Summary of presentation by Chik Collins, University of West of Scotland to Oxfam-UWS Partnership Policy Forum: ‘Realising Social Justice: People, Politics and Policies’, 18 November 2014
Social Justice: A Contested Terrain (An historical overview of how social justice has been understood, evaluated and applied in practice)
The idea of social justice has generally been a way in which centre-left/social democratic political thinking has looked to challenge inequality without advocating ‘radical equality’ – seeking ‘social proximity’ within a political community, often linked to ideas of fairness.
In the social democratic inspired post-war welfare state, social justice was linked to an implicit recognition, deriving from the experience of the 1930s in particular, that classical liberalism failed to account for the profound inequalities in power within an unregulated market economy. Left to its own devices, moreover, such power imbalances led to inequalities of income and wealth which produced ‘underconsumption’ – a lack of effective demand. The Keynesian Welfare State sought to address the latter by modifying the former. This meant a regulated market economy, with a legitimate role for working class organisations (trade unions and communities) in increasing the bargaining power of ordinary people, and a welfare state to mitigate wider insecurity. This was the ‘settlement’ which entered into crisis in the 1970s, and which Thatcherism sought to dismantle. However, as disciples of Hayek, who rejected any idea of social justice, the Thatcherites sought to justify their aims in other terms – ‘freedom’ from ‘coercion’, etc. The concept of social justice, for the most part, continued to be linked to a KWS-type model.
The key departure from this came in 1994, when Labour’s Commission on Social Justice began to reformulate the idea of social justice along lines with which Thatcherites would have been able broadly to agree – as ‘inclusion’ in a ‘flexible’ labour market. Social justice was now to be rather less about the politics of ‘who gets what, when and how’ and rather more about ‘adaptation’ to the requirements of a flexible labour market, underpinned by a minimum wage and in-work benefits (to ‘make work pay’) - all in a growing economy with increasing government expenditure.
In Scotland, in the early years of devolution (under the Labour-Lib Dem coalition), these two aspects – ‘social inclusion’ and ‘social justice’ – were theorised together (in a context in which there was a strange amalgam of social democratic and neoliberal agendas more generally). There was a specific social justice strategy with clear targets/milestones. But by 2003/2004 it was clear that these were not being met. ‘Social inclusion’ did not in fact deliver the kinds of outcomes which people thought of as aligned with ‘social justice’ (still informed by KWS precepts). And as the wider social (poverty/health/education), economic (collapse of microelectronics and the broader inward investment agenda) and demographic (population decline) crisis became clear, the Scottish Executive went wholesale for a more straightforwardly neoliberal approach – Smart, Successful Scotland #2 – driven by the banking and finance sector. Social justice wasn’t spoken about any more. And ‘Closing the Gap’ (vaguely social democratic) became ‘Closing the Opportunity Gap’ (clearly neo-liberal).
It is perhaps no coincidence that as Labour was abandoning the language of Social Justice, others were taking it up. Ian Duncan Smith built on New Labour thinking south of the border, and brought it to life with the help of a visit to Easterhouse – creating his Centre for Social Justice. Now ‘social justice’ was to mean helping people in various ways to ‘free’ themselves from ‘dependency’ – and if necessary to do so by rendering them destitute.
The SNP, on the other hand, saw the opportunity to make inroads into Labour’s core vote as the new ‘defenders’ of what was left of the KWS – opposing housing stock transfers, PFI/PPP, privatisation of water, hospital closures, etc. It paid off in 2007 and again in 2011 – and continued to be strongly in evidence in September 2014.
But this itself is problematic. The SNP in government cannot claim very much by way of delivering social justice. In some ways its position is akin to that of the Scottish Executive in the early noughties – a curious amalgam of social democratic aspirations linked to neoliberal economics. The ingredients are not particularly compatible. Elements of social democracy have been sustained, but they have not been sustained in ways which are particularly beneficial to the least well off.
The problem for any viable social justice strategy in the present seems to be that none of the versions of ‘social justice’ which are, or have been, on offer are likely to deliver outcomes which reflect what the people who support the idea of Social Justice think of as representing social justice in practice – in particular, the meaningful reduction of inequalities in income, wealth, health and the broader experience/quality of life.
Yet, the concept itself is now very much part of the contested political terrain – the protagonists are unlikely to abandon it. Some of this can continue to be fudged – as is evident from the long-standing tendency for many to fail to distinguish between policies and practices which provide marginal mitigation and/or relief from the worst ravages of injustice, and those which actually might impact on the causes of that injustice. But it is not something that could necessarily be fudged for very long in a heated contest.
This is, perhaps, a useful frame for us to consider the ‘social justice challenge’: How might the broadly shared aspirations of a very large number of people in contemporary Scotland find the kind of expression which could propel viable and effective policies to realise social justice?
Chik Collins
School of Media, Culture and Society
University of the West of Scotland
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