A note on structure
We are Priya Lukka and Laurence Spicer -together, we collaborate in thinking about why and how sectors that resource, and draw up policy and programmes on issues affecting people’s lives need to change, organically but with an openness to dismantle themselves too. We have been humbled to work with Anu Priya and Laura Miller in producing this horizon scan of a landscape of issues affecting communities most vulnerable in the UK today, but also severely under-resourced, over-surveilled and often ignored by design.
For purposes of digestibility, we have divided our thoughts into a series of eleven horizon dynamics. The horizon exercise was carried out from August to October 2022, covering a range of issues that are relevant for the UK over the next 12 months, but also likely to be important over the next few years and probably over a longer period as government spending on public and voluntary services continues to decline.
So many of these issues are already having an impact on communities and some of them could worsen and lead to even more detrimental circumstances ahead. Each issue has not been appraised in the method of a traditional risk analysis. Communities and their changing circumstances are far more complex. Instead, we have set out a number of observations, political and policy changes and reactions and impacts from members of affected communities, working in close collaboration with Anu and Laura. These illustrations give insights into what people living at the margins of the economic system may be about to, or are already facing.
Our approach is not intended to create an artificial separation between these areas – they are all intrinsically connected. The approach of this horizon scan has been to root issues, as experienced by communities, recognising that they intersect. The issues covered are set out below, and, by no means, are exhaustive:
• Further right-wing polarising
• Fiscal deficit widening, inflationary pressures and high debt-to-GDP ratios
• Levelling up strategy
• Privatisation of public delivery
• Giant multinational monopoly corporations
• The erosion and vulnerabilisation of rights
• Promises of partial change
• Urgency and over-working culture
• The reproduction of racism in capitalist formations
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Possible horizon dynamics
The result of the UK’s Brexit Referendum in June 2016 solidified a more permanent shift to the right across a range of political issues, especially on matters relating to its borders and immigration, a key issue during the Brexit campaign. This was an inevitable outcome following the political shifts away from helping communities under persecution and experiencing exclusion that preceded the years prior to the Referendum.
Further right-wing polarising
Since Brexit, there has been a growing trend of further right-wing polarisation by governments which is evident in the culture of key institutions, election propaganda, the media which affects popular sentiments about marginalised, minorities and oppressed groups, and the way that election campaigns are won on immigration stances.
“[…] politicians are happy to adopt far-right tropes if it helps them create wedge issues to win votes. Just as the media are happy to platform the far Right to stir controversy and drive hits. The far Right doesn’t become safe just because it puts on a nice suit or describes itself as ‘anti-woke’ rather than ‘fascist’”
Sam Fowles, May 2022
While a few of the mainstream faces of the far-right, such as Trump and Bolsonaro have or may soon lose their grip on power, right-wing polarisation endures and flourishes.
Jon Allsop argues that the new Right in the UK is influenced by Trump’s toxic legacy of mainstreaming racism across the world. We see far-right political gains in Italy to Sweden and the entrenchment of Law and Justice in Poland and Fidesz in Hungary.
Indeed, many years of racist public policy and media and public hostility to immigration to the UK results in the normalisation of the UK government’s recent Migration and Economic Development Partnership.
Almost half of the people polled in a recent survey claim to support the UK government’s Rwanda immigration plans, despite seeing flaws in the policy and recognising it to be a form of modern slavery.
“They will be moving bodies across borders without their consent, under coercion in exchange for money - as the Rwandan government will receive £120 million for the pilot. This exchange of people for money is
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exactly what traffickers do. How is this in any way different, apart from the fact it has a sheen of legality?”
Professor Giorgia Dona, May 2022
Many individuals will face an unjust form of legalised deportation, despite obligations on all States, including the UK, under Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which grants the right to seek and enjoy asylum from persecution. In the case of Rwanda, there is no cap on the number of people who will be transferred.
There are also other provisions with the Nationality and Boarders Bill that put people with global heritage at risk of deportation.
“The COVID-19 pandemic has added to the desperate situation many migrant groups face, as many western democracies respond to an increase in asylum claims by (temporarily) suspending asylum protections, closing emergency relief and shelter provision and, in some instances, extending detention periods leading to the overcrowding of vulnerable adults and children in unsafe and inhumane conditions. Migration Data Portal 2021; Aal et al. 2021
“The consequence of these processes is that a strategy of attrition has become more profound, leading to hierarchies of human worth as migrant groups are denied access to core services. As a mode of social control in the welfare state context, contemporary bordering practices have served to reinforce marginalisation, dependency and destitution— processes that have intensified under a protracted state of exception which has resulted in increased use of indirect strategies of attrition, rather than direct controls through surveillance and explicit coercion.”
From: ‘The Exceptional Becomes Everyday: Border Control, Attrition and Exclusion from Within’ by Regina C Sherpa
In the proposed new Public Order Bill, there are measures to constrict and/ or criminalise transformative activism and strengthen stop and search powers. The discretion and the powers granted to police to control ‘public nuisance’ are already purposely intended to threaten those engaged in activism. The transformation of activism into criminality shrinks the limited spaces available for communities to be seen and heard.
“Policing by consent is a story this country likes to tell about itself. The reality is that policing is unaccountable, aggressive and violent. We withdraw our consent from policing, and encourage the wider public to as well”
Sisters Uncut, February 2022
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In addition, the Crime and Policing Act has brought in restrictions on protest, new powers for the police, and enables the criminalisation of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities’ way of life. The civil rights organisation Liberty has said that it will hit those communities already affected by over-policing hardest, particularly young Black men.
We are presented with a context which criminalises marginalised and racialised groups and their protesters and defenders at a time when political, economic and social factors are worsening and degrading hard-won gains. For example, the Home Office has recently reclassified modern slavery as an issue of illegal immigration. This is despite 97% of all modern slavery referrals being confirmed as genuine by the authorities. This reclassification is with an intention to further demonise racialised and minoritised people, despite the risks inherent in not seeing it as a safeguarding and protection issue. Tomoya Obokata, the UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery has said that modern forms of slavery affect minority communities in a discriminatory way.
Fiscal deficit widening, inflationary pressures and high debt-to-GDP ratios
Fiscal deficit widening, inflationary pressure and high debt-to-GDP ratios are all exacerbating an intentional deprivation and a scarcity of resources that has been going on for decades, with the signalling that there is less available for public services that should be delivered by the Government – propelling the idea that the government is too constrained to deliver essential public welfare.
This affects groups disproportionately. Cuts to public budgets, and more generally, changes in the macroeconomic environment - for example, the UK’s current double digits inflation - lead to differences in how their costs are distributed, and how this affects the stratification of groups.
In a recent report from The Runnymede Trust, ‘Falling Faster Amidst a Cost of Living Crisis: Poverty, Inequality and Ethnicity in the UK ,’ it was found that Black and minority ethnic people continue to be overrepresented in the lowest-income groups while also enduring more food insecurity, material deprivation and fuel poverty. The report goes on to link the racialised changes to the tax and social security system to the plunge into poverty with white families receiving £454 less a year on average in cash benefits than they did a decade ago. However, the number has risen to £806 less a year for Black and minority ethnic families. For Black families alone, the figure skyrockets to £1,635.
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“The growing rates of poverty outlined in our briefing, in the world’s fifth largest economy, are simply unconscionable. We talk about this cost-of-living crisis in universal terms. No one is immune from the consequences. However, what’s clear from this research is that some groups are less equal and more impacted than others, including our black and minority communities.
Dr Halima Begum, CEO of the Runnymede Trust
Black people’s experiences of healthcare in this country are often unequal to that of white people and around two-thirds of Black people in the UK have faced discrimination by a healthcare professional because of their race (Black Equality Organisation) alongside the NHS’s own Race and Health Observatory finding ethnic inequalities in health outcomes at every stage, from birth to death. This translates across all areas of public life and across all forms of marginalisation, including class, learning difficulty and physical disability.
Further, police services are, more than ever, responding, often in violent ways, to people failed by mental health, social care and learning disability services; for example, Oladeji Omishore fell into the River Thames following the use of a Taser by two Metropolitan Police Officers on Chelsea Bridge, whilst he was experiencing a mental health crisis.
Deaths and serious injuries during and following contact with the police are always disproportionate for people from racialised communities. Recent cases include Chris Kaba who died after a single gunshot wound, without even being arrested for any crime; and a child (unnamed) who was mauled by a police dog while being detained by armed officers and has required two surgeries since. Racism manifests across all public services and where it has the impact of slow violence causing trauma and disability as discussed by the Institute for Healing and Justice which advocate broadening the conversation in medicine and health to include institutional and structural racism to create an antiracist, just, and healing medical system.
The gap between wages and benefit uplift and runaway prices from inflation has been widening causing more people to experience poverty; the impacts are disproportionate for groups most marginalised.
If the UK’s economic structure is designed to create a decent standard of living and maintain planetary balance it has failed; if it is about maintaining the system which benefits powerful corporations, it is functioning better than ever. The increased scarcity being experienced for those who are hardest hit has shown an explicit valuing of the ongoing accumulation of elite wealth holders.
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“There are plenty of areas where the government can become more efficient. We’re continually reviewing to make sure we’re getting good value for money”
Liz Truss, September 2022
“’Value for money’ is the go to when right wing politicians mean austerity and cuts to public services already on their knees”
Asad Rehman, September 2022
The recent mini-budget, and pledges to subsequently reverse the most contentious of its proposals, raise further alarm bells about the lack of concern for mitigating inflationary impacts on communities or about how affected groups will be able to feed, house and clothe their families.
Whilst estimates about tax burden are quickly calculated, they fail to value the continued demonetisation for people surviving on benefits, specifically disabled people, parents and single-income households. These groups are not being mentioned in the media, where the focus is usually on how budgetary changes affect the notion of what is the average family, rather than trying to estimate in financial, and other ways, the full impact of tax changes. In effect, they are being erased and further othered through media narratives on tax.
“I spend my Disabled Living Allowance on mobility; if I lose my DLA for my car, I’ll be even less able to work, more likely to be on benefits and cost more in benefits claims”
Unison Member
Also, see:
• How the cost of living crisis is impacting disabled people - YouTube
• Disabled people are hit 9 times harder by austerity | Frances Ryan - YouTube
• Loneliness rises dramatically among disabled people - Sense
Due to higher-than-expected inflation, public services are now worse off than they were intended to be when public spending plans were set out last year. Departments have been told to pay for the costs of higher-than-expected pay awards from within existing budgets. This has a direct impact on communities and their ability to afford to remain housed, nourished and clothed. Health and education services have been told to make £11 billion in savings despite already struggling, again, with disproportionate impacts in their ability to deliver services with equitable reach for all communities. The level of cuts is likely to be much more severe when the new Prime Minister’s budget is published in November.
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Overall, the fiscal strategies being used are consistent with the attack on the most vulnerable or least protected organisations and people. For example, there are projected cuts to protections for the environment, business regulation for organisations smaller than 500 people, and continued erosion of the real value of welfare payments.
A decade of austerity and cuts have eroded collective support through the State and on the back of this inflation erodes an individual’s ability to support themselves. The rhetoric of resource scarcity is a continuing backdrop to the cutting of vital public services. There are many groups who rely on public spending, particularly older persons, people with disabilities and children living in poverty
There has been a health and wealth precarity further induced by the pandemic, for example, the number of people who now cannot work due to the long-term impacts of Covid. The disproportionality of these impacts is critical – groups most impacted by the Pandemic correlate with those most marginalised and with the least access to health and other public services.
After adjustment for other risk factors, South Asian, Black, and mixed ethnic groups were all more likely to test positive for COVID-19 than were White people in England, and had higher rates of hospitalisation, intensive care unit (ICU) admission, and death due to COVID-19.
Daniel R Morales and Sarah N Ali
Levelling up strategy
Living in the UK varies dramatically from region to region, especially in socioeconomic outcomes and some attempt has been made to understand the varying factors that contribute to this in the form of the Levelling Up strategy. Whilst this resonated with many outside of London continues to be a policy soundbite, achieving very little in the most geographically unequal major economy in Europe.
“Levelling up is one of the signature economic and social challenges of our time, a challenge made all that much greater by the cost of living crisis.”
Andy Haldene, June 2022
“Disadvantaged young people, children growing up in poverty, lone parents, disabled people and Black and ethnic minority groups have not fared well during the pandemic, but they do not feature in the government’s discussion on levelling up.”
The Equality Trust, February 2022
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Authorities outside of London fight it out for small pots of cash, with those the best placed winning competitive bids not necessarily the communities most in need of ‘levelling up’.
The latest data shows that levelling up has not produced quantifiable results, with London growing at the fastest rate (in Q3 2021), while other regions, such as the North East, the Midlands and Wales, experienced a contraction of between 1.2% and 0.3%, and remain around 3.3% smaller than pre-pandemic levels.
Despite relative growth, there is huge wealth disparity and impacts within London – those in the top wealth decile (i.e. the 10% of people with the highest wealth) hold 44.3% of London’s total net wealth. Those in the bottom decile (the bottom 10%) hold none of London’s total net wealth.
While government rhetoric focuses on geographic inequalities, it continues to ignore the entrenched and rising asset inequalities which exist in every community in the UK.
Privatisation of public delivery
Narratives of scarcity accompany a surge of privatisation and financialisation of all services that provide a public good. Treasury officials attempt to rationalise this pay-per-use model, despite there being a wide negative commentary on the consequences and many commentators, like Danny Dorling, arguing that in fact, it is public ownership that is important in the fight against inequality.
I have seen first-hand how PFIs have damaged our local services in the Tees Valley. South Tees Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, in particular, has been plagued by a dodgy new Labour PFI contract. The James Cook University Hospital was completed in 2003, but its PFI contract does not run out until 2034, and will cost over £1.5 billion. The trust currently has to meet annual payments of £57 million a year—more than £1 million every week. Of course, hospital upgrades and rebuilds are expensive, but that trust is paying £17.5 million over and above what an equivalent Treasury-funded hospital would cost annually. Shockingly, that is enough to pay for more than 530 nurses. It is ludicrous.
Matt Vickers, Future of the NHS, January 2022 (Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party and MP)
The increasing political power of corporations allows them to exercise even greater undue influence to reduce corporate taxation, broaden tax allowances and exemptions, and increase the legal loopholes which enable tax avoidance.
These measures invariably shift the tax burden onto ordinary people with the brunt felt disproportionately by groups that are already marginalised,
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oppressed and impoverished. They also impact the service that is delivered. There are well-documented human rights abuses associated with privatised social care, child care, mental health care, ‘detention facilities’ for people seeking asylum, and prisons.
The number of people from minoritised communities, including those displaced due to environmental and economic factors, who risk being pushed into these horrific systems because of the lack of support in society and in public services is growing.
Corporate power continues to grow in sectors that are providing universal services, where price hikes are at the behest of profit-maximising companies. The privatisation of energy and utility companies and the lack of robust regulation has led to shareholder growth amidst scandalous waste, deprivation and damage.
“People have been massively disenfranchised in their local area both by privatisation & by everything going online. Before Thatcher you could walk to your Town Hall & ‘bang your fist on the counter’ regarding local health, education, planning or myriad other local issues. Also you could go to the gas or electricity company showroom, the local police station of the bank in the high street. Not so easy now with distance head offices & not knowing very often who’s ‘in charge’ anymore, especially for the doubly disenfranchised who don’t have a computer”
Sue Cotteril, August 2019
Giant multinational monopoly corporations
Giant multinational monopoly corporations who have made extraordinary profits from the pandemic and the War in Ukraine will continue to award dividends, whilst narratives of scarcity, rationing and ‘hard choices’ continue to affect resource pots, especially donor pots that are market-linked/investment funds.
There is a creeping corporate greenwashing that impacts perceptions and narratives around corporate behaviour. Companies and hedge Funds have grown in impact over recent years, laundering their reputations through Environmental, Social and Governance (“ESG”) credentials which means that they can display their badge of responsibility and then influence the fate of entire countries through investing in extractive production that displaces communities, betting on countries defaulting on their debt and influencing Governments to invest in policies at the expense of people like infrastructure projects that only service big business.
More recently, the chief executive of Shell has called on the government to tax oil and gas companies in order to protect the poorest people in society from soaring energy costs. Governments could increase funds for public services
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very effectively, through increasing corporate taxation, as recommended by a body of economists from Stiglitz to Mazzacuto. Businesses also do not need to wait for taxation to pay reparations for the harm that their business models have caused and towards environmental and societal repair.
“Shell has broken its profit record for a second consecutive quarter and announced a $6bn share buyback scheme as the fallout from the war in Ukraine continues to generate bumper earnings for the world’s oil and gas majors”
Tom Wilson, FT, July 2022
“BAE Systems has been a primary partner and beneficiary of the massive billion-pound arms contracts which have helped prop up the autocratic Saudi regime for more than fifty years, profiting from torture, repression and international aggression.”
Campaign Against Arms Trade, 2022
The narrative of scarcity and economic decline contrasts with the hugely powerful UK corporations whose profits and power continue to expand unchecked.
The erosion and vulnerabilisation of rights
The vulnerability of rights already enshrined in law, relating to gender rights, disability justice rights, bodily autonomy rights, environmental protection and water.
“[The Bill of Rights Bill] will curb abuses of the system and reinject a healthy dose of common sense” [by] “strengthen[ing] traditional UK rights such as freedom of speech – under attack, from expanding privacy law to stifling political correctness”
Dominic Raab, June 2022
There is a threatened and real erosion of rights, for clean water, environmental protection and decent living conditions bound up in a rhetoric of affordability, deregulation and freedom from restricting legislation. This connects to the erosion of civil liberty implicit with the Nationality and Borders Bill, which implicates Rights to citizenship for anyone who has family heritage globally and the Right to dissent (set out more specifically in the Crime and Policing bill).
Narratives are also forcing dichotomies in place of healthy, pluralistic debates, with the current Government labelling people with valid dissenting arguments as ‘enemy of the people’, as we lurch towards authoritarianism in many settings across the world, which has an impact on the political landscape in the UK. Even those who are now standing against the erosion of rights face criminalisation and in the cases of some people, deportation.
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Promises of partial change
Tackling a disparity of outcomes for different groups through redistributive fiscal policy is a human rights obligation for the UK - signatory of the United Nations Agenda 2030 with a mandate to ensure that no one is left behind. Fiscal policy has the potential to remedy this. However, placing resources in the hands of people who have been exploited and harmed does not allow us to escape a system that has a pathological drive to keep people of a racial, ethnic, marginalised or minoritised background, oppressed. More meaningful repair and acknowledgment is needed.
This is also a time in which so-called ‘diversity, equality and inclusion’ programmes and other seemingly progressive initiatives get introduced, but in effect are used as surveillance or buffers against rebellion, essentially to maintain the status quo in many organisational settings that do not want to face the difficult journey to understand their own complicity in colonialism, and ongoing oppression of communities of race, ethnicity and other markers of differing heritage.
When philanthropic organisations replicate incremental changes or get behind initiatives that offer only the vague potential of marginal policy changes (like policies to support renewable industries rather than the difficult policy of removing subsidies for coal), they let down communities and expose them to harm.
NGOs, civil society and the work that funders resource can change narratives in these spaces and be influential in raising awareness of exploitation, exclusion and expropriation. But often the space to strategise and re-imagine policy ideas and solutions is just not there.
People and their movements are in need of the space to heal and tend to the grief and wounds of rupture, displacement and violence.
Urgency and over-working culture
Current ways of working are upholding systems of oppression in the critical areas of long hours and inflating eroded pay which means that people cannot afford their normal bundle of shopping as items become more expensive and pay is not increased proportionally and are working longer hours to maintain, often, basic standards of living.
There are, however, movements to reject this kind of culture, such as the Slow Factory Institute
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“I have to go back to full-time work, which I am not fit enough to do, because I am in a lot of pain.”
Liz Webber, UNISON member
In many sectors of the economy, especially those in areas that operate on shift patterns, we are seeing people being treated as units of production within a system, rather than as stewards of the community as part of a living world. In this situation, some people are having to ‘grind’ more than others.
The ways power-holders get to set the pace, expectations and the rate of remuneration reinforce racial and gender segregation in the workplace. The impact that has on exhausting not just people and communities but ‘planetary resources’ is real now, and will worsen over time.
A reflective time, in which the origins of the source of resources and wealth that funded great monuments, historical buildings and vast collections of art and artefacts are being questioned is now here, and with that reparations and repair are becoming a very real reckoning in the horizon ahead.
As the most powerful countries in the world begin to contend with precarious climatic conditions, the urgency of injustices that the global majority have been facing for decades is suddenly elevated, forcing a recognition that is long overdue and too little, too late as lives continue to be lost unnecessarily in most countries across Asia, Africa and Latin and South America.
This new-found sense of ‘urgency’ on the part of wealthy nations is reflected in global multilateral discussions in terms of what and whose lives are prioritised. This is, in effect, reproducing the power dynamics of colonialism and Transatlantic Slavery that gave rise to the crisis of capitalism.
We need more ideas outside of the same mechanisms that have given rise to a policy-framed response to the crisis, centred on the valuing of people and their connection to the land and each other. To combat the impacts of these horizon issues, we need investment in communities dreaming.
The reproduction of racism in capitalist formations
Far-right ideologies are affecting particular communities, with affiliation to international extremist factions outside of the UK. This is evident with the spread of Hinduvata-inspired Islamophobia into the UK, most recently seen in Leicester and Birmingham. There has been a resurgence of white supremacist groups linked to pro-gun white communities in the US.
Such groups are enabling racist messaging to emerge across social media with many activists facing criminal threats and bullying.
We have to ask, where is the policing of these ideological movements, and their unchecked power? And why are social media, a largely un-policed zone, despite vast race hate crimes being disseminated and only dealt with ex-post?
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Politicians from minority communities are often seen at the forefront and re-producing oppression towards another community, for example, Suella Braverman is a strong advocate of extremist immigration stances
Coming back to what is liberation in the holistic sense, it is important to ask what does economic independence mean, as defined by communities affected by legacies of Slavery and colonialism and what processes have determined this, through truth-telling hearings and other public consultations?
And what part does systems change or adopting anti-imperialist stances hold in this, if communities do not want a temporary transfer of resources from the system that caused historical suffering and continues to deprive communities of liberation?
“Over the course of the history of global capitalism, the tendency for the racialization of class politics to be consolidated over and over again. The outcome has been nothing less than a tragedy for progressive politics because race, more often than not, becomes “the modality through which class is lived, the medium through which class relations are experienced, the form in which it is appropriated and fought through.”27 We need to name these long-standing developments as a form of racist identity politics enveloped in the universalist category of class”.
RACE.ED, April 2021
• Is Capitalism Anti-Black?
• Black British Wealth Creation?
Conclusion
The issues set out in this horizon scan are not in isolation from each other. We hope that the consideration of these issues can lead to dialogue that can disrupt the current system. We believe that the basis for any fight for equity must have direct and participatory community engagement. So in re-envisioning, it may be worth thinking about what authenticity means and what accountability in the broadest sense would mean. For example, this could be being generative with resources in a way that people can decide their allocation and investment and the story (and its form) to be told from their use. The default is often to re-think the world in the form of new policies - perhaps this is part of the path ahead, but it may also be in attitudinal shifts, space, time, healing from trauma and an acknowledgement to repair from past ways of being that reinforced coloniality and to not repeat patterns.
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