Radical Help
How We Can Remake the Relationship Between Us and Revolutionise the Welfare State
Hilary Cottam
Having read it
★★★★★
It lives up to its title and is worth quite a lot of stars out of five and while it (and everything else) is not perfect the experiments run and written about have and do open and allow a healthy civic and social conversation and design process that proves the potential and benefit in better and more relational and collaborative processes, spread nationally but powered regionally and locally to many of our state (and wider) systems and frameworks and day-today attitudes.
This is not a traditional process of social science research. We are not looking for statistical truth. We are looking instead for insight and for deep understanding. If most social research focuses on those who fit within the norms of a distribution curve, we try to work at the edges. We learn most from those who are ‘difficult’ like Earl, or ‘impossible’ like Ella, and also from those who, like Melvin, have overcome challenges and are doing really well. We want to learn from those who are flourishing and those who are not. We want their help, their ideas and their involve-ment. Our hypothesis is that if we can design something that works for those who are hardest to include and those from whom we have the most to learn, then we will have something that works for everyone.
Well worth your reading time and in fact, the reading time and ultimately assisting and actioning of the many clearly better, more inclusive twenty-first century societal means and methods for all by the political classes and apparent leaders; the market won’t save us but relational and collaborative attitudes and approaches can, do and will. But, like Audre Lorde is quoted in the book, those in charge at the top of an organisation (whether government, business or even charity) do not seem to like to put themselves out of a job:
[The] master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.1
A good passage
[...] The fundamental contract on which our welfare state is based – that work is always a route out of poverty – is broken.
[...]
Of course, it is the poor who are affected most by inequality and the decline in incomes. Once again, as in Beveridge’s time, decent housing and food are beyond the reach of many. Just as importantly, dignity is damaged. There is the psychic pain of feeling inferior, the frustration at not being able to stand on one’s own feet, the lack of autonomy endemic in modern low-wage work. All of these exert physical effects: they lower the immune system, make us feel ill and lead to shorter lives.29 And the ante keeps rising: the need for the right phone, the right suit, the right teeth, in order to take part socially or to succeed at a job interview.30 And while the welfare state can hand out money, it has little help to offer those facing the increasingly complex social and emotional effects of modern poverty.
[...]
Modern poverty is about money and about a breakdown in our social fabric, a rent in our relationships and our shared experience. As the work of Savage and his colleagues shows, we don’t know each other any more. This paucity of relationships affects our understanding of the world, our rich enjoyment and our material chances since now, more than ever, whom we know affects who we can be and what we can do.
In the face of these challenges, the welfare state is impotent. However good our schools, for example, study after study shows us that education can no longer compete with the structural transfers of wealth between generations.31 It is the wealth and social position of our parents that will largely determine if or where we go to university, not our own hard work. Income transfers – the benefits paid to working families – might prevent starvation, but they also build resentment. A negligible few want to actually depend on handouts. And our health services particular are strained by the effects of our anxiety, poor diets and stress-induced disease: all exacerbated by poverty. The welfare state can do little to ease either the anxiety or the material effects that modern poverty produces in our lives.
A second good passage
Martha Nussbaum says that too much government policy fails because it reflects the biases of society’s elites. In particular, she is critical that this bias leads to an over-emphasis on policies that privilege economic values and the measuring of national economic output (GDP), which is not an adequate or always useful measure as to whether a nation’s people are thriving and developing at the community level. She tells us that we must develop a granular understanding of people’s lives if we want to see how internal and external structural issues affect us, and therefore how we can address the bigger social challenges we face. When we start to make policy that is rooted in everyday lives, then we can make effective change. The capability approach is she argues, a counter-theory.4
It’s about power. Traditional welfare approaches see you as dependent according to their biases and then in response they try to give you something or do something to you, to manage your need in the best way they know how. The capability approach shifts the way support is offered. A capability cannot be done to you. I cannot give you a capability any more than I can give you a relationship, or ‘do’ health for you. Each of us must grow our capabilities with support. We need the help to help ourselves and this change in dynamic is liberating for both helper and those seeking help.
A third good passage
Economies of scale concentrate on the growth of organisational infrastructure. Economies of cooperation share a purpose and grow through people and relationships.