Work and Employment in State-Citizen Relations in England 1880-2007
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Loughborough University Institutional Repository Towards an enabling state? Work and employment in state-citizen relations in England 1880-2007 This item was submitted to Loughborough University's Institutional Repository by the/an author. Additional Information: • A Doctoral Thesis. Submitted in partial fullment of the requirements for the award of Doctor of Philosophy of Loughborough University. Metadata Record: https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/2134/13651 Publisher: c Michael Fitchett Please cite the published version. This item was submitted to Loughborough University as a PhD thesis by the author and is made available in the Institutional Repository (https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/) under the following Creative Commons Licence conditions. For the full text of this licence, please go to: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ I • Lo':'ghb,orough • Uruvers1ty University Library Author/Filing Title ...... ... f..!.T<;-..ti ..€!. ..! . .................. ........................................................................................,- Class Mark .................................................................... Please note that fines are charged on ALL overdue items. TOWARDS AN ENABLING STATE? Work and Employment in State-Citizen Relations in England 1880-2007 By Michael Fitchett Doctoral thesis Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of PhD of Loughborough University Spring 2011 © Michael Fitchett 1 Abstract This study represents the intellectual biography of an idea. That idea is the Welfare to Work regime of the New Labour government of Tony Blair over the period 1997 to 2007. This Welfare to Work regime is situated within a concept of an Enabling State developed in speeches by New Labour Ministers, particularly Blair, Gordon Brown, David Blunkett and the brothers Ed and David Miliband. The study elaborates the concept of 'enabling', traces its origins back, partly to the debates at Putney at the end of the English Civil War, partly through working-class history, and partly through the transformation of Gladstonian Liberalism wrought by New Liberals such as T.H. Green, L.T. Hobhouse and J.A. Hobson between 1880 and 1914. lt will argue that New Labour can be understood only by reference back to these origins. The study will also define the Enabling State by defining its opposite, the Disabling State created, albeit unintentionally, by the Conservatives between 1979 and 1997. The study employs a subset of Discourse Analysis, Speech Act Theory, to study the Labour speeches, since there has yet not been elaborated a 'theory of the Enabling State'. A participant observation is also employed to discuss how 'enabling' works at the level of individuals. The study is an attempt to 'read history backwards' as it were: to define the enabling state as it exists now, at least at the level of rhetoric, and then, as practical history, to trace lead ideas back to their sources, and to find antecedents: not cause and effect, for that is too difficult, but to find practices, traditions, concepts and discourse on which New Labour have been able to draw. This study will argue that, far from abandoning traditional Labour values, New Labour has found new ways to realise them. Key words: Citizenship, employment, Labour Party, employability, New Deal, welfare to work 2 Acknowledgements Thanks, first of all, of course, to my Supervisor, Dr Monica Threlfall, without whom this thesis simply would not have happened. She has guided me, mentored me, taught me, forced me to censor the more extravagant claims, and, since I have been a part-timer, done all this over seven long years, above and beyond the call of duty. That she has put up with me and my unacademic nature all this time is something I can but admire. Second, to everybody in the Department at PI RES. Writing a PhD can be a lonely business, and to all those who have helped in multifarious ways, whether serving on panels, or simply being there when I wanted to talk, and being willing to listen, and making a lonely experience bearable. Not in any particular order, Mike, Mark, Jeremy, Paul, Maurice, Oily, Dave, Martin, The Linguists, Matt, Kerry, Bezen, Elena, Michael, Natalie (dear Natalie). Not forgetting Pauline, Audrey, Dawn and Frances, without whom I doubt whether the Department would function at all. If there is anybody I have missed out, Sorry! Thirdly, to the staff and management of Training Co, who authorised and facilitated the participant observation in Chapter Five, and to the learners who provided the material. it is often said that the best way to learn anything is to try to teach it, and I think I learned at least as much from those learners as they learned from me. Most of all, of course, Mum, Dad and my older brother Dave, an engineer, not an academic. My Dad did not live to see me return to the academic world. He was a man of little formal education, but he raised three sons, and took care that I never knew the struggles and hardship he went through to get me into, and to stay at Grammar School. I got my love of reading and words from my Mum, who was also a woman of little formal education. She did live to see me come back to the academic world, and made the MA possible, though she did not live to see the end of this project. I am not a religious man, but I would like to think that when people depart from this world, there is somewhere for the warm people, and somewhere for the cold people and that wherever the warm people go, Mum and Dad are looking down on me and saying, "Yes, lad, you did all right." 3 ------------·--- TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Abbreviations ................................................................................. 7 INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................. 8 METHODOLOGICAL NOTES .................................................................... 21 CONCLUSION ........................................................................................... 30 CHAPTER ONE- THEORIES OF CITIZENSHIP AND WORK. A REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE IN RELATION TO ENGLAND ......................................... 31 1. INTRODUCTION .................................................................................... 31 2. CITIZENSHIP ......................................................................................... 36 2.1 Varieties of Citizenship ..................................................................... 37 2.2. The Civic Republican Tradition of Citizenship ................................. 41 2.3. ·The Liberal Democratic Tradition ..................................................... 43 3. CONSIDERATIONS BEARING ON THE CONCEPT OF 'WORK' ......... 53 3.1 Sociology and Psychology ................................................................ 54 3.2 'Work' in the discipline of Economics ................................................ 60 3.3 Workers as subjects: the concept of self-realisation ......................... 65 3.4 Summary .......................................................................................... 69 4. POST 1992 SCHOLARSHIP .................................................................. 71 5. CONCLUSIONS ..................................................................................... 76 1. INTRODUCTION .................................................................................... 79 2. THE ENABLING STATE IN THE VIEWS OF TONY BLAIR AND GOVERNMENT MINISTERS, 1997-2007 ............................................... 81 2.1 Brown lays the foundations .............................................................. 84 2.2 Blair develops the concept ............................................................... 90 2.3 Brown defines 'Liberty' ..................................................................... 98 2.4 Blair's State of the Nation Lectures ................................................ 102 3. THE THEORY OF THE ENABLING STATE ........................................ 109 3.1 The Australian Experience ............................................................. 112 4. THE IMPLICATIONS OF 'ENABLING' FOR EMPLOYMENT POLICY 119 4.1 Government Departments and Enabling ........................................ 119 4.2 The Academic discourse of Enabling ............................................. 122 4.3 Skills ............................................................................................... 126 5. CONCLUSIONS ................................................................................... 130 CHAPTER THREE: ANTECEDENTS OF ENABLING STATE THINKING ... 133 1. INTRODUCTION .................................................................................. 133 2. FORERUNNERS. PRACTICAL AND INTELLECTUAL CURRENTS 1647 - 1880 ....................................................................................................... 135 2.1 The Levellers and the Putney Debate ............................................ 135 2.2 The labouring classes and citizenship ............................................ 137 2.3 The labouring classes and the duty to work ................................... 138 2.4 Working-class voices ...................................................................... 143 4 3. THE WORKING CLASSES AND STATE WELFARE IN ENGLAND 1880 -1914 ...................................................................................................... 147 3.1 Support for the unemployed ........................................................... 150 4. BEVERIDGE AND AN ATTEMPT TO FILL A GAP