By Peter Beresford, Visiting Professor at the University of East Anglia and Co-Chair of the disabled people’s organization, Shaping Our Lives.
Keywords: Neoliberalism, personal politics, participation, new social movements, equal alliances
—
In the UK and beyond, social policy has rarely been in such a conflicted and contradictory state. On the one side, we have powerful demands for a right-wing populist approach, residualizing services and support and vilifying beneficiaries like disabled people, asylum seekers and trans people. This has dominated public discussion and media headlines. But on the other side and no less insistent have been calls from service user, voluntary, community and professional organisations for more truly participatory rather than top-down policy and provision. Pressure has also been rising for more participatory learning, research, policy and practice, which have increasingly been embodied in reforms.
What’s interesting is that while concepts like welfare and the welfare state were originally seen as progressive and liberatory, they have increasingly had retrograde meanings attached to them and indeed been experienced as at least as much about rationing and stigmatization as helping and being supportive.
Formal versus personal politics
What’s also interesting is that while in formal politics, the neoliberal revolution fostered by Pinochet, Thatcher and Reagan has dominated our political news for decades, much less has been said about its counterpoint – global popular pressures for more anti-discriminatory and inclusive personal politics reflected in roles and relationships that address diversity with equality. This is despite the significant if incomplete progress these have undoubtedly made internationally.
This ideological divide has recently focused in the UK on a new Labour government’s efforts to end winter heating allowances for many older people, efforts which then came in for harsh opposition from politicians until then wedded to residual social policy. The most extreme expression of this so far has been the commitment of Nigel Farage’s far right neoliberal Reform Party to restore any government cuts in the benefit – and indeed to end the two child benefit cap, despite his obvious longstanding ideological opposition to any such measures. The subsequent Government step-down is also significant in itself as it represents essentially the worst of all welfare worlds. This follows from the massive financial (let alone political) cost of such a policy u-turn as well as the essential wastefulness of what will now be a hardened means-tested benefit.
Making change
My new text, The Antidote examines how 50 years of neoliberal ideology and public policy have got us to this strange and unhelpful situation. Perhaps more important though, it raises the question in practical terms of how we might call a halt to such populist neoliberal ideology and restore an effective voice in policymaking to electorates.
As Ruth Lister says in her Foreword, ‘At the heart of the book is the feminist mantra that the personal is political…The aim is to unite the personal and the political in an empowering and emancipatory way in the belief that formal politics can learn from progressive developments in human relations’. As Ruth says, ‘Myriad groups on the ground are starting to make that society’ based on principles of humanistic and inclusive politics. This is what I have called in The Antidote a politics of connection. To make this possible, the book offers examples and diverse case studies of how lived experience, experiential knowledge, education for empowerment and change and inclusive communication, can all play their part both in signposting us to truly participatory public policy and political change and help us get there.
Regressive developments
We have seen the bedmates of neoliberalism – the massive top-down corporations that have taken charge of revolutionary developments in communication, knowledge development and transfer, learning, work and artificial intelligence (AI) recast our lives and societies. But they have generally caused more concern about manipulating us and our children, rather than engaging and bringing us together. Building on the twentieth century/modernist mantra ‘only connect’, advanced by creatives like E.M. Forster, T.S. Eliot and Richard Hoggart, the book points to a new understanding of connection – connecting inclusively and equally, to highlight a new path for change.
From minoritised to majority
This is one which could transform the many minority New Social Movements (NSMs) now challenging oppression and discrimination; from the disabled people’s and Black civil rights, to LGBTQIA and women’s movements, to become the majority we actually are. The route proposed to achieving this is building alliances between us committed to connecting on equal and inclusive terms. Neoliberalism has served the interests of an unaccountable and destructive overclass which has presided over globally increasing poverty, ill-health, division, conflict and environmental damage.
Each of us may understand our own oppression, but not necessarily that of other groups, especially as the siren voices of the political hard right encourage white to see Black, and nationals to see migrants, as the cause of all their woes. We saw this writ large in large summer’s UK riots. The idea of intersectionality helps us challenge this as it reminds us that few of us are just one thing. Instead we may be workers as well as claimants; parents as well as environmental activists. We have many things in common in a political democracy. The one percent at heart only have themselves.
Towards inclusive involvement
Challenging populism and espousing participation in the way the book explores also helps us to rethink key concepts that have long been at the heart of public policy and which have increasingly come under critical consideration. These include ideas like solidarity, community, welfare and support. New social movements came under attack for weakening old understandings of and approaches to building collectivity because of their emphasis on difference and divisions. But we should remember again if we are to challenge dominance of over-powering minorities that historically solidarity has too often been based on leaving out and relegating some groups to the margin rather than seeking to include them on equal terms. With more recent upward redistributions of power and wealth we can see the limitations of such understandings and the importance of seeking to include all of us in change – if that process of change-making is to be a progressive rather than regressive one. The Antidote seeks to offer a starting point for such reconsideration and renewal.
—
Peter Beresford is Visiting Professor at the University of East Anglia and Co-Chair of the disabled people’s organization, Shaping Our Lives. X @BeresfordPeter
Peter Beresford (2025), The Antidote: How people powered movements can renew politics, policy and practice, Policy Press, Bristol, https://policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/the-antidote
Image: Grenfell Tower (credit: Peter Beresford)