Welfare is ‘bad’: bringing it all together

This chapter sets out to encapsulate and affirm all of the empirical materials that have been presented so far in a way that draws together all the different and complex strands. For this reason, it revisits much of what has been recounted already, including some of the most pertinent data excerpts. The aim of this chapter is to suggest that the contemporary ‘welfare imaginary’ has shifted irrevocably, particularly in the time since the embedding of the post-war welfare commons, and to show that, because of this, there is a persistent and pervasive tendency within the liberal welfare regimes of the Anglosphere for welfare provision – a social good originally imagined as something positive and necessary – to be thought of as inherently ‘bad’. I suggest that the contemporary ‘welfare imaginary’ is badly damaged and that the sociology of this drives lived experiences in the context of welfare recipiency. This break or schism in the ‘welfare imaginary’ is something that has been addressed elsewhere. Jensen and Tyler (2015: 471), themselves drawing on a range of sources, note this in the context of the UK in a way that is worth recounting: It is difficult to remember from a contemporary perspective that the Keynesian welfare state was imagined by its original architects as a ‘cradle to grave’ safety-net for citizens: a ‘welfare commons’ of ‘shared risks’ which would function to ameliorate economic and social hardships, injustices and inequalities (see Timmins, 2001; Lowe, 2005; Glennerster, 2007). The landmark publication of the Beveridge Report in 1942 saw people queuing outside government offices in their desire to get their hands on a copy of this blueprint for a new welfare state (Page, 2007: 11) and the report sold over 100,000 copies within a month of its publication. More recently, Fitzpatrick and colleagues (2019) return to T.H. Marshall's idea of a basic minimum standard of social and economic security as a facet of social rights. Drawing on Hoxsey (2011), and with recent reforms in the UK in mind, they make the following observation: These developments beg the question whether social citizenship is entering a post-Marshallian phase, or returning to a pre-Marshallian form; even whether, as Hoxsey suggests of Canada, citizenship is taking on an individualistic and marketised form shorn of its social element. (Fitzpatrick et al, 2019: 5)

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