{"title":"战争和福利的框架","authors":"Ben Whitham, Nadya Ali","doi":"10.1111/newe.12331","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>The political-economic terrain of the UK has been beset by a series of overlapping crises in recent years – from the global financial crisis (GFC) of 2007/08 (and the longer-term crises of public services induced by the decade-plus of austerity that followed), to the global public health crisis of the pandemic and its socio-economic impact. Today, stagnant wages and rocketing inflation have led to talk of a major ‘cost of living crisis’, with energy bills and basic commodities becoming increasingly unaffordable to many.</p><p>This article explores some of the frames that have shaped recent political-economic crises and crisis-responses in the UK. We argue that successive waves of crisis and austerity in the UK have been framed as universal or equalising moments, even as their impacts have been unevenly distributed. Pervasive racialised inequalities that are normalised, unseen, or ignored in ‘normal’, non-crisis contexts are exacerbated by both crises and crisis-responses. Austerity Islamophobia - the racialised framing of Muslims in the context of political-economic crises – provides the focal case study for our argument.</p><p>The UK government's economic response to the arrival of the global Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 included an unprecedented national furlough programme: the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme. From March 2020 to September 2021, the scheme constituted a massive programme of public spending, with employers given up to 80 per cent of staff salaries and employment costs to retain staff while they were ‘locked down’ at home and unable to work. That one of the most radical Conservative governments in recent history, led by the supposedly self-help Churchillian icon Boris Johnson, could find itself effectively nationalising all industry – albeit temporarily – might have offered a glimmer of hope for political and economic progressives for a radical reappraisal of the economic status quo.</p><p>Yet from the outset of the pandemic, the spectre of austerity lingered in the air. The invocation of discursive frames from the 2010–2020 austerity era was an early warning sign. In 2020, claims that ‘we're all in this together’ and that we should ‘keep calm and carry on’ – frames central to the cultural politics of austerity after the GFC – were revived with gusto, from corporate advertising to political speeches.2 But the trouble with these framings in terms of who a crisis affects, and how we should respond to it, is that we have never all been ‘in it together’. The systemic classist, racist, sexist, and ableist inequalities that pervade UK society in ‘pre-crisis’ times position some people to be more adversely impacted than others when a crisis arrives.</p><p>However, as Lucinda Platt has shown, racial disparities in Covid-19 deaths were not about the supposed (mis)behaviours of racially minoritised groups.11 They were about the complex interaction of social, political, and economic inequalities faced by Black and Asian groups. These inequalities map onto two key markers: occupation and housing. Platt notes that Black African populations, for example, were more likely to be working in social care, where the impact of the first wave of pandemic was most viciously felt. Racially minoritised people are also more likely than the white British population to live in ‘densely occupied or overcrowded areas’. Platt concludes by suggesting that the pandemic not only generated disparities in health outcomes but also economic ones. The House of Commons Women and Equalities Committee has noted that racially minoritised people were more likely to be on zero-hours contracts than their white counterparts. As their report found:</p><p>“The coronavirus pandemic has sharpened the focus on the systemic issues with the zero-hours contracts policy, including the disproportionate number of BAME people on zero-hours contracts. The pandemic has highlighted the unequal way that zero-hours contracts operate: employers can deny furlough to employees and instead reduce their working hours to zero. In some cases, workers on zero-hours contracts are ineligible for statutory sick pay.”12</p><p>Such systemic inequalities and their exacerbation through socio-economic crises clearly affect racially minoritised communities in general, but we are particularly interested here in how they intersect with Islamophobia as a specific form of racialised framing and socio-economic violence.</p><p>Through this framing, Muslims suffer welfare disentitlement (the ‘disallowing’ of claims to socioeconomic justice)21 often being framed as ‘benefits cheats’ exploiting the national welfare system, rather than as deserving citizens.22 The framing of class as a discrete or pristine social category, exempt from racialisation, is the necessary condition for constructing the ‘white working class’ discourse, and also for ignoring or erasing racialised disparities in experiences of crises.</p><p>Such racialised disparities in the effects of crises impact upon many racially minoritised groups, but again Muslim communities may be hit especially hard. The Runnymede report notes that British Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities (around 90 per cent of whom identify as Muslim, and who together account for of 3.8 per cent of the UK population, or more than 2.2 million people)26 are likely to be even more sharply impacted than the wider ‘BAME’ category. This includes Pakistani and Bangladeshi households being a staggering <i>66 per cent</i> more likely than white households to be in fuel poverty in the winter of 2022–23. While other scholars have already demonstrated the pertinence of our concept of austerity Islamophobia to understanding the pandemic crisis and its responses,27 we can now anticipate its relevance to the ongoing cost of living crisis too. The positioning of Muslim lives to be disproportionately impacted, alongside crisis-response framings that position them as essentially ‘ungrievable’, deny them the status of ‘working class’, and disallow their claims to socioeconomic justice, all threaten to shape this crisis as they have previous ones.</p><p>The succession of major crises in the UK in recent years – the GFC and austerity, the pandemic, and now the cost of living crisis – have had deeply unequal impacts. Racially minoritised people are often positioned to be particularly vulnerable to such impacts. Their over-representation among the working class, and below the poverty line, in deprived urban neighbourhoods, as well as in precarious and ‘frontline’ forms of employment, have all been identified as reasons for this positioning. Muslims have faced particular challenges, and their framing as a more generalised ‘problem’ (as well as their frequent outcasting from frames of the ‘working class’), is at play in their positioning with regard to both crises and crisis-responses. As the cost of living crisis and any new wave of austerity develop, there is a real and immediate risk that racially minoritised groups in general, and Muslims in particular, will face significantly worse outcomes – both in socioeconomic terms and in terms of how they and their experiences are discursively framed (or erased).</p>","PeriodicalId":37420,"journal":{"name":"IPPR Progressive Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2023-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/newe.12331","citationCount":"0","resultStr":"{\"title\":\"Frames of war and welfare\",\"authors\":\"Ben Whitham, Nadya Ali\",\"doi\":\"10.1111/newe.12331\",\"DOIUrl\":null,\"url\":null,\"abstract\":\"<p>The political-economic terrain of the UK has been beset by a series of overlapping crises in recent years – from the global financial crisis (GFC) of 2007/08 (and the longer-term crises of public services induced by the decade-plus of austerity that followed), to the global public health crisis of the pandemic and its socio-economic impact. Today, stagnant wages and rocketing inflation have led to talk of a major ‘cost of living crisis’, with energy bills and basic commodities becoming increasingly unaffordable to many.</p><p>This article explores some of the frames that have shaped recent political-economic crises and crisis-responses in the UK. We argue that successive waves of crisis and austerity in the UK have been framed as universal or equalising moments, even as their impacts have been unevenly distributed. Pervasive racialised inequalities that are normalised, unseen, or ignored in ‘normal’, non-crisis contexts are exacerbated by both crises and crisis-responses. Austerity Islamophobia - the racialised framing of Muslims in the context of political-economic crises – provides the focal case study for our argument.</p><p>The UK government's economic response to the arrival of the global Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 included an unprecedented national furlough programme: the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme. From March 2020 to September 2021, the scheme constituted a massive programme of public spending, with employers given up to 80 per cent of staff salaries and employment costs to retain staff while they were ‘locked down’ at home and unable to work. That one of the most radical Conservative governments in recent history, led by the supposedly self-help Churchillian icon Boris Johnson, could find itself effectively nationalising all industry – albeit temporarily – might have offered a glimmer of hope for political and economic progressives for a radical reappraisal of the economic status quo.</p><p>Yet from the outset of the pandemic, the spectre of austerity lingered in the air. The invocation of discursive frames from the 2010–2020 austerity era was an early warning sign. In 2020, claims that ‘we're all in this together’ and that we should ‘keep calm and carry on’ – frames central to the cultural politics of austerity after the GFC – were revived with gusto, from corporate advertising to political speeches.2 But the trouble with these framings in terms of who a crisis affects, and how we should respond to it, is that we have never all been ‘in it together’. The systemic classist, racist, sexist, and ableist inequalities that pervade UK society in ‘pre-crisis’ times position some people to be more adversely impacted than others when a crisis arrives.</p><p>However, as Lucinda Platt has shown, racial disparities in Covid-19 deaths were not about the supposed (mis)behaviours of racially minoritised groups.11 They were about the complex interaction of social, political, and economic inequalities faced by Black and Asian groups. These inequalities map onto two key markers: occupation and housing. Platt notes that Black African populations, for example, were more likely to be working in social care, where the impact of the first wave of pandemic was most viciously felt. Racially minoritised people are also more likely than the white British population to live in ‘densely occupied or overcrowded areas’. Platt concludes by suggesting that the pandemic not only generated disparities in health outcomes but also economic ones. The House of Commons Women and Equalities Committee has noted that racially minoritised people were more likely to be on zero-hours contracts than their white counterparts. As their report found:</p><p>“The coronavirus pandemic has sharpened the focus on the systemic issues with the zero-hours contracts policy, including the disproportionate number of BAME people on zero-hours contracts. The pandemic has highlighted the unequal way that zero-hours contracts operate: employers can deny furlough to employees and instead reduce their working hours to zero. In some cases, workers on zero-hours contracts are ineligible for statutory sick pay.”12</p><p>Such systemic inequalities and their exacerbation through socio-economic crises clearly affect racially minoritised communities in general, but we are particularly interested here in how they intersect with Islamophobia as a specific form of racialised framing and socio-economic violence.</p><p>Through this framing, Muslims suffer welfare disentitlement (the ‘disallowing’ of claims to socioeconomic justice)21 often being framed as ‘benefits cheats’ exploiting the national welfare system, rather than as deserving citizens.22 The framing of class as a discrete or pristine social category, exempt from racialisation, is the necessary condition for constructing the ‘white working class’ discourse, and also for ignoring or erasing racialised disparities in experiences of crises.</p><p>Such racialised disparities in the effects of crises impact upon many racially minoritised groups, but again Muslim communities may be hit especially hard. The Runnymede report notes that British Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities (around 90 per cent of whom identify as Muslim, and who together account for of 3.8 per cent of the UK population, or more than 2.2 million people)26 are likely to be even more sharply impacted than the wider ‘BAME’ category. This includes Pakistani and Bangladeshi households being a staggering <i>66 per cent</i> more likely than white households to be in fuel poverty in the winter of 2022–23. While other scholars have already demonstrated the pertinence of our concept of austerity Islamophobia to understanding the pandemic crisis and its responses,27 we can now anticipate its relevance to the ongoing cost of living crisis too. The positioning of Muslim lives to be disproportionately impacted, alongside crisis-response framings that position them as essentially ‘ungrievable’, deny them the status of ‘working class’, and disallow their claims to socioeconomic justice, all threaten to shape this crisis as they have previous ones.</p><p>The succession of major crises in the UK in recent years – the GFC and austerity, the pandemic, and now the cost of living crisis – have had deeply unequal impacts. Racially minoritised people are often positioned to be particularly vulnerable to such impacts. Their over-representation among the working class, and below the poverty line, in deprived urban neighbourhoods, as well as in precarious and ‘frontline’ forms of employment, have all been identified as reasons for this positioning. 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引用次数: 0
摘要
近年来,英国的政治经济领域一直受到一系列重叠危机的困扰——从2007/08年的全球金融危机(以及随后十多年的紧缩导致的公共服务的长期危机),到疫情的全球公共卫生危机及其社会经济影响。如今,停滞不前的工资和飙升的通货膨胀导致人们谈论一场重大的“生活成本危机”,能源账单和基本商品对许多人来说变得越来越难以负担。本文探讨了影响英国近期政治经济危机和危机应对的一些框架。我们认为,英国接连发生的危机和紧缩浪潮被视为普遍或平衡的时刻,尽管它们的影响分布不均。普遍存在的种族化不平等在“正常”、非危机环境中被正常化、被忽视或忽视,而危机和危机应对都加剧了这种不平等。紧缩的伊斯兰恐惧症——在政治经济危机背景下对穆斯林的种族化框架——为我们的论点提供了重点案例研究。针对2020年全球Covid-19大流行的到来,英国政府的经济应对措施包括一项前所未有的全国休假计划:冠状病毒就业保留计划。从2020年3月到2021年9月,该计划构成了一项大规模的公共支出计划,雇主提供高达80%的员工工资和雇佣成本,以留住那些被“锁在”家里无法工作的员工。近代史上最激进的保守党政府之一,在被认为是自助的丘吉尔式偶像鲍里斯•约翰逊(Boris Johnson)的领导下,可能会发现自己实际上正在国有化所有行业——尽管是暂时的——这或许会给政治和经济进步人士带来一线希望,让他们对经济现状进行彻底的重新评估。然而,从大流行开始,紧缩的幽灵就在空气中徘徊。对2010-2020年紧缩时期话语框架的援引是一个早期预警信号。2020年,从企业广告到政治演讲,“我们都在一起”和“我们应该保持冷静,继续前进”的说法——全球金融危机后紧缩文化政治的核心框架——被热烈地重新提起但是,就危机影响谁以及我们应该如何应对危机而言,这些框架的问题在于,我们从来没有“同舟共济”。在“危机前”时期,英国社会普遍存在着系统性的阶级歧视、种族歧视、性别歧视和能力歧视等不平等现象,这使得一些人在危机到来时比其他人受到更大的不利影响。然而,正如露辛达·普拉特(Lucinda Platt)所表明的那样,Covid-19死亡人数的种族差异与种族少数群体的所谓(错误)行为无关它们是关于黑人和亚裔群体所面临的社会、政治和经济不平等的复杂相互作用。这些不平等体现在两个关键指标上:职业和住房。Platt指出,例如,非洲黑人更有可能在社会护理领域工作,在那里,第一波大流行的影响最为严重。与英国白人相比,少数族裔更有可能生活在“人口密集或过度拥挤的地区”。Platt总结说,大流行不仅造成了健康结果的差异,也造成了经济结果的差异。英国下议院妇女与平等委员会(House of Commons Women and Equalities Committee)指出,与白人相比,少数族裔更有可能签订零时工合同。正如他们的报告所发现的那样:“冠状病毒大流行加剧了人们对零时工合同政策的系统性问题的关注,包括零时工合同的BAME人员数量不成比例。大流行凸显了零时工合同的不平等运作方式:雇主可以拒绝给员工休假,而是将他们的工作时间减少到零。在某些情况下,签订零时工合同的工人没有资格获得法定病假工资。“这种系统性的不平等及其在社会经济危机中的恶化,明显影响了总体上的少数族裔社区,但我们在这里特别感兴趣的是,作为一种特定形式的种族化框架和社会经济暴力,它们是如何与伊斯兰恐惧症交织在一起的。”通过这种框架,穆斯林遭受福利剥夺(“不允许”要求社会经济正义)21,经常被视为利用国家福利制度的“福利骗子”,而不是应得的公民22将阶级作为一个独立的或原始的社会类别,免于种族化,是构建“白人工人阶级”话语的必要条件,也是忽视或消除危机经验中种族化差异的必要条件。 在危机的影响中,这种种族化的差异影响到许多少数民族群体,但穆斯林社区可能再次受到特别严重的打击。Runnymede的报告指出,英国巴基斯坦和孟加拉国社区(其中约90%的人认为自己是穆斯林,占英国人口的3.8%,或超过220万人)26可能比更广泛的“BAME”类别受到更严重的影响。这包括,在2022-23年冬季,巴基斯坦和孟加拉国家庭陷入燃料贫困的可能性比白人家庭高66%,令人震惊。虽然其他学者已经证明了我们的紧缩伊斯兰恐惧症概念与理解大流行病危机及其应对措施的相关性,但我们现在也可以预测它与正在进行的生活成本危机的相关性。将穆斯林的生活定位为不成比例的受到影响,再加上危机应对框架将他们定位为本质上“不可委屈”的人,否认他们的“工人阶级”地位,不允许他们要求社会经济正义,所有这些都有可能塑造这场危机,就像他们之前的危机一样。近年来,英国接连发生的重大危机——全球金融危机和财政紧缩、流感大流行,以及现在的生活成本危机——产生了严重的不平等影响。少数族裔往往特别容易受到这种影响。他们在工人阶级中,在贫困线以下,在贫困的城市社区,以及在不稳定和“一线”形式的就业中,都被认为是这种定位的原因。穆斯林面临着特殊的挑战,他们作为一个更普遍的“问题”的框架(以及他们经常被“工人阶级”的框架所排斥),在他们关于危机和危机反应的定位中发挥着作用。随着生活成本危机和任何新的紧缩浪潮的发展,普遍的少数民族群体,特别是穆斯林,将面临一个真实而直接的风险,将面临更糟糕的结果——无论是在社会经济方面,还是在他们和他们的经历如何被话语框架(或抹去)方面。
The political-economic terrain of the UK has been beset by a series of overlapping crises in recent years – from the global financial crisis (GFC) of 2007/08 (and the longer-term crises of public services induced by the decade-plus of austerity that followed), to the global public health crisis of the pandemic and its socio-economic impact. Today, stagnant wages and rocketing inflation have led to talk of a major ‘cost of living crisis’, with energy bills and basic commodities becoming increasingly unaffordable to many.
This article explores some of the frames that have shaped recent political-economic crises and crisis-responses in the UK. We argue that successive waves of crisis and austerity in the UK have been framed as universal or equalising moments, even as their impacts have been unevenly distributed. Pervasive racialised inequalities that are normalised, unseen, or ignored in ‘normal’, non-crisis contexts are exacerbated by both crises and crisis-responses. Austerity Islamophobia - the racialised framing of Muslims in the context of political-economic crises – provides the focal case study for our argument.
The UK government's economic response to the arrival of the global Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 included an unprecedented national furlough programme: the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme. From March 2020 to September 2021, the scheme constituted a massive programme of public spending, with employers given up to 80 per cent of staff salaries and employment costs to retain staff while they were ‘locked down’ at home and unable to work. That one of the most radical Conservative governments in recent history, led by the supposedly self-help Churchillian icon Boris Johnson, could find itself effectively nationalising all industry – albeit temporarily – might have offered a glimmer of hope for political and economic progressives for a radical reappraisal of the economic status quo.
Yet from the outset of the pandemic, the spectre of austerity lingered in the air. The invocation of discursive frames from the 2010–2020 austerity era was an early warning sign. In 2020, claims that ‘we're all in this together’ and that we should ‘keep calm and carry on’ – frames central to the cultural politics of austerity after the GFC – were revived with gusto, from corporate advertising to political speeches.2 But the trouble with these framings in terms of who a crisis affects, and how we should respond to it, is that we have never all been ‘in it together’. The systemic classist, racist, sexist, and ableist inequalities that pervade UK society in ‘pre-crisis’ times position some people to be more adversely impacted than others when a crisis arrives.
However, as Lucinda Platt has shown, racial disparities in Covid-19 deaths were not about the supposed (mis)behaviours of racially minoritised groups.11 They were about the complex interaction of social, political, and economic inequalities faced by Black and Asian groups. These inequalities map onto two key markers: occupation and housing. Platt notes that Black African populations, for example, were more likely to be working in social care, where the impact of the first wave of pandemic was most viciously felt. Racially minoritised people are also more likely than the white British population to live in ‘densely occupied or overcrowded areas’. Platt concludes by suggesting that the pandemic not only generated disparities in health outcomes but also economic ones. The House of Commons Women and Equalities Committee has noted that racially minoritised people were more likely to be on zero-hours contracts than their white counterparts. As their report found:
“The coronavirus pandemic has sharpened the focus on the systemic issues with the zero-hours contracts policy, including the disproportionate number of BAME people on zero-hours contracts. The pandemic has highlighted the unequal way that zero-hours contracts operate: employers can deny furlough to employees and instead reduce their working hours to zero. In some cases, workers on zero-hours contracts are ineligible for statutory sick pay.”12
Such systemic inequalities and their exacerbation through socio-economic crises clearly affect racially minoritised communities in general, but we are particularly interested here in how they intersect with Islamophobia as a specific form of racialised framing and socio-economic violence.
Through this framing, Muslims suffer welfare disentitlement (the ‘disallowing’ of claims to socioeconomic justice)21 often being framed as ‘benefits cheats’ exploiting the national welfare system, rather than as deserving citizens.22 The framing of class as a discrete or pristine social category, exempt from racialisation, is the necessary condition for constructing the ‘white working class’ discourse, and also for ignoring or erasing racialised disparities in experiences of crises.
Such racialised disparities in the effects of crises impact upon many racially minoritised groups, but again Muslim communities may be hit especially hard. The Runnymede report notes that British Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities (around 90 per cent of whom identify as Muslim, and who together account for of 3.8 per cent of the UK population, or more than 2.2 million people)26 are likely to be even more sharply impacted than the wider ‘BAME’ category. This includes Pakistani and Bangladeshi households being a staggering 66 per cent more likely than white households to be in fuel poverty in the winter of 2022–23. While other scholars have already demonstrated the pertinence of our concept of austerity Islamophobia to understanding the pandemic crisis and its responses,27 we can now anticipate its relevance to the ongoing cost of living crisis too. The positioning of Muslim lives to be disproportionately impacted, alongside crisis-response framings that position them as essentially ‘ungrievable’, deny them the status of ‘working class’, and disallow their claims to socioeconomic justice, all threaten to shape this crisis as they have previous ones.
The succession of major crises in the UK in recent years – the GFC and austerity, the pandemic, and now the cost of living crisis – have had deeply unequal impacts. Racially minoritised people are often positioned to be particularly vulnerable to such impacts. Their over-representation among the working class, and below the poverty line, in deprived urban neighbourhoods, as well as in precarious and ‘frontline’ forms of employment, have all been identified as reasons for this positioning. Muslims have faced particular challenges, and their framing as a more generalised ‘problem’ (as well as their frequent outcasting from frames of the ‘working class’), is at play in their positioning with regard to both crises and crisis-responses. As the cost of living crisis and any new wave of austerity develop, there is a real and immediate risk that racially minoritised groups in general, and Muslims in particular, will face significantly worse outcomes – both in socioeconomic terms and in terms of how they and their experiences are discursively framed (or erased).
期刊介绍:
The permafrost of no alternatives has cracked; the horizon of political possibilities is expanding. IPPR Progressive Review is a pluralistic space to debate where next for progressives, examine the opportunities and challenges confronting us and ask the big questions facing our politics: transforming a failed economic model, renewing a frayed social contract, building a new relationship with Europe. Publishing the best writing in economics, politics and culture, IPPR Progressive Review explores how we can best build a more equal, humane and prosperous society.