Month: June 2016

Two-tier Europe: the UK and associate membership

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Carol Weaver argues that Brexit should lead to a redesign of EU membership, leading to the formalisation of a ‘two-tier Europe’ composed of full members and ‘associate members’ that agree to the same rules.

Václav Havel once talked of the ‘power of the powerless’ and whilst that may well have been a very good thing with regard to the Velvet Revolution unfortunately it does not seem to have been a very good thing last week in the EU referendum here in the UK.

I’ve always told UKIP (in debates with them) that they can never have an ‘independent UK of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’. In attempting to achieve this they would inevitably destroy the very union they say they want to protect. I also told Nick Clegg some years back that he was wrong in supporting an in-out referendum with the hope the people would vote to stay.

But we are where we are so why not make the most of it. The EU has become problematic and we have discussed and debated ‘widening v deepening’, ‘two-tier Europe’, ‘multi-speed Europe’ and ‘variable geometry’ for many years now. What we have accidentally achieved, in the usual EU way of compromise, is some kind of mélange of all of these.

Now it might be time to deliberately redesign Europe with a choice of:

  1. ‘Full membership’ including Schengen and a Eurozone with deepening and more fiscal unity
  2. ‘Associate membership’ with all associates agreeing to the same rules rather than having, for example, a ‘Norway model’, a ‘Swiss model’ and a possible ‘British model’. This should not be so attractive that Eurozone countries would want to join.
  3. No membership at all.

The associate membership would not be ‘all but institutions’. It would mean limited membership of appropriate institutions with no say in the core workings of the Eurozone and possibly limited freedom of movement without full citizenship. It would apply to countries such as the UK and others that do not want to join the euro. It could also apply to countries such as Turkey once it has completed all relevant chapters. Widening of full membership is currently not feasible.

Former MEP Andrew Duff, a lifelong committed federalist and EU constitution supporter, realised this was necessary in 2013, saying ‘So the Convention in 2015 needs to craft something other than privileged partnership outside the Union, something more than the EEA, yet something less than full membership. The European Union has proved itself over the years capable of great constitutional ingenuity, and it is reasonable to assume that, given the political will to work together for the good of all Europe, it can continue to do so.’

David Cameron has in the past discussed this idea with other EU members .

The new design would mean a new treaty which could trigger more referendums including here in the UK where we have a ‘referendum lock’. This might be better than in-out referendums across Europe backed by right wing parties such as the Front National often themselves backed by Russian money.

At the time of writing Article 50 has not been invoked. There is time to consider the possibility of a new treaty outlining formal Associate Membership. It will take some time but so would any other option.

Dr Carol Weaver is Lecturer in International Relations at De Montfort University.

Governing Perma-Austerity in Baltimore

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Our colleague Madeleine Pill reports on the findings from the exploratory research in Baltimore, carried out as part of the collaborative governance under austerity project, sponsored by the Economic and Social Research Council as part of its Urban Transformations Network, and led by Prof. Jonathan Davies.

The City of Baltimore has 621,000 residents, a quarter of whom are below the poverty line (US Census 2010).  An extract from the outgoing Mayor’s 2013 State of the City speech helps set the scene – ‘for over 50 years, Baltimore’s story has been dominated by a narrative of post-industrial decline. From 1950 to 2000, the city lost a third of its population. Jobs disappeared, crime rates rose, schools deteriorated, and many neighbourhoods destabilised. City government itself was left with a legacy of high taxes, growing liabilities, and crumbling infrastructure’.

Initial research interviews confirmed that Baltimore ‘is used to austerity and functions like that all the time’.   The city’s longstanding ‘culture of scarcity’ is linked more to the ‘de facto devolution’ of Reaganomics than the 2008 crisis, which is not regarded as a significant turning point for the city.  Its ‘fiscal squeeze’ had already resulted in deployment of the standard repertoire of measures (such as a city hiring freeze and pension and health benefit reform for city agency workers).  Only a minority of those interviewed saw these as political choices, the majority seeing them as part and parcel of the ‘muddling through’ required out of perceived necessity.

The City of Baltimore’s approach to its ongoing challenges has been to find ways to increase revenue and reduce public spending; partner with key local institutions to try to integrate systems and approaches; focus on economic development; and seek to attract and retain people to live in the City through a focus on neighbourhoods.  The latter policy realm of neighbourhood revitalisation/ community development formed the focus for exploratory research in the city.  Here the city’s ‘ed and med’ anchor institutions and its philanthropic foundations are key players, along with city government.

The strategies and tactics with neighbourhood implications include:

  • A Housing Typology was adopted by the City of Baltimore in the early 2000s as an asset- (rather than need) based way of prescribing policies and prioritising city resources for its neighbourhoods. The typology prioritises neighbourhoods ‘in the middle’ (where interventions are perceived as being able to help the market).  However, at the time of research the emphasis on the city’s ‘stressed’ neighbourhoods (with the policy prescription of demolition for site assembly) was boosted by significant funding for a 4,000 property demolition and redevelopment initiative from the State of Maryland.
  • “Change to Grow” is the title of the city’s fiscal plan (adopted in 2013), which seeks to address the city’s deficit and shows that city strategies are predicated on the need to deconcentrate poverty by (both retaining and) attracting the middle class to the city through better services, a better quality of life and less ‘fiscal stress’ . Achievement of this ‘meta-goal’ is linked to what a Community Development Corporation director described as Baltimore’s ‘niche’ providing a ‘low-cost [housing] alternative in a high-cost region [which] goes from Washington to Boston’.   This approach sustains the focus on neighbourhoods in ‘the middle’.
  • “OutcomeStat” is an emergent strategy, based on the principles of Results-Based Accountability, presented by city officials as a way of seeking to align non-profit and philanthropic initiatives and resources with those of city government by combining them in an outcomes-based methodology, using indicators grouped under (Mayoral) priority outcomes. Such approaches may herald the upscaling and rationalisation of the city’s non-profit organisations.
  • Self-help and self-provisioning of services in those neighbourhoods containing the necessary voluntary associative capacity is longstanding practice in Baltimore, where city government is challenged to provide ‘the basics’.
  • Urban boosterism of the downtown, waterfront area continues the pattern set in the 1950s and most famously realised in the 1980s Inner Harbor redevelopment. New downtown investment includes the current $1.8 billion Harbor Point waterfront development, which has received significant public subsidy via tax credits, which are also being sought for another significant development at planning stage, Port Covington.

Funding scarcity was linked by everyone interviewed to the need to work together.  The notion of ‘integration’ was widely used, linked to the rising policy realm of workforce development.  This has been championed by the city’s philanthropic and anchor institutions (acting through and assisted by the Baltimore Integration Partnership), and spurred by Johns Hopkins University and Medical System with its HopkinsLocal initiative.  City government adoption of the Baltimore City Anchor Plan (2014), through which anchor institutions regularly meet by geographic sector, underlines this joint working, though it was stressed by some that the anchors set the direction, ‘we do our own thing and the City kind of follows along with us’.

But where’s the citizen? In discussing working together, citizens/ service users/ community representatives were not generally mentioned, partnership interpreted as being between the city’s key institutions and its non-profit organisations. A government official critiqued the ‘whole infrastructure… [that] co-opts community voice and says, this is what the community wants’.  The absence of the citizen in these informal governing arrangements belies a European-style ‘collaborative moment’ in the city.

However, the riots which took place in the city in April 2015 in response to police brutality and misconduct proved to be a key focusing moment which was emphasised by all those interviewed.  A community activist explained that ‘the unrest awakened many people’ who are ‘talking about things they’ve never talked about before’.  Another commented, ‘it’s going to take courage…because these are systematic, inequitable things that are so entrenched in this city that we really have to blow this thing up and do it the right way’.

A proposition arising from the exploratory research is that Baltimore, as a result of the unrest in the city, seems to be at a critical juncture which has heightened collaboration in discourse and to an extent in practices and institutions.  For example, State funding support for the demolition/ site assembly strategy for ‘stressed’ neighbourhoods points to a partnership between the (Democratic) Mayor and (Republican) State Governor, despite their clashes regarding State funding cuts (to public transit and education).   Changes in practices and institutions, such as progress with OutcomeStat and workforce development, will be explored further in the major round of interviews currently underway.

Another priority for the current interviews is to talk to citizen activists and informal community leaders.  In the exploratory phase we found that the social movements and civil society activism obvious in the city are motivated by a deep sense of injustice – especially with regard to policing and housing.  We will explore what people mean by social justice in the city, and the similarities and differences between current protests against injustice and those of the 1960s.  Are the injustices the same or are there new spatial and economic inequalities?  We will explore whether a socially just Baltimore is possible and what local actors are seeking to and can achieve in this regard.  For example, one convening body explained that it had discussed structural racism and the challenge of ‘how it translates, how it gets funded or how more youth get engaged’.  Also, what is the potential for local political change?  For example, a national voice in Black Lives Matter, DeRay McKesson, sought (unsuccessfully) to gain the Democratic nomination for Mayor of Baltimore this April, but his candidature does indicate a ‘grassroots, community-driven, young, energetic constituency that is starting to gain momentum and have a voice’.

The research coincides with a particularly turbulent period of change in political leadership at federal as well as city level, ‘the Governor is still going to be here next year.  Our Mayor is not…  we also don’t know who’s going to be president next year’.  What happens at Federal level remains to be seen.   However, the bounded and devolved nature of city governance in the US means that Baltimore provides a rich case in which to explore the local particularities and responses to challenges experienced to a greater or lesser degree across all eight of the cities in this project.

Dr Madeleine Pill is Lecturer in Public Policy at the University of Sydney

Brexit: the Need for a “21st Century Marshall Plan”

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2000px-marshall_plan-svgProfessor Jonathan Davies argues for a new “Marshall Plan” to fix the broken political economy of the UK, and of Europe.

There are long decades when history barely moves.  And there are times when decades or even centuries fly by in weeks.  Political history in the UK is suddenly moving at breakneck speed.  Our relationship with the EU is sundered, the UK itself fractured along a bewildering tangle of lines.  The possibility of Scottish secession looms once more.  Friends are at each other’s throats.  Terrified remain supporters – and a good few remorseful leave supporters – call for the government to set aside or ignore the referendum.  The Parliamentary Labour Party has turned all its fire on Jeremy Corbyn, while the Liberal Democrats court redemption by making a play for enraged middle class progressives.  The Conservative Party is in turmoil as is the repentant architect of Brexit, Boris Johnson.

In this febrile atmosphere, the battered, embittered and disenfranchised working classes forming the backbone of Brexit has been chosen as the chief villain of the piece – although almost half of them did not vote at all.  Stuck between the rock of racism and the hard place of “progressive” middle class contempt there is, as always, nothing on the table for them.  We must be clear that the grind, hectoring, dispossession and punishment of austerity and several decades of neoliberalism before that lie at the root of these fractures, themselves symptoms of the long durée of economic decline.  The exuberant junketing of our elites cannot disguise the feebleness of British economic growth, the illusion of shared prosperity sustained through astronomical levels of personal and private debt. The costs of this model have been imposed – quite ruthlessly – on those least able to bear them.  The realities of UK PLC for millions of people are, structural unemployment, zero hours contracts, sweat-shop labour, benefit cuts and sanctions and food banks. Brexit is the blowback.  Even so, conditions are far worse in Greece and Spain.

If Britain and Europe’s elites were serious about keeping the ship afloat, they would recognise the appalling vista they have created, abandon neoliberal ideology and austerity wholesale and embark on a massive programme of redistribution and investment in working class towns and cities. Britain and Europe would move to initiate a 21st century Marshall Plan – the post-war reconstruction programme led by the USA after WW2.  We live in very rich societies, but with ever-greater concentrations of wealth and poverty.  The very existence of the United Kingdom and European Union could now depend on the political will to reverse that trend.  Enormous ideological and political resources have been expended on neoliberalism, and such a step looks vanishingly unlikely.  It is much more likely that the reverse will happen and an even heavier price will be exacted from the working class.  Moreover, it is a moot point whether such a programme would be enough reverse the decline of late Western capitalism.  Either way, Britain and Europe can certainly afford it.  If they want the genie back in its bottle, they will have to pay the price.

Jonathan Davies is Professor of Critical Policy Studies and Director of the Centre for Urban Research on Austerity at De Montfort University

Brexit – A Nation Divided

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CURAs Jonathan Payne reflects on Brexit its causes and its consequences for UK progressives

The people of Britain woke up this morning to a Brexit vote and a country deeply divided and ill at ease with itself and its place in the world.  Democracy, the will of the people, had spoken, but no one was quite sure what the consequences would be.

Cameron’s decision to put the question of Britain’s membership of the EU to the people was less about democracy, however, and more about appeasing the right-wing Euro-sceptic elements within his own party, that have been festering for decades, and heading-off splits in the Conservative vote from UKIP. The people, albeit by a slender majority, have now given their decision, rejecting the views of the  ‘experts’, such as the OECD and IMF, who said this would be bad for the economy and jobs. It was Michael Gove who said, ‘People in this country have had enough of experts’, and it would seem, on that score at least, he was more than half right. Like so much of politics, this has been about feeling and sentiment as much as facts and argument.

There is no doubt that some in the Leave campaign, with immigration its strongest suit, played on many people’s fears and anxieties. Right-wing populism thrives by blaming the ‘outsider’ for problems, the roots of which lie elsewhere: in the lack of investment in housing and public services wrought by austerity and in a neo-liberal growth model that generates profound social inequalities and deprivation. Such populism is a cancer that tears at the very heart of an open, tolerant society, one which history teaches us we should all be deeply afraid of.

Perhaps this is why many are so worried about the visceral tone of the debate and what has been unleashed in the process. And what has been unleashed? If the Brexit vote illustrates anything, it is perhaps the deep sense of alienation and abandonment felt among the most deprived and marginalised sections of the white working class, abandoned for decades by the Conservative and New Labour projects. Some deprived neighbourhoods were, it would seem, literally no-go areas for Labour campaigners for Remain. The argument had been lost a long time ago. Many were fed up with ‘establishment politics’, and who could blame them?

And so a process of healing a divided nation begins. How will such anger and despair, unleashed by this referendum, be dealt with? If one question remains, when all the dust has settled, it is this: can Britain, outside of the European Union, forge a progressive growth model that can reduce inequality and work for all its people, in particular those who feel their voice has been marginalised for too long?  We can only hope that such anger can be channelled into progressive politics and there is the intellectual capacity, will and optimism to do so.

Jonathan Payne is Reader in Employment Studies at De Montfort University and a member of CURA (Centre for Urban Research on Austerity) as well as CROWE (Contemporary Research on Organisations, Work and Employment.

The Coming Fight Over Brexit

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Professor Jonathan Davies, director of CURA, offers his thoughts on Brexit.

After yesterday’s staggering Brexit vote, it is impossible to predict what lies ahead. It is clear, however, that responsibility lies at the feet of both the British and European elite. By a thousand cuts it has immiserated, marginalised, impoverished and fragmented working class communities, some of which voted by overwhelming majorities to leave the EU. It can be no surprise in these dire conditions that resentment is boiling across the continent. This vote is a seismic moment in the rolling crisis of Britain’s post-war economic and political system. It is a moment in the rolling crisis of Europe, where vast territories have been laid waste by waves of crisis and austerity.

For many people, the grinding realities of austerity and the lack of hope for the future manifest in the form of virulent anti-immigration sentiments. The politics of despair are rife. Fears have been successfully channelled by the ugly dog-whistle politics of the leave campaigns. This is extremely damaging, but there is nothing new about it. Provoking racism to deflect attention from their own actions has long been a tried and tested policy of right wing elites. And it can be a lot easier to blame other people at the bottom of the heap than to hold the powerful to account.

Yet nationalist resentment is not the only story. Many working class people reject racism – especially in London. The people of Spain and Greece show that a politics of hope is possible in their struggles against austerity, despite the awful conditions they face. Like it or not, the struggle ahead will be over the meaning of Brexit. This is a huge challenge for people who believe in solidarity, open borders, love the diversity immigration brings and reject the delusion that stopping immigration will mean more jobs for “British workers”. At its height in the early 2000s, the anti-globalisation movement rallied around the slogan “another world is possible”. Our common challenge is to find a way of making it happen.

 Jonathan Davies is Professor of Critical Policy Studies and Director of the Centre for Urban Research on Austerity at De Montfort Univiersity.

Looking (and thinking and acting) beyond Brexit

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CURA’s Adam Fishwick offers his thoughts on Brexit, in response to Jonathan Davies’s previous post.

Brexit can only be understood as a victory for the Right. The Leave campaign was no anti-establishment revolt. Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Ian Duncan Smith, Nigel Farage, Rupert Murdoch – for all their posturing in standing up to the bureaucrats in Brussels or confronting the entrenched political elites of Westminster, represent nothing more than a nastier, more virulent, more insidious strain of that which they outwardly claim to be confronting.

But there is an anger at the established political and economic forces that occupy the institutions that govern us. As stated by Jonathan Davies, the marginalisation, fragmentation, and ongoing immiseration of many in the UK (and across Europe) is the real issue facing us today – and it is here that there has been, and continues to be, a real revolt.

The Right have succeeded in making this into a narrow nationalist, anti-immigration, and oftentimes racist response to the deepening impact of neoliberal policies and practices that are the real cause of the vast inequities of wealth and power around us. Mobilising all too familiar tropes against those outside and appealing to a nationalist rhetoric that offers little of substance but harks back to a vague, semi-existent past has filled the symbolic gap left by the retreat of social democracy into the comforts of the political power and institutional prestige.

Worryingly we are already seeing the emboldening of the far Right through this discourse. Some of the early congratulations for Brexit came from Marie Le Pen, Geert Wilders, the AfD, and the Northern League and the recent presence of groups like Britain First in Leicester in the previous weeks show the comfort such groups have found in this campaign.

The answer to this, however, does not come from a decrying of the ‘false consciousness’ of the working class or to anger at their betrayal on the part of those supposed to represent an alternative vision that they have clearly long abandoned. In The Communist Hypothesis, Alain Badiou argues that such pronouncements provide an inadequate and counter-productive starting point for confronting the entrenched relations of power that have led us to this point and which are continuing to set the course as we begin to move beyond Brexit.

So, perhaps instead, it is time to embrace the emerging new contentious politics and to replicate a break with what Badiou called “the set of parliamentary political personnel that proclaim that they are the only ones equipped to bear the general consequences of a singular political movement” (149). And to do this there is a pressing need to articulate and begin to embody a vision beyond austerity and beyond neoliberalism, political forms that lie at the heart of the wider disenfranchisement and marginalisation seized upon by Brexit. From post-work utopias to horizontalist political spaces and experiments, some of the work in envisioning and constructing new political forms has been started already, but there remains much more to be done and a much longer struggle ahead.

Dr Adam Fishwick is Lecturer in Urban Studies and Public Policy and a member of Centre for Urban Research on Austerity at De Montfort University

Workshop: Local Economic Development and Skills Under Austerity

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In this post, Jonathan Payne reports back on a two day workshop on local economic development (LED) and skills policy under austerity held by the Centre for Urban Research on Austerity (CURA) in May.

The workshop brought together leading UK academics in the areas of LED, governance and skills to debate the changing institutional landscape around LED in England and the opportunities and constraints afforded by policy commitments to ‘localism’. This afforded a rare opportunity for academics interested in economic geography, local governance and skills to come together and discuss how the ‘localisation’ agenda is playing out in practice.

As Ewart Keep argued, for the last thirty years skills policy in England has tended to be a national project, focused on generalised workforce upskilling in pursuit of government targets. With government now promising to devolve more of the adult skills budget to local areas, there are questions around how much autonomy local areas will have and what level of resource they might draw on. Furthermore, past experience would suggest that a narrow focus upon education and training, or boosting the supply of skills, runs up against problems of weak employer demand for skill, linked to the way many firms in the UK compete, design jobs and manage staff. This is reflected in a high proportion of low skill, low wage jobs compared with many other advanced European countries, relatively low productivity, and problems of ‘over-qualification’ and ‘under-utilisation of skills’ within the workplace. As the UK Commission for Employment and Skills has argued, there are limits to what boosting skills supply can achieve on its own without wider measures to influence the ‘demand side’. The latter requires effective measures such as industrial policy, economic development and business improvement to grow the proportion of high skill jobs and upgrade the skill content of work more generally. Skills policy might work better if integrated and joined up with such activity.

The role of local enterprise partnerships, city-deals and combined authorities is clearly of relevance here for a number of reasons. First, government is promising to ‘empower’ local communities through these mechanisms to drive LED. Second, skills policy is being localised and skills often figure prominently within this agenda. These claims are controversial, particularly in terms of how ‘real’ localism is at time of funding cuts. However, localism is also a moving picture, and if skills and economic development are to be integrated as part of a more holistic approach, then this is one of the few areas where we might look for examples of progress (or not).

Many issues came to the fore during these discussions: the tendency for LED governance to bounce back and forth between different scales and for policy to ‘keep failing forwards’; the uneven capacity of LEPs; the role of power in devolving ‘risk’; the need to understand how local actors comprehend their situation and what motivates their engagement; the tendency for policy to eschew interventions inside the ‘black box’ of the firm; and the question of what ‘localism’ can tell us about the ‘neo-liberal state’ in a period of crisis management and the narratives it constructs. What is clear, however, is that research will be better placed to address such issues where academics work across disciplinary boundaries. LED, governance and skills are an example of one such interface where collaboration is likely to prove particularly fruitful.

Jonathan Payne is Reader in Employment Studies at De Montfort University and a member of CURA (Centre for Urban Research on Austerity) as well as CROWE (Contemporary Research on Organisations, Work and Employment

Workshop: Resistance and Alternatives to Austerity

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Adam Fishwick and Heather Connolly report back on a workshop they convened for CURA on Resistance and Alternatives to Austerity.

On 18th May CURA hosted our one day workshop on ‘Resistance and Alternatives to Austerity’ engaging with a range of distinctive – and innovative – strategies that have emerged in Europe and Latin America that are challenging the dominant turn to austerity. Papers delivered during the panel sessions were grouped around three key themes on workplace occupations, migrant workers’ protest, and alternative ‘grassroots’ mobilisation. The day ended with keynote presentations from Lisa McKenzie and Phoebe Moore that illustrated the sheer range of opposition that the workshop presenters touched upon – from working class neighbourhoods in the UK to the tensions over technology in the workplace.

The panels generated lively debate from participants and speakers (some of which was broadcast on social media via #CURAresistance) with debates centring on the viability of bottom-up forms of resistance, on the role of institutional actors and the state, and the possibilities for developing new subjectivities and forms of agency.

In the first panel, David Bailey and Saori Shibata presented findings from their research in ‘low-resistance’ societies of the UK and Japan and argued that only with what they termed ‘militant refusal’ were austerity measures successfully challenged and reversed. Lucia Pradella discussed the centrality of new migrants in resistance within and against the traditional trade unions in the logistics sector in Italy – highlighting the dynamism of new actors in a sector crucial to global capitalism. Nick Kiersey, finally, drawing on his research into anti-austerity protests in Ireland challenged us to think about the possibilities of developing a ‘left governmentality’ in the ‘slow exit’ from neoliberalism and austerity.

In the second panel, Heather Connolly returned to the theme of migrant workers within and against traditional trade unions in France, presenting her research on the Sans Papiers movement in France and the innovative models of resistance it adopted. Adam Fishwick argued that, despite the return of a bleak period of austerity in Argentina, resistance could still be found in what Ana Dinerstein has termed the ‘concrete utopias’ in the country. Focusing on the recuperated factories, he showed how they offered a distinct alternative beyond the constraints of state. To close the panels, Stuart Price presented some of his findings of a workplace occupation in Spain, discussing tensions between the closing of space for protest and the potential/limitations of new, seemingly spontaneous forms of resistance.

Lisa McKenzie – alongside Stuart Price – brought a powerful visual component to the day, combining images collected in the course of her fieldwork and everyday life in Nottingham and London with ethnographic narratives on working class life under austerity. Her keynote presentation demonstrated the lived realities of austerity from navigating unemployment, to homelessness, to the pervasive class stigmatisation that, in her words, ‘does the work of the policies of austerity’. Running through her talk was a sense of the need to think concretely about the impacts of austerity in order to confront it – to engage directly with the lived, everyday impacts of the assault on the most marginalised and stigmatised communities and individuals. Closing her presentation, two resonant images of young working class men on top of the roof of an elite private school in Nottingham during the 2011 riots and a homeless man under a new luxury development in London neatly captured this sentiment.

Phoebe Moore took us in a different, but related, direction with a vision of the new workplace and the role of technology in reinforcing the lived conditions of austerity, but also in potentially offering ways to confront and resist in uniquely innovative ways. In her presentation, the new techniques in the measurement and management of working life – from worn technologies to new monitoring and surveillance devices – were shown to be a central component of the micro-level practices overseeing workplaces across a range of sectors. But her work also highlighted the means by which this key component of the new discipline of austerity can be confronted. Technology – as much as it represents a mechanism of control in the workplace – was also shown to provide mechanisms for overcoming that control. From the everyday challenging of its use in the workplace, to re-purposing it in practice, to the development of more organised forms of resistance, the potential for subversion was clear.

Overall, the presentations and discussions throughout the day made clear that if austerity is to proceed, it will not continue unchallenged. Drawing on research and expertise in a variety of settings and contexts, the speakers and participants offered a clear sense that the precarious, impoverished futures proposed and practiced by advocates of austerity are not the only future available. Moving forward, the plan from this workshop is to develop a published collection of the papers that consolidates these themes of resistance to the increasingly pervasive practices of resistance, with the aim of continuing collaboration in to resisting austerity.

Dr. Adam Fishwick is Lecturer in Urban Studies and Public Policy and Dr. Heather Connolly Senior Lecturer in Human Resource Management at De Montfort University, both are core members of CURA.

Austerity Urbanism – Scotland Style?

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In today’s post Annette Hastings discusses ‘austerity urbanism’ in the Scottish context.

It’s hard to counter the view that contemporary austerity is being realised to a large extent in and through what is happening in cities. Jamie Peck developed the ‘austerity urbanism’ thesis to explain the dimensions and significance of austerity in US cities. He argued – in a nutshell – that in the US some of the worst impacts of austerity were targeted on city governments and that, by targeting cities, austerity was effectively being targeted on the most vulnerable. Recent research suggests that the thesis developed for the US, holds for England. It confirms that the unprecedented cuts to local government budgets have impacted most heavily on poor cities. It also suggests that despite the intention of many city governments to shelter the poor and marginalised from the worst effects of austerity cuts, that cuts were beginning to harm the services relied on these groups – such as housing, social care, social work and advice services. The work also showed that it was poorer people and places that suffered more when cuts were made to the ‘universal’ services used by the broader population such as libraries, leisure centres and street cleansing.

But does austerity urbanism hold in Scotland? To the same degree? In the same kind of ways? Anti-austerity rhetoric and a sense of resistance is palpable in Scotland. It comes from politicians, from urban managers, from the mainstream media and from citizens and civil society. But does this lead to a distinctive austerity urbanism – Scotland style?  Some differences do stand out.

The Scottish Government has had less of a tendency than its Westminster counterpart to try to protect some public services while sacrificing others to the worst of austerity cuts. So whereas in England, local government has been subjected to much higher rates of cut than some other services such as Health, giving flesh to the austerity urbanism thesis, in Scotland cuts have been shared more equally across public services. While Scottish councils have experienced  big reductions in what they have to spend on key services – an 11% real terms reduction between 2011 and 2015  (which equates to about £100 per head of population) –  this is not as severe a picture as in England, where the reduction was on average about twice as big. However, this sense of protection in Scottish local government relative to England has now come to an end, with a much more severe local government settlement in place for the current financial year – with Glasgow City Council, for example,  facing a real terms cut of over £63million, and Edinburgh and other urban councils implementing cuts of £30million and more.

The targeting of poor cities for grant cuts has not been as stark in Scotland as in England either. Poorer councils have lost a little bit more than better off ones and, like England, there is a post-industrial and urban skew to cuts, but in Scotland these patterns are more to do with population loss than the policy design. It is important to note though that historically in Scotland, the deprivation premium built into the local government finance system to compensate more disadvantaged councils for higher levels of need was historically less generous in Scotland than in England. That situation has been reversed since the onset of austerity.

But despite these differences, it is also clear is that austerity in Scotland has been harsher than it needed to be. Since 1999, the Scottish Parliament has had the power to vary the rate of income tax by 3p in the pound – a power which has never been used despite the anti-austerity rhetoric of successive Scottish Governments. Moreover, a new Scottish Rate of Income Tax has been in place since April 2016, giving the Scottish Parliament even more capacity to vary levels of income tax. In early 2016, the SNP Government proposed (and had agreed) a Budget in which a clear commitment not to vary income tax levels was made, a position maintained in their Party’s manifesto in the recent May 2016 Scottish Parliamentary elections.  And the ‘winners’ of these elections, the SNP alongside a resurgent Scottish Conservative Party, stood alone amongst mainstream parties during the election campaign in that they did not argue for increased personal tax rates to ‘pay for public services’ . This would suggest that it is not only in Scottish polity that the desire to counter austerity agendas with increased taxation is controversial, but that this agenda is also controversial with the Scottish public.

So yes, we can perhaps detect some ‘Scottish style’ aspects of austerity urbanism, but the extent to which these differences are durable and more than rhetorical is debatable.

Annette Hastings is Professor of Urban Studies at the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow

Governing Austerity in Athens

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In today’s post our colleagues Ioannis Chorianopoulos and Naya Tselepi report the findings from the exploratory research in Athens, carried out as part of the collaborative governance under austerity project, sponsored by the Economic and Social Research Council as part of its Urban Transformations Network, and led by Prof. Jonathan Davies.

Local authorities in Greece have limited collaborative governance experience, despite persisting national authority attempts towards this direction during the last three decades (Chorianopoulos, 2012).  A legacy of authoritarian administration for the most part of the twentieth century and clientelistic politics since return to democracy (1974), arrested the development of local relational dynamics, shaping instead a centralized governance mode heavily dependent on the national level.  More recently, formal collaborative responsibilities in EU Structural Funds were met by local authorities halfheartedly.  Regulations were followed to the letter in order to avoid penalties but collaboration was largely symbolic, consisting of roundtables in which local socio-economic groups and organisations were consulted to provide their informed consent to municipal proposals.  Examples of more dynamic collaborative stances did surface, but they were treated in the literature as contextually defined responses, challenging a centralized type of administration.  It is in this frame that the City of Athens was approached in an attempt to explore the traits of collaboration, this time in austerian conditions.

Meanwhile, the latest local authority Act (2010) attempted to infuse a collaborative logic to local affairs by obliging municipalities to set up new participatory platforms, and by widening their degree of discretion to launch partnership schemes with local businesses and civil society groups.  Our initial “access point” to the research field was the “Deliberation Committee”, a mandatory collaborative governance initiative foreseen in the local authority Act.  Concurrently, we also investigated municipal mobilization in other policy areas, as it was becoming known that the City Hall is actively initiating collaborative schemes.   As preliminary research suggests, mandatory schemes followed the pre-austerity route of rubber stamping City Hall plans.  The volume and the traits of collaborative schemes launched by the municipality on its own initiative, however, defied expectations.  The gravity of the sovereign debt crisis and the impact of concomitant austerity measures on municipal finances and local socio-economic realities were key to this development.

Austerity and social need

Contractionary fiscal policy preoccupations shifted the attention of the national authorities to the local level, seen as a tier capable of absorbing a share of cuts to public spending.  Faced with reduced central government grants and real falls in tax revenues, the municipality was forced to reduce its budget by over 20 per cent since the onset of austerity (see Figure 1).

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Figure 1: City of Athens: Overall Budget by Fiscal Year (2010-2016). Source: (City of Athens, 2016)

Meanwhile, the share of Athenians whose equivalent disposable income fell below the poverty threshold has more than doubled, reaching 26,1 per cent, while a further 8,1 per cent of the population experienced severe material deprivation.  Consequently, the latest census results registered a 16,9 per cent decrease of the city’s total population, amounting to a decline of 133.336 people due to falling birth rates and almost no net immigration.  The steep rise in municipal unemployment and poverty figures, and the clearly defined population decline trend, suggests that it is in the city that “austerity bites” (Peck, 2012).

Collaborative shift

The City of Athens responded to austerity-stemming impasses via the launch of collaborative governance initiatives.  Prominent examples of such schemes include, amongst others:

  • Rethink and Reactivate, a physical intervention project in the city centre, organized and funded by the Onassis Public Benefit Foundation.
  • INNOVATHENS, a public-private consortium that supports start-ups in the tech sector, engaging six associations of IT firms and co-funded Samsung.
  • Resilience, an attempt to define and address the key challenges the city is facing, guided by 100RC – a Rockefeller urban network.
  • synAthina, a new municipal unit facilitating community groups to implement and communicate their activities, funded by “Bloomberg Philanthropies”.
  • Solidarity Hub, a social assistance centre for 8000 registered people that face severe poverty problems. The scheme is funded by EEA grants, obliging City Hall to collaborate with NGOs.

The repositioning of the local governance centre of gravity towards collaborative grounds underscores a profound departure from the pre-austerity stance of centralized administration and limited policy-making interaction with the market and civil society.  Currently, almost all municipal policy areas engage sponsors, donors and partner groups, including community groups and activists.  In the social policy field, in particular, the City of Athens endorsed an overtly “enabling” role, facilitating NGOs to pursuit funding opportunities on its behalf.  As a result, social policy goals for the 2015-2019 period were fashioned on an ad hoc basis and appear in the respective blueprint underscored by the “subject to funding availability” annotation (City of Athens, 2015: 5).

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Food bags awaiting claimant citizens in the “solidarity hub”.

Informal collaborative vehicles and adversarial stances

Our next goal in this attempt to approach the changing matrices of  Athenian urban politics, will be to map and investigate key examples from the variety of grassroots collaborative initiatives that have sprung up in the city during the last years.  Cases in point include the large number of complementary currency systems and time banks, social pharmacies, medical centers, soup kitchens and farmers’ markets, all organized at neighborhood level by spontaneously formed solidarity groups.  It is the perceptions of austerity and collaboration of activists participating in this movement that we aim to explore.  Their degree of engagement in the corresponding municipal programmes, and their views on the collaborative example pursuit by the City will also be examined.  Municipality respondents reflected eloquently on this issue:

“I mean, you have the top down kind of consultation that most countries like the UK have gotten really good at doing.  So they know how to talk and they also have a strong civil society. Which we didn’t have. But then […] what you have here is bottom up collaboration.  You know what I mean? In a network kind of way. …this is the new organizing pattern. Right? … but there is no conversation with the top.  And the question is; does there need to be conversation with the top?” (Athens-UP2-F).

Dr Ioannis Chorianopoulos is Associate Professor and Naya Tselepi a PhD candidate at the Department of Geography at the University of the Aegean.