill health and poverty) and entirely re-writes the findings to argue that there is a problem
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now of families that cause trouble. Moreover, the principle dimension of ‘troubled families’ in political speech and media coverage appears to be how much they cost the taxpayer. The ‘troubled families’ rhetoric works to incubate negative and vindictive attitudes towards the poorest and most vulnerable families in Britain, by implicitly connecting the virtues of austerity with the sins of profligacy. The relentless focus upon ‘troubled families’ marks a decisive shift in debates about ‘poor parenting’, towards stigmatisation and marginalisation and towards dividing those that cost the state (‘welfare recipients’, ‘troubled families’) from those that fund the state (‘hard- working families’, ‘taxpayers’). Loic Wacquant has compellingly described how the state intertwines its economic and moral functions, stridently asserting its capacity to name and efficiently manage moral conduct at the very moment it proclaims its impotence on the economic front. While austerity is thus ‘painful but necessary’ and ‘unavoidable’, the state simultaneously retains its right to police the sacred borders between its ‘commendable’ and ‘deviant’ citizens. Thus we have seen a resurgence in notions of the ‘deserving’ and the ‘undeserving’ poor, the scroungers and the hard-working taxpayers, the workers and the shirkers, or, in Wacquant’s terms, ‘those who merit being salvaged and inserted into the circuit of unstable wage labour and those who must henceforth be durably
8 blacklisted and banished’.
Resilience, restraint and the moral appeal of austerity
How then is this sacred border between the categories of commendable citizen and deviant produced in contemporary political rhetoric, in terms of the moral discourses around austerity? How does the tightening of individual belts become a moral romances of austerity in Britain, as articulated in the current cultural visibility and celebration of practices of ‘new thrift’ - as diverse as growing your own food, recycling and repurposing goods and craft practices - and how these work to aestheticise austerity. New thrift culture, which has exploded in the current moment of economic austerity, takes the form of a series of popular pedagogies across television, self-help literature, weblogs and other cultural sites that promises to teach us how to survive and thrive on less money: doing more with less, making or growing things we would usually buy, and cutting down on waste and extravagance.
I use the term ‘new thrift’ to signal that these popular pedagogies draw on older environmental and ecological countercultures and principles, but they are articulated in distinctly new ways. ‘New thrift’ promises that it is not only possible to survive on less, but also that we will be happier as a result and that we will reconnect with moral virtue and discover new kinds of value that are not predicated on consumption and extravagance. ‘New thrift’ is a reinvention of frugality for the neoliberal generation and cannot be understood outside of the austerity context in which it has thrived. The material squeeze enacted upon vulnerable families by policies of austerity has thus been accompanied by a rapid proliferation of complex cultural austerity- romances, through which austerity has been positioned as a positive exorcising of unaffordable indulgences and as a welcome rediscovery of practices of creativity, ingenuity and thrift. As within all the other fields of self-help and transformation culture, social problems are relentlessly individualised and psychologised, with the responsibility once more falling on the flawed, damaged or incompetent subject and their ‘bad’ cultural choices. New thrift pedagogy promises to transmit rules for ‘smart’ spending and provide instruction in consumer competence and responsibility, advocating that its readers and viewers take control of their addiction to consumption and embrace a simpler and more fulfilling life.
Superscrimpers (Channel 4, 2011-12) is a great example of the retrogressive kinds of
austerity-romance that populate new thrift culture. This programme produces a kind of ‘austerity chic’, interspersing moments of ‘commonsense’ wisdom from its ‘army of thrifters’ with segments in which groups of women go and learn a ‘lost’ domestic skill from an expert. The host ‘Miss Moneypenny’ (Heather McGregor) berates the British consumer of today for spending beyond their means, getting into debt, failing to save and put by, wanting too much stuff and being wasteful. McGregor stages an ‘intervention’ in each episode where a ‘spendaholic’ comes face-to-face with a room full of their extravagance (clothes, beauty products, magazines) and a large poster detailing what they spend in a year on said extravagance. Superscrimpers works through a familiar reality television process of shaming and resolve, but it does this in part through the production of post-war nostalgia, situating the past as a time of self- sufficiency, pride and ingenuity, to which we must return.
The opening minutes of the programme in particular use archived black and white footage of post-war housewives seeking a bargain or trying some innovation, repeating in each episode the notion that thrift wisdom has been forgotten, and that Britain needs to be reskilled in the ways of frugality. Superscrimpers, like other examples of ‘new thrift’ culture, repositions thrift not as a matter of survival, but as a matter of transforming the relationship of the self to itself. Austerity is presented not only as fashionable and fun, but also as a source of personal self-esteem and thus of national transformation. Thrift practices within new thrift culture are saturated with retro-kitsch appeal, and threaded through with anxieties around over-consumption, waste and indebtedness. ‘Thrift’ is here offered as a moral reorientation which will cure us of the condition of dependence. It animates a consoling and constructed national nostalgia, and (re)circulates pathologies about the ‘wrong’ kind of family consumption. The argument that we have forgotten the value of prudence and need to be reconnected to it is also deeply gendered - the problematic consumers who need to learn lessons of restraint are mostly women. Thrift culture is overwhelmingly aimed at women, especially mothers and housewives. And these gendered dimensions of the culture serve to highlight the invisible labour of mothers, especially stay-at-home mothers, whose labours remain largely unrecognised by the state and undervalued by society. For the wage-earning world of work remains supplemented by the double or even triple shift of domestic labour performed by mothers. And as incomes drop in the austerity regime - via pay freezes, welfare cuts, rising rents, escalating costs of living
- it is women, especially mothers, who are invited/compelled to make up the shortfall, to make the money go further, to do more with less. In the current radical restructuring of welfare systems, emerging evidence suggests that it will be mothers that will lose out disproportionately as the changes are implemented. Indeed, much ‘new thrift’ culture has been produced by mothers who have had to retreat from a world of employment in which they cannot any longer afford to participate. The rising costs of childcare and penalties of being a working mother (being passed over for promotion, risking loss of their jobs when they become pregnant), together with the gender pay gap (which starts to bite at women’s salaries as soon as they have their first child), each contributes to the retreat of women from employment. We might read new thrift culture as an attempt by mothers to find pleasure in this retreat from a profoundly unjust world of work, by putting their energy and creativity into learning a new skill, learning crafts, growing and making things. These attempts connect with powerful romances around the ‘pre-feminist’ lives of mothers and grandmothers who weren’t trying to ‘have it all’, but were firmly encased in a domestic sphere, skilled, resilient, self-sufficient and ingenious. ‘New thrift’ culture has powerful emotional outcomes. It produces and circulates figures of happy gendered restraint, especially that of the happy housewife, thus connecting up with a broader backlash against feminist gains. In 2011, Universities Minister David Willetts suggested that deepening social inequalities have been exacerbated by women taking university places and jobs that would previously have gone to working-class men. In comments made shortly before the launch of the government’s social mobility strategy, Willetts stated that ‘feminism trumped egalitarianism’. This willingness on the part of a government minister to blame social immobility on women is a reminder - if such is needed - of the divisive politics of neoliberalism.
A pornography of poverty
As well as being haunted by figures of hardy and virtuous resilience from the post- those who are symbolically shamed for not being austere enough, who do not re-use, recycle or upcycle, who are wasteful, who pay full price for the new consumer goods they ‘want’ but do not ‘need’, who are dismissed as tasteless overconsumers. In its attendant fantasies of the ‘spendthrift’, new thrift culture produces and circulates ‘commonsense’ notions of poverty: namely that poverty can be approached as a crisis of over-consumption, and as a failure of the individual to prudently use resources. The thrifty housewife, forensically charting moments of waste and potential efficiency, is invited to understand social insecurity (her own and that of others) as a problem of self-discipline rather than as a consequence of the extensions and excesses of neoliberalism.
The spendthrift family (symbolically opposed to the thrifty housewife, happy in her fiscal restraint and responsibility) is caricatured as welfare dependent, workless, fiscally incompetent, and spending beyond their means. Imogen Tyler proposes the term ‘national abject’ for these figures who exist as symbols of marginality, and who
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are seen to occupy positions of deviancy. In seeking to divide families into categories of ‘skiver’ and ‘striver’, ‘worker’ and ‘shirker’, politicians have shown a new willingness to draw on divisive vocabularies of virtue and waste. The circulation of these ‘national abjects’ of thrift culture can be seen in the growth of poverty pornography across the media, which repeatedly produce stories showing how little is needed to live on. Witness the swathe of recent television programmes which play on shameless curiosity about poverty, and position the lives of the poor as something that others have a right to peer at and dissect. Thus, as part of its The Cost
of Living season, the BBC recently broadcast We Pay Your Benefits (BBC 1, 2013), a
programme which invited four ‘taxpayers’ to analyse the spending habits of four ‘welfare recipients’ in order to assess whether the current rates of unemployment support were too high. In The Great British Budget Menu (BBC 1, 2013), three celebrity chefs were set the challenge of preparing a two-course ‘budget banquet’ for a pound per head. Life on the breadline is transformed from a profound social injustice to an opportunity to scrutinise the habits of the poor. Poverty itself is rendered as a challenge, or as an experiment in poverty tourism. This orientation is repeated in political speech, such as in Iain Duncan-Smith’s recent remarks that he would be able
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to live on current levels of unemployment benefit. We should be asking why the direction of scrutiny is always downwards, and why a programme that scrutinises the spending habits of the super-rich elite is unthinkable. Of course these media austerity experiments are conducted through unspoken privilege. Living thriftily for a year, living frugally for a fixed period of time to see if you can, to see how much money you could save, in order to blog or write a book about your experiences, are entirely different experiences from the recurrent poverty experienced by low-income and precariously employed families, whose material conditions of thrift as impoverishment are stigmatised and must be concealed.
Tracy Shildrick et al’s 2012 book Poverty and Insecurity provides an illuminating and powerful account of the stigmatising effects of poverty, which is deeply felt to be something to be ashamed of, and to deny. For these families living in poverty the issue is not one of over-consumption, but of trying to manage in the face of stagnating wages, insecure and precarious underemployment, the rising basic costs of living, culture works to make these structural factors invisible, and positions ‘poverty’ as a result of individual moral failures of prudence and responsibility. For families who have to rely on benefits for some or all of their income, there is very little household budget ‘fat’ left to trim. The most recent lattice of welfare ‘reforms’ commenced in April 2013 - and are collectively known as ‘Black April’. Two thirds of households that were impacted by these measures were already defined as being ‘in poverty’; they were already living below the poverty line. The idea that those hit by austerity will be able to find some pleasure in tightening their belts further reminds us that the romances of playing with thrift are disconnected from the realities of life on the breadline. The disciplinary policies of the new austere welfare state are premised on two myths. The first of these is that deprived people don’t work, or don’t want to work. The second is that full employment is possible (or indeed desirable) in a fully marketised neoliberal economy. But one of the effects of neoliberal economics in the 1990s was to transform waged work, making work for those in a large sector of the labour market (and particularly the low-paid) precarious, fragile and often short-term. For many people poverty is caused not by an abstention from working, but by being forced to work in the kind of jobs that are created by neoliberalism, those ‘available to people at the losing end of the class system’, which trap many people within
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‘churning low-pay, no-pay careers at the bottom of the labour market’. Although the accepted wisdom is that ‘employment is the best route out of poverty’, MacDonald and co’s research demonstrates that ‘the sorts of work available to our interviewees kept them in poverty rather than lifting them out of it (p5)’.
These are the impossibilities that austerity parenting creates: you are held more responsible than ever before for the future successes (and failures) of your children, while simultaneously being made increasingly vulnerable to the conditionalities and precarities of late capitalism. And this is in a context in which supporting families is refigured as a public ‘squandering’ of resources, and the state demands that ‘parent- citizens’ effect social and economic renewal for themselves. Austerity inscribes a new requirement upon parents to become ‘austere’, to absorb the consequences of capitalism’s crisis by tightening their belts. The belts of those who are hardest hit by the austerity project are already out of notches: yet the fantasy is that new notches can be made, that new degrees of resilience can be found. Austerity - as a cultural object, as a set of economic practices, as a subject-making discourse, and as a web of socio- historical fantasies - is reconfiguring our sense of public, mutual and collective sensibilities. Moral discourses of parenting are thus intimately entwined with public narratives of austerity; and resisting the austerity project requires that we interrogate the emotional appeals it makes to us. Notes
1. John Clarke and Janet Newman, ‘The Alchemy of Austerity’, Critical Social Policy 32 (3) 2012. 2. ‘Paying the Price: Single Parents in an Age of Austerity’ ongoing research project by Gingerbread: www.gingerbread.org.uk/content/1813/Paying-the-price.
3. Danny Dorling, ‘A think piece for the commission on integration and cohesion’, The Commission on Integration and Cohesion, Communities and Local Government
4. For two powerful responses advising against changing how child poverty is measured, see Joseph Rowntree Foundation: www.jrf.org.uk/publications/measuring- child-poverty-consultation;and Kim Allen et al: www.britsoc.co.uk/media/49869/Measuring_Child_Poverty_Consultation_2013.pdf.
5. For an excellent account of the parenting policies of New Labour see Val Gillies ‘Raising the “Meritocracy”: Parenting and the Individualization of Social Class’,
Sociology, 39 (5) 2005. For an account of parenting in media culture, see Tracey
Jensen, ‘“What kind of mum are you at the moment?” Supernanny and the psychologising of classed embodiment’, Subjectivity 3 2010.
6. D. Cameron, ‘Fixing our Broken Society’, speech 7.7.08. See www.conservatives.com.
7. For a full account of these slippages, see Ruth Lister, ‘There May Be Trouble Ahead: what we know about those 120,000 “troubled families”’, Poverty and Social Exclusion in the UK, Policy Response Series No. 3, 2012.
8. Loic Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity, Duke 2009, pxvii.
9. See Imogen Tyler (2013) Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain, Zed 2013.
10. Duncan-Smith’s logic was that he had been unemployed twice before, apparently forgetting that he is married to a millionaire heiress and lives rent-free on his father- in-law’s country estate.
11. R. MacDonald, T. Shildrick, C. Webster and K. Garthwaite, The Low-pay, no-pay cycle: understanding recurrent poverty, Joseph Rowntree Foundation 2010, p7.