Austerity and the Politics of Becoming

In this short contribution, we attempt to explore the ways in which austerity measures – deficit reductions through tax increases and cuts to public spending – generate unexpected political subjectivities among women of colour activists in Britain. In particular, we examine how the dramatic cuts to public spending and the privatization of public services simultaneously subject women of colour by further destabilizing their already precarious economic position and create new possibilities for women becoming radical agents for social change. We argue that the dynamic for mapping this process of women of colour becoming new (or, at least, different) political agents is found in the oftentimes disrespected and devalued social relations of caring and care work (Erel, 2011). We argue that caring for and about Others is a dual process of subjectivation through the (re) privatization of care through the roll back of the social welfare state and a politics of becoming which generates new solidarities for collective action among women of colour. Taking seriously the dynamics of women of colour's activism under austerity matters because it disrupts the binary in EU studies scholarship that privileges a focus on the macro politics of EU institutions over the lived experiences and outcomes at the micro-level. By intruding into this space to tell a different kind of story about austerity politics, it might perhaps be possible to reframe how we think about the ongoing economic crisis, whose interests are served by governing institutions and how we might think differently about resistance to the crisis – beyond the tropes of documenting a populist far-right backlash. We begin by first mapping the changing landscape of austerity and its disproportionate impact on women of colour in Britain. We then turn to explore how women of colour confront the challenge of care by investigating how care acts as both a barrier to public space and as the fulcrum for a new public politics. The 2008 economic crisis was sparked after global financial institutions gambled with subprime mortgages through complicated synthetic financial instruments such as collateralized debt obligations, and plunged global capitalism into chaos after these supposedly ‘safe’ investments rapidly depreciated (Bassel and Emejulu, 2017a). In order to save the global capitalist system, nation states in which the crisis was concentrated, such as Britain and the United States, bailed out these institutions through a massive transfer of wealth. It is this transfer of wealth from public to private hands that then sparked austerity measures. In Britain, since 2008, more than £1,162 billion has been allocated to saving ailing financial institutions from collapse (National Audit Office, 2017). Unlike what took place in the eurozone, Britain chose to undertake a voluntary programme of austerity. The massive hole in the public accounts had to be reconciled and austerity was the policy proposal taken up in Britain in 2010. Indeed, the then Conservative-Liberal Democrat government led by David Cameron saw the crisis as an opportunity to dramatically reshape the British social welfare state and the conception of social citizenship (Bassel and Emejulu, 2017a). Britain is distinctive in its response to the crisis as austerity was, for a time, justified across the political left and the right as a consequence of an overweening social welfare state. However, this surprisingly durable economic consensus among elite state actors has now fractured with the Labour Party, the official opposition, breaking ranks under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn and the Shadow Chancellor, John McDowell, to call for an end to austerity and a return to the social welfare settlements of the post-war period (The Labour Party, 2017). Curiously in the British context and in the context of the JCMS Annual Review, debates about Brexit and austerity remain almost completely separate. Although the worst is yet to come in terms of austerity with more than £12 billion of cuts to public services still to be implemented, this programme of cuts and privatizations is not necessarily informing Britain's approach to economic and monetary policy after its planned exit from the EU. Instead, austerity has largely disappeared from public debate; it seems to have been crowded out by the on-going difficulties of the protracted Brexit negotiations. What is important to note about the economic crisis and austerity measures is that they are largely represented as crises for an undifferentiated middle class and the white working class. In the hegemonic discursive constructions, the middle classes experience the crisis as a new phenomenon of precarity: a university graduate will have to struggle on zero-hour contracts for long periods; permanent, well-paid jobs are difficult to find; final salary pension schemes have closed; it has become increasingly difficult to get on the housing ladder. Thus, in one sense, the crisis is represented as a temporary inconvenience for the economically privileged. For groups who can draw on their wealth to secure their economic position and buy access to vital social welfare services such as healthcare and education, austerity is largely an invisible process. The crisis and austerity have also been represented as an insurmountable challenge for the white working classes. In these discursive constructions, white working class men and women have found themselves in circumstances where local services have disappeared and the eligibility requirements for certain kinds of benefit have become more stringent (Goodhart, 2017). These tough economic conditions combine with an already existing hostility to immigration, which, in turn, become the explanatory factor for a backlash against the establishment as seen in the 2016 Brexit vote, misrepresented as the will of the ‘white working class’ (Emejulu, 2016). This dominant narrative is compelling but misleading in that it erases the complex dynamics of race, class, gender and legal status that have helped to determine which groups have been hardest hit by the crisis and austerity. The economic crisis has been a slow-moving disaster for women of colour which they experience largely outside the public eye. As we have documented in great detail elsewhere (Bassel and Emejulu, 2017a, 2017b; Emejulu and Bassel, 2015, 2017a, 2017b;) women of colour are impacted by the crisis and austerity measures both discursively and materially. Firstly, women of colour largely disappear in accounts of the crisis and austerity. There can be no place for women of colour in the story of the economic crisis as their experiences confound the hegemonic narrative. Both middle class and working class women of colour – but particularly Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Black African women – have seen their household incomes plummet since 2008 (see Women's Budget Group (2018) for further details). This is for two reasons. First, women of colour, on the whole, are more likely to be living in the poorest households and are more likely to be unemployed, underemployed or in low-skilled, low-paid work. Second, women of colour are also more likely to be living in larger households with more dependents – older adults and children – requiring care. Thus when public spending – particularly real terms cuts in unemployment insurance and housing benefit – is curtailed, these women lose a vital source of household income. Importantly, when controlling for class, women of colour in a more secure economic position also see greater falls in their income in comparison to their white counterparts. This is because these women are more likely to work for the state in the feminized caring professions of teaching, social work and nursing. Thus, when public spending is cut, this also destabilizes employment – and income – for women of colour. In this tumultuous year in which we have witnessed far right and proto-fascist groups make important breakthroughs in electoral politics particularly in Germany and Italy, women of colour disrupt the taken-for-granted narrative about the relationship between austerity and the populist far-right politics. Women of colour's precarity under austerity has not seen them turn against immigration or vote for racist and xenophobic parties. In fact, we are currently seeing a revival in radical grassroots Black feminist and Afrofeminist politics in Europe (Emejulu and Sobande, forthcoming, 2019). Thus, the dynamics under austerity are more nuanced than is usually represented. However, in order to capture this complexity we need to have an appreciation of intersecting inequalities – unequal social and economic outcomes derived from the ways in which race, class, gender and legal status interact – and an understanding of how care work in both private and public spaces, creates particular kinds of political subjectivities for women of colour. It is to this point we now turn. We now explore how caring for and about Others is a dual process of subjectivation. In this section we explore the first face of care. Through migrant women of colour's experiences of becoming British citizens we see the (re) privatization of care and roll back of the social welfare state at work. This face of the politics of becoming (see also Khan, 2019) is one in which care is turned against some women of colour, for not caring in the ‘right ways’ to instil ‘British values’ and prevent extremism. Yet, at the same time, the increasingly neoliberal nature of the process (Turner, 2014) exacerbates the ways in which the broader withdrawal of state care and support of women can severely hamper some women of colour's participation in the naturalization process and public life more generally. Care acts both as a barrier to public space and as the fulcrum for a new public politics (Bassel and Emejulu, 2017b; Erel, 2011; Lister, 2008). In the process of becoming British citizens, migrant women of colour face a vortex of conflicting demands (Bassel and Khan, in progress; Bassel, 2016). 2 In particular Muslim migrant women – specifically Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslim women – are often portrayed in public discourse and social integration policy as victims of social isolation who need English to do their job of socializing young people better (more generally see Luibhéid, 2006; Tyler, 2013). We can understand the ways in which these Muslim women are interpellated by the state as ‘failed care’. Muslim women are portrayed as isolated victims for whom no one cares (except, grudgingly the state) and also passive objects who fail to care for – and sufficiently control – their sons which leads to violent disorder and extremism. These refrains of failed care have been consistently repeated by state actors – on both the left and the right – for almost 20 years. One of the earliest instances of the deployment of failed care is seen in the Labour government's response to rioting in the northern English cities of Oldham, Bradford and Burnley in 2001. The multiple causes of these riots, including intimidation and violence by far right groups, were largely ignored. Instead, the disorder was attributed to the lack of English proficiency, particularly of mothers of the young men who participated in the disorder (who, it should be noted, did not participate in the rioting and for whom it was assumed they could not speak English). A ‘meaningful concept of citizenship’ was needed, that would foster loyalty to the nation (Turner, 2014, p. 337). 3 Understanding English was linked with social cohesion and ultimately led in 2005 to the introduction of a naturalization process that seeks to bureaucratically impose ‘British values’ via citizenship tests, a ceremony, and administrative procedures in order to ‘become’ a British citizen. The citizenship test, in particular, was posited as the solution to a lack of community cohesion and the failed care of Muslim mothers. More recently and especially in the context of young British people travelling to Syria to join Islamic State (IS), the former Prime Minister David Cameron called for an end to the ‘passive tolerance’ of separate communities which, he argued, left many Muslim women facing discrimination and social isolation, and proposed the launch of a £20 million language fund (The Guardian, 2016). The proposals mandated that migrant women demonstrate proficiency in the English language if they were living in the United Kingdom on a five year spousal visa, and left open the possibility that these women would be detained and deported if they were unable to provide evidence of improvement in the language. Similar to the Labour government's response in 2001, young Muslims’ disorder was attributed to their mothers’ failed care and lack of English. Dame Louise Casey's Review into Opportunity and Integration (2016) commissioned by David Cameron evokes the same failed care figure: the Muslim woman – particularly the Pakistani and/or Bangladeshi Muslim woman – who is simultaneously a victim of domestic violence, socially isolated, facing discrimination in the job market and unemployed, failing to learn English and, as a result, struggling to manage her children. In addition to language provision for these women, Casey proposed to reinvent the process through which one becomes a British citizen ‘which is of huge national, cultural and symbolic value’ to include ‘an Oath of Integration with British Values and Society on arrival, rather than awaiting a final citizenship test’ (Casey, 2016, p. 168). Cameron's pledge to support Muslim women to learn English and Casey's very general recommendation to support ‘targeted English language provision’ are silent on the state withdrawal of care through austerity. They do not acknowledge the legacy of funding cuts to English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) services which have contributed to social isolation. Instead, failed care, which is transmitted through culture and religion, are constructed as the problem, and English language training and a new and improved citizenship test process, the solution (Bassel, 2016). English language, as before, is to act as the ‘panacea’ (Greenwood and Robins, 2002, p. 507; Sasse, 2005, p. 678) to the ills caused by a lack of integration (Khan, 2013) and serve as an antidote to radicalization. These Muslim migrant women are the vehicle for this panacea of English language because they are biological and social ‘reproducers’ of the nation (Yuval-Davis and Anthias, 1989; Yuval-Davis and Anthias, 1997), who will, it is argued, raise young people with the correct values (Lonergan, 2017; Yuval-Davis et al., 2005; see also Morrice, 2016a). It is vital, according to Casey, for this existing culture of failed care to be transformed by using the English language as the vehicle to impose the correct British values – and in turn, the correct forms of care and control – on Muslim groups. Yet, for those women of colour targeted by these discourses and policies, austerity in experiences of becoming funding for has been dramatically back and a that women and would be 2011). In the that for would be with and with a disproportionate on and 2016). we can see how discourses of ‘failed with a broader of that women of colour's experiences of becoming British to this crisis of care a particular state and from social welfare but not since the 2008 economic women are into the care work and communities their to The is a of social for those who can for it and for those who as some in the provide care work in return for for those in the first 2016, p. 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