At a time when much alternative public discourse was drowned out by the simplistic cacophony of ‘Let’s get Brexit done’, how could dialogues be opened up in which such large questions about the future could be discussed seriously and constructively in a spirit of trying to find solutions that would meet the interests of a range of different groups?
Although the polarised political landscape, and media bias, posed formidable obstacles, it seemed to me that the best chance of building a consensus about how the welfare state could be reinvented would be to focus discussions around specific ideas for new initiatives. Perhaps people could be brought together to brainstorm creatively about ways in which the platform technologies I had been studying could be used to reorganise existing services and develop new ones, bringing into being a digital welfare state for the twenty-first century. At least the context of a general election put some of the relevant questions on the table with an urgency that was not present at other times. It seemed worth a try.
This was the original idea behind the book. But launching it in the middle of a snap election campaign in Britain entailed risks as well as opportunities. The UK first-past-the-post system mitigates against cross-party collaboration, and there is also pressure on each party to produce a precisely worded and fully costed manifesto that covers every aspect of government policy and inevitably takes a somewhat top-down form. At the very least, this sits in tension with any idea of building consensus around specific issues from the bottom up locally or regionally. At worst, it can throw up concrete barriers to any kind of collaboration, with each party trying to distinguish itself from its competitors by disparaging their policies.
In the event, these fears were academic. Thanks to a decision by the Scottish Nationalist and Liberal Democrat parties to break ranks with Labour and take Boris Johnson up on his challenge to go to the country to ‘get Brexit done’, the election was called even earlier than I had anticipated. Publishers’ schedules were long and I had to undergo surgery in the autumn that put me out of action for several weeks as far as writing was concerned, so the upshot was that the publication of the book had to be delayed beyond the election period. My role in it was reduced to that of a voiceless bystander.
The Labour Party manifesto was comprehensive, ambitious and radical, touching on quite a few of the issues I wanted to address. Unfortunately, it did not receive anything like the detailed discussion it deserved in the rushed pre-Christmas tempo of the election campaign, overshadowed by the polarised debates over Brexit, and facing hostile media coverage. Although no doubt some elements from it will be adopted by a range of policymakers as the months and years go by, while other elements might form the basis for future campaigns, it is unlikely that this innovative manifesto will resurface in the same form.
Nevertheless, there is still a need, perhaps more urgent than ever in light of the results of the election, for a serious debate about the future of the welfare state in the twenty-first century in the context of a digitalised global economy. The changing context includes new challenges to the nation state posed by the increasing volatility of international trading agreements in general and, in particular, by Brexit. In the UK it also includes a likelihood that the deterioration in employment protection and benefit coverage experienced under the previous coalition and Tory governments will continue to worsen and reach crisis point. Meanwhile the need to address the climate emergency has become ever more visibly urgent.
This book is intended as a contribution to this debate. It does not seek to be a manifesto. Nor does it seek to cover every aspect of government. Rather, it aims to provide a starting point for discussion, experimentation and the search for solutions. It is likely that many of these solutions will not take a top-down form and be implemented formally by central government, but will be more piecemeal and bottom-up, rooted in local political alliances between different stakeholders and enacted at a regional or city level. The book seeks to lay the groundwork for such discussions by offering an analysis of how the principles underlying the welfare state have unravelled over the past 70 years and what the impacts of this have been on employment, social protection and gender relations, and hence on solidarity, equality and inclusion. Drawing on recent research, it then suggests ways in which these trends might be reversed, including by developing positive uses of the digital technologies that are sometimes held to be part of the problem, rather than the solution.
This was how this preface stood in February 2020, when I completed the first draft. Since then the world has changed in even more dramatic ways with the emergence of the coronavirus pandemic. This has given a new urgency to the issues I address and added to their topicality. Several of the trends I discuss have increased exponentially during the lockdown period.
On the one hand we have huge numbers of people working remotely from their homes, in many cases subjected to new kinds of electronic surveillance and digital management. On the other, in order to cater to their needs, there has been an equally dramatic need for other workers (mostly low-paid, precarious and disproportionately black and from ethnic minorities, and also subjected to surveillance and digital management), to deliver them the goods and services they cannot fetch for themselves, transport them to and from the locations where they need to be treated in person and, at great risk to their own health, provide them with that physical treatment. As the NHS is reorganised to accommodate patients with the Covid-19 virus, a new bonanza is created for the outsourcing companies that get the contracts. As small high-street shops, restaurants and cafes are driven out of business, the large corporations that dominate online shopping and delivery services increase their market share. And huge profits are made by the companies, many of which pay no tax in the UK, that take a rent from the increased use of digital technologies.
Meanwhile, neoliberal governments have had to abandon their pretence that the market can take care of the management of the state, embarking on a series of public interventions unprecedented since the Second World War, in the process opening up a space for radical debates that would not have seemed possible even six months ago, and exploding the myth that ‘there is no alternative’. The UK government has manifestly failed to develop coherent policies to address the spread of the virus, and its public support has plummeted since the 2019 general election. The crisis has thrown up a new interest in UBI and other radical alternatives to the present system.
Finally, in the vacuum left by government incompetence, communities have come together locally to develop their own solutions to support the vulnerable, discuss ideas about what reforms to campaign for, and organise demonstrations to express their outrage against racism. In the process new social models are being developed that prefigure what a more inclusive post-Covid society might look like. Some of these community experiments, such as schemes to distribute food and essential supplies, coordinated online, resemble the suggestions I make in the later chapters of this book, giving these discussions, I hope, added legitimacy and relevance. Ideas that seemed utopian in my first tentative draft now seem more realistic and achievable. I offer them here in the hope that readers will build on them and, in the uncharted future that lies before us, start to formulate the basis for a new kind of welfare state fit for the twenty-first century.
Acknowledgements
This book draws on a large body of research on the platform economy, including 14 national surveys carried out at the University of Hertfordshire and funded by the European Foundation for Progressive Studies (FEPS) and the trade union confederation UNI-Europa. In the UK, additional funding was provided by the Trades Union Congress (TUC). I would like to thank these bodies for their generous support. In particular, I would like to thank Justin Nogarede at FEPS, Aileen Koerfer at UNI-Europa and Kate Bell at the TUC for their always constructive and hands-on engagement with the project, and my colleagues Neil H. Spencer, Matthew Coates and Dag S. Syrdal at the University of Hertfordshire’s Statistical Support Unit for their patient and painstaking analysis of the complex survey data. Their contributions have been invaluable, but they cannot be held responsible for the views expressed here, which are my own. The book also draws on some of my other recent published material, including the discussion paper A New Bill of Workers’