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Participatory Practice
more interested in children as future workers than in happy, healthy childhoods, saying that we do not lift the poor ‘by hammering the people who are successful’! (Sayer, 2016: 164). Blair was a warmonger. He allied with then president George W. Bush on the US’s ‘war on terror’ to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, despite widespread public dissent. In fact, during his first five years, he took British troops into battle five times, more than any other prime minister in British history. This was to be his downfall, but his legacy remains that, on Tony Blair’s watch, ‘the top 1% carried on taking more and more each year as compared to the year before, just as fast as they had done during the Thatcher years’ (Dorling, 2018a: 18). The naivety of New Labour under Tony Blair (1997–2007) was based on a belief that neoliberalism could bring about the end of class, a new classless society, based on meritocracy. This completely missed the point: ‘neoliberalism is itself a class project: an ideology which aims to restore and consolidate class power, under the veil of the rhetoric of individualism, choice, freedom, mobility and national security’ (Tyler: 2013: 7). This decoupling of class inequalities directly led to the abjectification of the ‘chav’ so firmly stitched into media ridicule by comedians David Walliams and Matt Lucas with their representation of Vicky Pollard as a feckless, irresponsible, ignorant, teenage mother to be both feared and ridiculed. Tony Blair, far from his promise, brought in a new political formula in the name of socialism: ‘a neoliberal perceptual frame through which to perceive “the masses” as an underclass of people cut off from society’s mainstream, without any sense of shared purpose’ (Blair, 1997, cited in Tyler, 2013: 176). No wonder Margaret Thatcher described Tony Blair as her biggest success! Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the action of human beings. (Mandela, 2005)
A decade of ‘austerity’ Britain The general election of 2010 brought an inconclusive result. The ‘Big Society’ was the platform on which David Cameron ran for office and became the driver of the coalition between the Conservative party and the Liberal Democrats. The ‘small state’, so we were told, was about handing over power to communities and local people, an act of participatory democracy and community empowerment. Nothing could have been further from the truth. This was a smokescreen for ‘austerity’ measures, absolving state responsibilities for the poorest in society by making the poor responsible for their own poverty while dismantling public sector provision. It was a pincer movement. Political persuasion was applied, Gramsci-style. David Cameron was an ‘enthusiastic purveyor of the austerity narrative’ (O’Hara, 2020: 138). This independently wealthy, public school educated, White, male Oxford University graduate used a ‘toxic narrative’ based on ‘“troubled” families who were the dangerous zombie vanguard of an out-of52
