Introduction

If you were trying to characterise developments in social policy in recent years, the chances are that you might select a series of key events and trends to define the attitudes of policy makers and political narratives. The list might include the febrile Brexit debate regarding controlling our borders (HM Government, 2018), the Grenfell Tower tragedy (Davies et al, 2017), the Black Lives Matter movement (Dray, 2021), COVID-19 (Nazroo and Becares, 2021), continued welfare retrenchment (Edmiston and Thakkar, 2021) and the Windrush scandal (Williams, 2020) partly inspired by Theresa May's ‘hostile environment’ (EHRC, 2020) as an intent to delineate between citizens and aliens. While the inventory might not be definitive, these events would feature on many people's lists. At the heart of this list lies the portrayal of a modern Britain as increasingly divided and polarised, not just across class and income lines but also in terms of race and ethnicity.

At the heart of the Brexit debate, one of the most divisive periods of British politics, was the vision of a Britain that had become lost in a ‘global hegemon of the capitalist world economy’ and a ‘deep-rooted nostalgia for the British imperial project’ (Virdee and McGeever, 2018: 1805, 1809) where racisms continue to be a part of British values (Patel and Connelly, 2019). While the creation of a ‘hostile environment’ may have begun as a statement of intent to tackle illegal immigration, it says a great deal about British political narrative that it so easily spread to include a problematisation of immigration in general. The fact that the term ‘hostile environment’ is not formally included in white papers nor in policy documents (Griffiths and Yeo, 2021) illustrates the potentially nebulous nature of the concept. Furthermore, an intersectionality of race and class is demonstrated in the fact that most of the Grenfell Tower fatalities were of minority ethnic people, and the way in which COVID-19 has disproportionately affected the Black and minoritised population (Otu et al, 2020; Nazroo and Becares, 2021).

With this in mind, it might be presumed that race and ethnicity are key elements within a discipline such as Social Policy, which has a rich history of studying and analysing inequality.

Introduction

The previous chapter suggested that citizenship refers to a status which brings with it certain rights and duties. At its core, the conceptualisation of citizenship recognises Lewis's (1998: 104) suggestion of three relevant elements of citizenship intimately connected to social welfare provision:

• 1. citizenship provides a way of recognising the link between the state and the individual;

• 2. citizenship implies membership in a community, which in turn highlights inclusion and exclusion criteria; and

• 3. citizenship is a social status that allows people to make a claim against state services.

Furthermore, as noted in the previous chapter, it also incorporates the suggestion by Dean and Melrose (1999) that citizenship has been presented as a ‘totalising’ concept, often gender neutral, essentially universal and ahistorical. Citizenship, especially within the UK context, has developed a particular masculine, White, able-bodied and heterosexual assumption about citizens which obscures the broader diversity of citizens. While this chapter does not seek to be comprehensive in scope, it focuses on the tension between welfare provision and diverse citizens within the UK. As such, attention is given to the implicit, and often explicit, framing of citizenship within social policies, in order to problematise citizen interaction with state support and administration which follows in the later chapters. Complementing sources that contextualise broader philosophical debates (see Faulks, 2000; Lister, 2010, 2020; Dwyer, 2010; Edmiston, 2018), this chapter provides detail on the historical development of citizenship as a concept to underpin subsequent discussion in this book.

As such, this chapter sets out the emergence of imagined communities which have played a central role in the formation of citizenship and the limitations and rearticulations of citizenship which can be drawn out of theorisation and debate regarding citizenship. We give credence to Hoffman's (2004) suggestion that citizenship is a momentum concept: an ever-unfolding and ever-changing term that is reworked towards increasingly progressive ends. Illustrating the benefits of this momentum concept, subsequent chapters in this book draw out research insights across a diverse range of citizens’ engagement with various aspects of the welfare state.

Famously, at the start of the Communist Manifesto in 1848, Marx observed ‘all that is solid melts into air’. While many may criticise some elements of the Manifesto, or even disagree with the underpinning sentiments, few can argue with Marx's observation that our social, political and economic worlds are in constant change. It is tempting to think of welfare as having a monolithic permanence within our world that is ever-present and unchanging. However, this book further reinforces the fact that welfare is an ever-changing entity that is shaped by the political vagaries of governments and has at many times been used as a method of gaining political capital. In this respect, welfare has been shown to focus on meeting the needs we cannot meet ourselves, such as health, housing, social care and education. However, this also goes beyond the boundaries of personal benefits to also recognise the social benefits of welfare and the social outcomes of citizenship and inclusion.

Similarly, the book has demonstrated the changing nature of society and our social relations. We live in a time when there is increasing awareness of diversity within society, whether that be in terms of gender, sexuality, ‘race’, disability, lifestyle or heritage. This is not to say that such factors and choices are new, in fact quite the opposite. However, what is interesting about this book is that the themes covered reflect a post-industrial representation of diversity and, in doing so, a new canvas upon which economic and social exclusion are portrayed. We find ourselves in an age when such diversity is more recognised and, on the surface, more accepted. It is unlikely that this book would have been written in this way 20 or 30 years ago.

In recognising a post-industrial social diversity, the book has afforded an opportunity to pause and consider the extent to which such diversity is genuinely accepted, let alone celebrated. Contemporary Western society is often presented as one of equality and tolerance, implicitly inferring acceptance and even the legal protection of diversity. And yet, the preceding chapters have begun to challenge the reality of this assumption, a view that is supported in increasing levels of reported hate crime. With the annual data published each March, the number of hate crimes has increased from 42,225 in 2013 to 155,841 in 2022.

Citizenship is closely tied to welfare reforms, providing access to various protections and promoting a sense of unity, social justice and equality in order to enhance state welfare provisions. This establishes citizenship as a crucial element enabling individuals to claim protection from the state against collective harms, which are often rooted in industrialisation and societal changes. Citizenship has become an increasingly contested concept. The term can invoke a sense of belonging to a particular community, a particular society as an equal member, and entitlement to the rights and protections that come with being a ‘citizen’. It is associated with a system of legal, political and social practices that offer a series of rights, protections and forms of support and redress that can be, and often are, denied to noncitizens. It can also be considered as participatory, including the acts through which we claim citizenship status. Fundamentally, much welfare provision is predicated upon the status of being a citizen, the social rights this confers and the access to welfare support that ensues.

For the starting point of this book and its study of welfare, citizenship can be understood as a way of defining belonging and, by default, a way of defining the characteristics which shape inclusion and exclusion. Although Chapter 2 will examine the concept in more detail, for now the term can be considered crudely not only in terms of nationality, but also in more nuanced social terms of ‘playing by the rules’ and maintaining ‘British values’. As the discussion will demonstrate through the account of citizenship theory and substantive chapters, such a view of citizenship is limited and problematic. It incorporates implicit assumptions and biases through its universal framing. As such, the universal notion of citizenship which helped to justify state intervention through welfare support has been seen to erase the broader diversity that significantly shapes individuals’ lives and their access to welfare support (Bhambra, 2015: 102). Welfare policies have historically made assumptions about who should receive support, such as the role of women in the family and the exclusion of people of colour from emerging welfare provisions. Prevailing societal institutions have internalised and normalised conventions that disadvantage women and racial minorities, even if they are not explicitly codified in statutes (Meer, 2020: 11).

• Aortic dissection represents the most frequent aortic catastrophe with approximately 10,000 cases annually in the United States. Dissection occurs with a primary tear of the intimal layer of the aorta and then subsequent infiltration into the media layer, creating a false lumen that may extend the entire length of the aorta.

• Propagation of the false lumen may result in obstruction of vascular branches of the aorta, leading to end organ hypoperfusion of the brain, heart, kidneys, spine or extremities.

• The location of injury (i.e., ascending versus descending aorta) predicts mortality and guides management decisions.