‘Ask not what your community can do for you’: obligations, New Labour and welfare reform

Abstract

The governing principle of New Labour's approach to social policy is the fastening of duties to rights. New Labour asserts that the bond between the taxpayer and the welfare recipient can be restored only by reconstructing welfare as a mechanism that reconnects the ‘socially excluded’ to the mainstream via ‘character’ improvement. This rights/obligations connection has been reflected in the attachment of new requirements to the receipt of cash benefits and in a preference for the provision of services in kind rather than payments in cash. In this article it is argued that New Labour's ‘one-sided’ account of the affinity between ‘givers’ and ‘receivers’—stripped of the ‘New’ Liberal notion of entitlement to a share in the ‘collective social surplus’—undermines social rights. The transfer to services ‘in kind’ restricts individual freedom and, as its neoconservative genealogy indicates, the rights/ obligations discourse opens the door to the use of stigma to enforce obligations.