Democracy as Punishment: Brexit and Austerity Politics

Chapter 7 asks what the implications of classed state control are for liberal democracy at large. It takes as a point of departure the referendum on leaving the European Union in June 2016 and the rise of what has been labelled ‘popular authoritarianism’. Residents on the housing estate experience government as something that is ‘not for them’: negative experiences with the authorities, including since 2010 the shift towards ‘austerity’ politics, translate into a deep-seated sense that politicians and politics are the antithesis of ordinary personhood and sociality. This justifies widespread withdrawal from electoral processes. However, unlike an ordinary election, some residents perceived the EU referendum as an opportunity to say ‘no’ to a government tout court. The chapter argues that an ethnographic understanding of ‘Brexit’ in terms of residents’ daily experiences of government uncovers the liberal state’s disavowal of its moral and political responsibilities towards its most disenfranchised populations. It also underlines the risk of right-wing populism at a time when alternative mechanisms for capturing working-class people’s voices are either weak or absent.

Political Brokers: Active Citizenship

Chapter 6 examines what grassroots mechanisms estate residents have at their disposal to make their voices heard. Private–public partnerships and civic initiatives that address problems of disorder and crime abound on Britain’s post-industrial housing estates. The chapter argues that official expectations of ‘active citizenship’ do not fit with residents’ own understandings of grassroots activism and change. As the daily work of both community activists and locally based politicians shows, good governance from residents’ point of view is about bringing policies in line with their daily struggles for security and survival. And yet, this alternative politics—referred to as a ‘bread and butter politics’—is also vulnerable to being silenced by officials who see it as evidence of petty, even corrupt behaviour. In the absence of adequate institutional and political mechanisms that can capture people’s demands, a ‘bread and butter politics’ not only reinforces deep-seated feelings of disenchantment with the political system but also fails to translate into an agenda for sustainable change.

The Good Person and the Bad Citizen: History, Class, and Sociality

Chapter 2 introduces the building blocks of an alternative political–moral order, as viewed from the perspective of council estate residents. It argues that official understandings of deservingness and respectability have at times dovetailed with, but more often diverged from, what residents understand to be a righteous person and by extension also a rightful citizen who is deserving of public resources and protection. In the post-war period, a fragile moral union existed between paternalistic welfare policies that prioritised the white, male-headed nuclear household and tenants’ aspirations for respectable homes and neighbourhoods. This fragile moral union, however, became dismantled in the decades that followed, when the ideal of the worker-citizen was replaced by that of the consumer-citizen and those renting on council estates increasingly seen as subjects of failure and lack. Today, working class residents’ own understandings of what makes a good person, based on their reliance on informal networks of support and care, stand in stark contrast to classed portrayals that see them as citizens of lack.

Introduction: Questioning the Punitive Paradox

The introduction starts with what many have seen as a worrying paradox: the illiberal turn that liberal democracies have taken with, or perhaps because of, popular support. While commentators have focused on ‘why’ liberal democracy has taken an illiberal turn, the book proposes an alternative starting point that focuses on the ‘how’ and the ‘what’: what democracy means to some of Britain’s most marginalized citizens in the first place and how these citizens engage with the state. It is by shifting the analytical focus to these questions that a more encompassing legacy of state coercion than commonly acknowledged in narratives of the punitive turn can be brought into focus, as well as the possibility of its critique and subversion. The introduction sets out council estates as a historical and ethnographic setting for such a project, outlines the methodology, and introduces the anthropological framework at the core of the book.

A Political History of Council Estates: Council Estates as State-Building Projects

Chapter 1 provides a political history of council estates. Built in the inter- and post-war decades as homes for the working classes, council estates have often been seen as a central pillar of the British welfare state. This chapter argues that far from being only about the provision of bricks and mortar, council estates were always projects of state-building that were tied to class segregation and class control. In the post-war decades, paternalistic policies ensured that working-class tenants were living up to state-sponsored standards of respectability. This legacy of classed state control became more pronounced under neoliberal governance in the 1980s, and from the mid-1990s onwards, under the ‘law and order’ state, and most recently, with the shift to ‘austerity politics’. A political history of council estates challenges the dichotomy of a ‘golden era’ of post-war social democracy and the subsequent punitive turn by foregrounding a legacy of classed control both across historical periods and across areas of policy making that are not often considered together.

Conclusion: A Different Kind of Paradox

The conclusion returns to the punitive paradox introduced at the beginning of the book: the paradox of how we can explain liberal democracy’s illiberal turn. It contrasts this with a different kind of paradox that emerges when we shift from the question of ‘why’ to the ‘how’ and the ‘what’: the paradox of how the expansion of state power to forcibly control its citizens is also the inverse to its powers to control the means of its own application. This paradox expands the debate on punishment by, first, moving beyond a focus on criminal law; second, revealing the crisis of state authority at the heart of governance today; and, third, bringing into focus an alternative political theory that reconnects the exercise of statecraft with a political economy of care.

Dangerous Streets: Encounters with the Police

Chapter 5 looks at how housing estate residents interact with the police in negotiating the dangers of ‘the street’. Government policies that go tough on ‘law and order’ have focused on young people’s involvement in street-based activities, invoking a language of ‘gang crime’ and ‘gang membership’. However, this language does not easily fit with residents’ own understanding of the dangers of the ‘streets’ that encompasses both the threat of daily victimization and the failures of the criminal justice system. This chapter argues that the daily threat of serious crime alongside mistrust in the police generates seemingly contradictory responses. Residents sometimes appropriate the police as personalized tools into everyday disputes with friends, kin, and neighbours. Meanwhile, in situations of more serious threat, they tend to fall back onto informal mechanisms of policing that the state outlaws as vigilante violence. It is precisely this gap between citizens’ expectations for support and the reality of police performance that is expressed when residents show support for harsher punishment in a system that has become ‘too liberal’ and ‘soft’.

Troubled Neighbourhoods: Encounters with Housing Authorities

Chapter 4 analyses tenants’ encounters with social housing providers in their daily attempts to maintain neighbourhoods that they consider fit for living. Social housing tenants’ view of what constitutes ‘neighbour trouble’ is often fundamentally out of sync with what the authorities refer to as ‘nuisance’ and ‘anti-social behaviour’. For social housing providers and their partners, the language of ‘nuisance’ and ‘anti-social behaviour’ denotes individualized conflicts between tenants. However, this language tends to silence the decades of material neglect that have deeply marked Britain’s housing estates. This decline is the primary cause of what tenants refer to as ‘trouble’: badly insulated walls and ceilings, cramped living conditions, and poorly maintained communal areas give rise to tensions between neighbours living in close proximity to one another. While tenants learn to use the language of ‘anti-social behaviour’ and ‘nuisance’ to frame their claims for help, this chapter argues that these forms of state-citizen engagement further depoliticize the structural problems that tenants face, while reinforcing a climate of suspicion and mistrust between tenants.

Precarious Homes: Encounters with the Benefit System

Chapter 3 looks at how so-called ‘single mothers’ engage the benefit system in their daily attempts to build and maintain family homes. In both policy terms and popular language, the ‘single mother’ is typically portrayed as a woman who corrupts both the immaculate trust of a mother to her child and the civic trust of a citizen to the public by bearing children in order to access public resources. By contrast, this chapter takes as its point of departure women’s own daily pursuits of family homes and the social relations that matter within them. It argues that the rules and logic of the benefit system come into conflict with women’s own expectations of what makes a good family home. By portraying women as needy individuals defined by their lack, means-tested benefits not only expose women to bureaucratic complexity but more substantively, penalize their reliance on fluid household arrangements that encompass friends, partners, grown-up children, and extended kin. While some women learn to ‘play the system’, their attempts to personalize the state also place them in an awkward and sometimes altogether illegal relationship with the law.