Moral Argument and the Justification of Policy: New Labour's Case for Welfare Reform

Introduction

The justification of policy is an integral part of democratic politics. From the annual party conference to the House of Commons, a television interview or a general election manifesto, politicians seek to win support for their party's legislative and policy programme in a variety of settings. There is a range of justificatory strategies available and a politician may attempt to sell a policy by claiming, for instance, that it is justified on pragmatic grounds, by reference to tradition, or perhaps because public opinion demands it (Cook 1980, 514–516). The stakes involved are high, as a well-chosen argument can ensure the successful passage of legislation through parliament or help to secure an election victory. To maximise its chances of success, a party must consider a number of factors when formulating an argumentative strategy to promote a new policy initiative. They include the history of the policy area or programme, the need for consistency between their chosen argument and the party's core values, the prevailing political climate, and the audience they will address. By the same token, scholars must take these same factors into consideration if they are to supply a full account of the dynamics of political justification.

Politicians often appeal to moral principles and arguments in their efforts to sell new policy programmes. Thus, they typically make the case for initiatives in the area of welfare by reference to the increase in well-being—or, more generally, the positive consequences—the policy will produce, and they frequently invoke human rights or liberties when seeking to persuade people to back constitutional reforms. The promotion of community responsibilities, meanwhile, is most often justified by reference to the fostering of civic virtue and the common good. It is important to note, however, that in making arguments of this kind, politicians are not seeking to claim that a policy is morally right in the sense that it fulfils the criteria supplied by a particular moral theory. Rather, their goal is to achieve a consensus in the policy area concerned, and moral arguments—used in conjunction with various rhetorical strategies—can enable them to do so. With this in mind, the article examines moral argument from the perspective of politics rather than through the lens of moral philosophy, and thus seeks to offer a ‘politicised’ conception of moral argument.

Given the prevalence of moral language in contemporary political argument, it is surprising that its role in making the case for policy initiatives has to date received little attention from scholars. Therefore, the primary task of this article is to facilitate exploration of this hitherto neglected area by proposing a theoretical framework that will enable us to disaggregate and reconstruct the process by which politicians select, formulate and employ moral arguments within a democratic context. To demonstrate the utility of this approach, the article brings the framework to bear on New Labour's moral arguments for its welfare reforms.

Towards an Understanding of the Dynamics of Moral Argument in Politics

A core assumption of this article is that the formulation of moral arguments is mediated by three factors, which constitute a general ‘context of justification’—a context of ideology, a context of argumentation and a context of hegemonic competition. ¹ The key themes within the ‘context of ideology’ are the ‘morphological’ character of ideology, and the process of ‘decontestation’, by which meaning is assigned to its constituent concepts. Meanwhile, the ‘context of argumentation’, within which moral principles may be utilised in political arguments, is concerned with the question of how the different requirements of argumentation in various policy areas may influence the choice of justificatory strategy. Finally, the ‘context of hegemonic competition’ addresses the issue of how political parties secure advantage over their opponents in rhetorical competitions. I now outline these three elements in turn.

In his theory of ideological morphology, (Michael Freeden 1996, 77) proposes that an ideology consists of a cluster of core concepts, a number of adjacent concepts and a periphery composed of ideas that are insignificant relative to the core. These concepts are given meaning through the process of decontestation, by which each is rotated ‘through a range of meanings until one of those meanings is held vis-à-vis the similarly held, or decontested, meanings of every other concept’ (Freeden 1996, 83). In this way, a coherent, integrated ideological platform is generated. Policy proposals are located on the perimeter of an ideology and link its constituent concepts to the social world (Freeden 1996, 79–80). Politicians often promote these proposals by appealing to moral arguments, which should themselves be as consistent as possible with both the policy proposal concerned and the decontested meanings of the ideology's constituent concepts. Such consistency is attainable through cultural adjacency, which avoids logical criticism by ‘creating [culturally] acceptable connections between terms and arguments’ (Freeden 1996, 85). Hence, the requirements of argumentation can supply further reference points for decontestation.

The ‘context of argumentation’ encompasses the three main traditions of Western moral philosophy, namely consequentialism, deontology and virtue theory. Because this article examines moral argument from a political—as opposed to a philosophical—perspective, it is important to note that there are differences in how moral philosophers characterise these paradigms and how politicians employ them to win support for their policies. Thus, I will provide the standard definitions of the three theories that are acceptable to moral philosophers, before giving examples of the broader way in which actual politicians use them.

As Samuel Scheffler explains, consequentialism states that the rightness of an act is determined by whether it maximises well-being, as judged from an impartial perspective that gives equal consideration to the interests of all (Scheffler 1988, 1). In a political context, this mode of argumentation is typically used in the area of welfare, where politicians emphasise the increase in—though not necessarily the maximisation of—well-being a policy will produce or, more generally, its positive consequences. A case in point is New Labour's ongoing campaign to encourage people to give up smoking to improve their own health and that of others (Department of Health 2007). Contemporary deontology, meanwhile, emphasises natural rights, the result of which is that ‘the language of rights has become a well-established part of popular moral discourse’. These rights are accompanied by obligations, which people must accept in exchange for the privilege of exercising their rights (Scarre 1996, 12). Deontological reasoning frequently appears in politicians' arguments to promote constitutional reforms such as the Human Rights Act of 1998, a measure New Labour claimed would protect and uphold the human rights of every UK citizen (Labour Party 2005, 111). Finally, virtue theory emphasises the ‘virtuous individual and those inner traits, dispositions, and motives that qualify her as being virtuous’ (Slote 1997, 177). Politicians often employ this form of moral argument to sell policies relating to community, an example being the introduction of citizenship education to the national curriculum in 2002 (Atkins 2008, 134). For New Labour, this initiative would both inculcate civic virtues in children and promote the common good through the creation of a ‘healthy national political culture’ (Landrum 2002, 221).

Finally, the ‘context of hegemonic competition’ invites consideration of how the desire to win rhetorical competitions may further influence the selection and modification of argumentative strategies. Thus, a party may choose a particular strategy because it appeals to the common-sense intuitions of the electorate, or because it offers the best available means of undermining the arguments of an opponent. An argument may also be selected because it is logically and/or culturally consistent with the party's ideological commitments, and hence is more likely to be convincing than one that contradicts them. Politicians enhance the effectiveness of their justificatory strategies with a range of rhetorical devices (see inter alia Myers 2000; Charteris-Black 2005; Finlayson 2007), and an examination of these techniques will enable us to take into account the ‘emotional as well as the intellectual attractiveness of arguments’ (Freeden 1996, 37).

Using this understanding of the ‘context of justification’ as a starting point, the article offers a three-fold analytical framework, which is applied to investigate the use of moral argument in contemporary politics. The three stages are: (1)

an examination of how particular principles and arguments may be made answerable to an integrated ideological platform;

Although there may be grounds for thinking the ‘context of ideology’ is more fundamental than the other contexts, they may in practice rebound back on each other. Thus, the process outlined here is neither linear nor hierarchical, and a clear explanation of the strategic decision-making process underlying the justification of policy is possible only when all three stages have been considered. It is also worth noting that these stages do not represent the procedure by which actual politicians choose particular moral principles and arguments. Rather, they form analytical strands in a reconstruction of the process by which argumentative strategies are selected, modified and utilised. The framework will therefore enable us to give a non-reductive account of this process, while remaining sensitive to the potentially conflicting considerations that enter into it and are implicit in articulations of moral argument.

In the remainder of this article, I employ the framework to elucidate the procedure by which New Labour formulated and applied moral arguments to sell its welfare reforms. In the following section, I outline the main features of the New Deals and their successor: the Flexible New Deal. Next, I explore the relationship between these initiatives and New Labour's ideological platform. I then consider the moral arguments used to justify them, and I show that these arguments are broadly consistent both with New Labour's ideological commitments and with the policies themselves. In the final section, I examine the tactics that New Labour deployed in its efforts to achieve hegemonic advantage in the area of welfare policy.

New Labour's Welfare Reforms

The primary objective of the New Deals was to enable unemployed people to ‘compete effectively for the jobs that are continually being created in Britain's dynamic labour market’ (HM Treasury 2000, 10). This programme was based on a policy framework endorsed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (Carcillo and Grubb 2006) that consists of three elements, of which the first is active labour market policies. These initiatives are intended to provide unemployed individuals with help and support that are tailored to meet their needs, and thus will enable them to reconnect with the job market. The second element consists of policies designed to ‘make work pay’, such as the National Minimum Wage and Tax Credits, while the third comprises initiatives to tackle the barriers that prevent people from returning to work (HM Treasury and DWP 2003, 2). One such obstacle was the shortage of good-quality, affordable childcare facilities, which New Labour sought to rectify through its National Childcare Strategy. Other barriers include discrimination and poor basic skills, and in April 2002 New Labour introduced Jobcentre Plus to tackle them. This agency provides a range of services, including training and access to childcare, and is intended to be flexible, work-focused and suited to the needs of each individual. The issues involved here are frequently multidimensional, so a ‘partnership approach between a number of Government departments, other public sector bodies, employers and the community and voluntary sectors’ is required (HM Treasury and DWP 2003, 50).

New Labour launched the New Deal for Young People (NDYP) in April 1998. This scheme was targeted at young people aged between 18 and 24 who were receiving Jobseeker's Allowance (JSA). After six months of ‘open’ unemployment, participants entered a four-month ‘gateway’ period, in which they were assigned a personal adviser who helped them to acquire ‘any needed basic skills (such as punctuality, how to compose a CV, and so forth) and engage in a serious job search’ (Waltman 2009, 126). If, at the end of this phase, they had not found unsubsidised employment, participants had to accept one of four options, the first of which was a subsidised job that included training and lasted for up to six months. To this was later added the opportunity to participate in self-employment ‘Test Trading’, during which the young person could ‘experience the realities of self-employment while still receiving support and guidance from a provider’ (Department for Social Development 2006). The second option was a six-month work experience and training placement with a voluntary organisation, while the third was six months of work experience with an environmental task force, including training. The fourth option was up to 12 months of full-time education for those lacking basic skills, during which JSA continued (Driver and Martell 2006, 97). After the options phase, participants who had not found employment entered the ‘follow through’ period, which offered further guidance and support for up to six months. The programme was mandatory, so ‘the receipt of benefit is conditional on willingness to accept offers of work or training. Failure to do so is penalised by loss of benefit’ (Shaw 2007, 47).

According to New Labour, the NDYP was a great success, helping to reduce youth unemployment by 75 per cent. The next step, however, was to address the question of how to help economically inactive individuals into work (Labour Party 2001, 26). Against the Conservatives, who had neglected this group during their time in government, New Labour argued that although people may be economically inactive due to caring responsibilities or disability, it does not follow that they are uninterested in, or incapable of, work. As a result, ‘the benefit system needs to do more to help and encourage people on inactive benefits to return to work’ (HM Treasury and DWP 2003, 49). To this end, New Labour introduced the New Deal for Lone Parents (NDLP) on a national scale in April 1998. This programme was aimed at lone parents whose youngest child is under 16 and who are either unemployed or working for fewer than 16 hours a week. Although participation in the scheme was voluntary, lone parents were required to attend an interview, at which they received ‘personal adviser support, help with childcare and training, and financial incentives’ (DWP 2007, 19). Benefit penalties applied if they failed to do so (Clarke 2007, 159). In 2006, New Labour proposed to increase the frequency of these interviews to six-monthly for lone parents whose youngest child is under 11, and to quarterly for those whose youngest child is aged 11 or over (DWP 2006a, 8). The government subsequently toughened its stance by ending the automatic entitlement to Income Support for lone parents with children aged 12 or over from November 2008, and in October 2010 the qualifying age will fall to seven (DWP 2007, 44).

New Labour expanded the New Deals to offer voluntary programmes to people on other inactive benefits. The New Deal for Partners was introduced in April 1999 to help the partners of unemployment benefit claimants back into work. It was followed 12 months later by the New Deal 50 Plus, which was aimed at people aged 50 or above who had been in receipt of JSA/Income Support or incapacity benefits for at least six months (Millar 2000, iv). The next initiative was the New Deal 25+, which was rolled out nationally from April 2001 and targeted people aged 25 and above who had been unemployed for 18 months or more. Finally, the New Deal for Disabled People was introduced in July 2001 to help incapacity benefit claimants to find work. ²

In October 2009, New Labour introduced the Flexible New Deal (FND) to replace the NDYP and the ND25+ in some areas. ³ A second phase will follow in October 2010. Under this scheme, a person's first 12 months on JSA is divided into three stages, during which the support they receive from Jobcentre Plus increases. Correspondingly, participants are required to intensify their efforts to find work (DWP 2008a, 12–13). After 12 months, jobseekers transfer to the FND, a scheme delivered by private and third sector providers who will give them the ‘individual, personalised support’ they need to enable them to find work (DWP 2008b, 8). These providers receive payment ‘according to how many clients they get into work with significant discretion over how they achieve that goal’ (Mulheirn and Menne 2008, 10). All participants must undertake a minimum of four weeks' work experience during this time, and there are tough sanctions for those who refuse the support offered.

In sum, the New Deals and FND were intended to help individuals from several target groups to find employment, and offered them a range of incentives—such as Tax Credits and the National Minimum Wage—to do so. These policy programmes, which propose a number of means for achieving a specific end, suggest the use of a consequentialist argument.

The Compatibility of New Labour's Welfare Policies and their Supporting Arguments with its Ideological Platform

The ‘context of ideology’ invites consideration of whether the arguments New Labour deployed in support of its welfare reforms, and the policies themselves, are congruent with its core ideological commitments. (Freeden 1999, 48) identifies these concepts as equal worth, opportunity for all, responsibility, social justice, community and cohesion, and they have remained remarkably stable throughout New Labour's time in government. As such, they provide a solid basis for this analysis. For Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling, the New Deals accorded primarily with New Labour's core value of equality of opportunity (Brown and Darling 2001, iii). This is because a key objective of the scheme was to ensure that the labour market functions well for everyone in Britain, and that nobody is prevented from obtaining work because, for instance, they have a disability or have children to look after (HM Treasury and DWP 2003, 3). New Labour linked this notion of opportunity for all to the values of equal worth and social inclusion, arguing that everyone who is able to work is entitled to have the opportunity to do so, and thus to have a stake in society, regardless of their circumstances (DWP 2006b, vii). These values are also evident in New Labour's policies to tackle workplace discrimination and to remove other barriers that prevent people from finding employment.

The New Deals and the arguments used to promote them manifested New Labour's commitment to the goal of full employment, decontested as equality of opportunity for all (HM Treasury 1997, 5). By putting ‘work first’, New Labour aimed to ‘secure social justice for those who too often have been left behind, and to enable them to realise their full potential, to the economic and social benefit of the whole community’ (Brown and Smith 2003, i). As Stephen Driver points out, this strategy to boost the human capital of poorer people by giving them the skills they need to participate in the labour market constituted an attempt to manipulate the distribution of resources. ‘In this way’, he argues, ‘opportunities are connected, in New Labour thinking, to outcomes’ (Driver 2004, 32). By enacting policies to give people the opportunity to learn new skills and ultimately to find employment, New Labour sought to realise its goal of a strong, cohesive society in which everyone has a stake (Primarolo 2004, 3). At the same time, however, the principles of social justice demand that a ‘modern, civilised society must protect the most vulnerable within it’ (DWP 2002, 5). To this end, New Labour argued that those who are able to work should have the opportunity to enter the job market, while those who are unable to do so should receive the security they need.

According to Alan Finlayson, a significant development of New Labour's welfare reforms was the ‘emphasis on the individualisation of service delivery, and with it the encouragement of responsibility for gearing up for the new economy’ (Finlayson 2003, 164). That is, New Labour intended that participants in the New Deals would act responsibly and accept the opportunities offered, in return for the personalised programme of support and training they received (DWP 2008b, 5). The core New Labour value of reciprocal rights and responsibilities thus had a strong presence in the New Deals. Indeed, it is explicit in the argument that government has an obligation to provide participants with real opportunities for training and work, while those able to do so have the responsibility to accept these offers—or at least to stop claiming benefits (Layard 2001, 3).

During its third term in office, New Labour introduced the FND, which is based on the notion of ‘opportunity for all and responsibility from all’ (DWP 2008c, 17). Like its predecessor, the FND is intended to make work pay, to which end it introduces new back to work credits, and to help people who can work to find employment while supporting those who cannot. It also seeks to remove the barriers that prevent disadvantaged individuals entering the job market, thereby enabling them to contribute to the nation's prosperity. This active approach to welfare, (Peter Hain 2007, 3) believes, will realise New Labour's vision of an ‘inclusive, cohesive and prosperous society with fairness and social justice at its core’. Thus, the values of equal worth, opportunity for all, community, cohesion and social justice are present in the FND.

A key difference between the two programmes is that the FND imposes greater conditionality both on jobseekers and on training providers. For participants, this new approach is summarised as ‘more support matched by higher expectations’ (DWP 2008c, 16). As such, they must act responsibly by preparing for, searching for and accepting employment in exchange for the flexible, personalised support they receive. Those who fail to comply with the scheme are subject to a tougher sanctions regime, and there is a new requirement for the long-term unemployed to engage in a programme of full-time work experience (DWP 2008a, 37). Providers, meanwhile, are motivated to find work for people by the competition for contracts and payment by results (DWP 2008c, 11). Those who do not meet their targets risk having their contracts terminated early. At first sight, this increased emphasis on reciprocal responsibilities suggests a shift to the right in New Labour's thinking on welfare. However, when we consider the goals of the programme—namely the creation of a fairer, more cohesive community, in which 80 per cent of people are in work and no child is growing up in poverty (Hain 2007, 3)—it is clear that this shift is in means only; the ends remain recognisably social democratic. ⁴

Although the New Deals and FND appear to be consistent with New Labour's ideology, a problem arises when we consider their practical implications. In both schemes, as Kevin Hickson correctly points out, the burden of responsibility falls primarily on those at the bottom of society, who New Labour deems to be socially excluded, ‘with no corresponding duties, such as the responsibility to pay higher direct taxation, falling on those at the top’ (Hickson 2004, 133). This has resulted in the exclusion of the rich (Finlayson 2010, 15), which violates New Labour's commitment to the values of social justice and community cohesion. It also undermines the value of equal worth, on the ground that if every individual matters equally, it follows that no one should be excluded from the reciprocal responsibilities that underpin a strong, cohesive community (Atkins 2010, 52). There were further disparities between New Labour's arguments for its welfare reforms and their practical effects but, as we will see in the remainder of the article, they did not prevent it from achieving a consensus in this area of policy.

The Moral Arguments Used to Justify New Labour's Welfare Reforms

As stated above, politicians typically make the case for welfare reforms by reference to the amount of well-being or the positive consequences they will produce. The congruence between consequentialist reasoning (broadly conceived) and the area of welfare policy makes this mode of moral argument particularly suitable for selling such initiatives, and it is therefore unsurprising that a tripartite consequentialist argument constituted the primary case for the New Deals. The first strand of this argument focused on the benefits for participants in the schemes. According to the (DWP 2002, 1), exclusion from the labour market can produce a range of negative consequences for individuals, which include loss of daily routine, sense of purpose and self-esteem. In contrast, work is beneficial because it ‘strengthens independence and dignity. It builds family aspirations … and can improve an individual's health and well-being’ (DWP 2006a, 2). Thus, by moving people off benefits and into work, the New Deals were intended to ‘transform the lives of millions, by making them self-sustaining rather than dependent—a hand-up not a hand-out’ (Layard 2001, 6).

The second strand of New Labour's consequentialist argument emphasised the positive effects of the New Deals on society as a whole. New Labour identified areas of the country in which unemployment is higher than average, and claimed that people with disabilities, lone parents and people from minority ethnic groups are often disproportionately concentrated within these regions. Such individuals may experience multiple difficulties, including poor-quality public transport and rising crime, which ultimately lead to social exclusion (DWP 2006a, 10). The goal of the New Deals was, in the words of Andrew Smith, the former employment minister, to promote social inclusion by bringing ‘employment, training and benefits to people in the right way, so that they have the standard and quality of life that we want in a civilised society’ (Hansard, col. 627, 19 December 1997). This would enable people to contribute to—and have a stake in—society, thus benefiting the wider community by breaking the cycle of exclusion, crime and deprivation that blights Britain's poorest neighbourhoods (HM Treasury and DWP 2003, 50). However, despite their success in reducing unemployment—particularly among the under-25s—New Labour's policies had little impact on in-work poverty, a condition linked to such factors as part-time employment, low pay and a lack of job retention or job progression (Smith and Middleton 2007, 13; Kenway 2008, 8). As several studies have shown that people who are in in-work poverty are more likely to experience reduced well-being and social exclusion (see Smith and Middleton 2007, 71–72), New Labour's linkage of paid employment and social inclusion appears tenuous.

Finally, New Labour emphasised the positive consequences of the New Deals for Britain's economy. This argument proceeded from the premise that people's skills and education are key determinants of productivity growth and economic performance (HM Treasury, DWP and DfES 2004, 7). Hence, the New Deals, which were designed to give people the opportunity to acquire new skills, would allow businesses to flourish and thus promote economic growth. They would also challenge the trade-off between equality and efficiency that prevailed in the 1980s by simultaneously creating economic prosperity and promoting social justice (Brown 1994, 19). In practice, however, it was estimated that in 2006 ‘as many as a third of all adults of working age lacked any recognised skills at all, or were at best low-skilled’ (Taylor 2007, 234). These individuals are more likely to be unemployed or in low-paid jobs, and thus to be socially excluded. If we take this point together with figures which show that UK productivity in 2007 (in terms of GDP per worker) was 7 per cent below that of France and 23 per cent less than that of the US (Office for National Statistics 2009, 1), then it seems that New Labour's attempts to reconcile economic efficiency and social justice failed.

The consequentialist case for the New Deals was supported by a secondary deontological argument, which drew on New Labour's core concept of reciprocal rights and responsibilities. According to Tony Blair, ‘everyone able to do so has a clear responsibility to find a job and look after their family’ (Blair 2001, 2). In return, government has an obligation to ensure that they receive the help they need to find suitable training or work. The coercive aspect of the New Deals was designed to ensure that all unemployed people of working age were made aware of their options, and thus would be in a position to take responsibility for themselves. After all, one of the main goals of New Labour's welfare reforms was to tackle the ‘culture of dependency’ and ensure that ‘people should not be free to choose a life on benefit’ (Shaw 2007, 46).

A further motivation for the compulsory aspect of the New Deals is evident in Darling's statement that New Labour's welfare policies were based on a

Blair's pledge to eradicate child poverty within a generation gave this claim additional force (Blair 1999, 1), and in the same year his government set targets to reduce child poverty by 25 per cent by 2004–05, 50 per cent by 2010–11 and eventually to eradicate it by 2020. However, despite some initial progress towards these goals, New Labour failed to meet its first target and—notwithstanding the recession—is still far from achieving its second. Given that at least 50 per cent of children living in poverty in 2008 were in working families, it seems that welfare-to-work schemes alone are not enough to alleviate child poverty, and that an overhaul of the taxation and benefit systems is therefore required (Kenway 2008, 4, 7–8).

Despite these problems, New Labour continued to argue as if the New Deals had achieved their stated aims, and indeed hailed them as ‘the most successful innovation in the history of the UK labour market’ (DWP 2008b, 6). It is unsurprising, then, that the arguments for the FND closely resemble those used to sell the New Deals, with New Labour claiming that this scheme would benefit individuals by improving their well-being, self-esteem and future prospects. New Labour also argues that the FND will have positive consequences for the community because it will improve the job prospects of those who face the greatest disadvantage, and thus will reduce social exclusion (DWP 2007, 5, 23). Here, New Labour again neglects the exclusion of the rich, though the emphasis on job retention and progression in the FND, together with the introduction of new back to work credits, may help to alleviate in-work poverty (DWP 2008c, 38).

New Labour's third consequentialist argument for the FND emphasises its benefits for the economy. (The DWP 2007, 27) maintains that, by improving people's skills, the programme will enable Britain to compete more effectively in the global economy by creating more jobs and more growth. This renewed commitment to skills is evident in the introduction of increasingly personalised support and training through the FND, which perhaps constitutes a tacit recognition of the limited success of the New Deals in this area. Finally, the deontological argument for the FND emphasises the increasing obligations that participants in the scheme must accept in exchange for this support, with New Labour asserting that ‘for those who are capable of working, there will be no right to a life on benefits’ (DWP 2008a, 12). A tougher sanctions regime underpins the responsibility to find work, while the greater conditionality imposed on training providers is designed to improve the efficacy of the scheme. These changes, claimed the DWP (2008a, 26), would set New Labour on course to achieving its targets of an 80 per cent employment rate by 2015, and the eradication of child poverty by 2020.

Overall, the prima facie coherence between New Labour's ideology, its moral arguments for its welfare reforms, and the policies themselves, creates an impression of integrity and competence that can be advantageous in rhetorical competitions, and thus constitutes one of New Labour's strategies for securing hegemonic advantage in the area of welfare policy. I examine the ‘context of hegemonic competition’ next.

New Labour's Tactics for Securing Hegemonic Advantage

The key premise of New Labour's case for the New Deals and FND is that the Conservatives' approach to welfare was seriously flawed. (David Purdy 2000, 183) explains that a residual welfare state began to emerge during the Thatcher and Major governments, which provided a ‘low-level safety net for the poor, while encouraging the majority of citizens to take care of themselves’. In practice, this meant that people received little or no help to find work, and by the mid-1990s the number claiming inactive benefits had trebled. For New Labour, the Conservatives' passive approach to welfare fostered ‘benefit dependency, wasted talent and obstructed opportunity’, and thereby trapped many people in long-term unemployment. This in turn contributed to a sharp increase in child poverty, which had reached 3.4 million by 1997 (DWP 2008a, 24–25).

However, the Conservatives were not wholly responsible for the growing culture of dependency, which in fact had been a problem since the early 1970s (Waltman 2009, 123). Although the Thatcher government removed the requirement on benefit claimants to look for work in 1982, the introduction of Restart interviews in 1986 marked the beginning of a more active approach to welfare that would challenge the dependency culture (Freud 2007, 12). The Major government consolidated this shift by introducing a Contract for Work, under which unemployed people were obliged to accept work if it was available, and by transforming unemployment benefit into JSA. This latter move both strengthened and formalised the connection between seeking work and claiming benefits and incorporated a number of programmes, such as ‘Restart’ and ‘Job Search Plus’, which were intended to help people find employment (Johnson 2001, 65). Underpinning these developments was a desire to create a welfare system for a ‘self-help society not a help-yourself society’ that promoted independence by reconnecting more people with the job market (Major 1996, 6). The similarities between this approach and New Labour's welfare reforms are striking, and it is therefore misleading to characterise the former as passive. Nonetheless, it proved strategically useful for New Labour to do so, as we will see below.

The consequentialist argument for the New Deals and FND draws on a narrative of welfare under the Conservatives, in which New Labour establishes relations of equivalence between high unemployment, poverty, wasted potential, community breakdown and social injustice. (Brown 1994, 1) identifies the source of these difficulties as the New Right's belief that ‘more inequality was essential to economic growth’, and thus creates a linkage between Thatcherite ideology, economic inefficiency and social problems. As (Jonathan Charteris-Black explains 2005, 97), such an association implies a causal relationship between these phenomena, which enables New Labour to hold the Conservatives directly responsible for Britain's ills. In so doing, New Labour deploys the strategy of ‘delegitimisation (of the other)’, which is intended to undermine and attack an opponent through the use of such techniques as marginalisation, censure and the presentation of the other in a negative light (Chilton 2004, 47).

New Labour also used the technique of legitimisation to make its case for the New Deals. Examples of this strategy include ‘positive self-presentation’ as manifested in acts of self-justification, and ‘self-identification as a source of authority, reason, vision and sanity’ (Chilton 2004, 47). New Labour deployed the latter to present its approach as the only viable solution to the problems created by the Conservative governments, with Blair claiming that ‘we are the only people who can be trusted to change, reform and modernise the welfare state, because we are the people who believe in it’ (Blair 1994, 7). Here, Blair suggested that the Conservatives had seriously damaged the welfare state because they rejected the values on which it was built. In contrast, New Labour upheld these values, and therefore was uniquely qualified to undertake the necessary reforms. It was on this basis that Blair described the New Deals, which encouraged self-reliance and personal responsibility, as ‘the only way forward as we break the old culture which left generations of families trapped in unemployment and poverty’ (Blair 2001, 2, emphasis added).

The New Deals were one of several initiatives designed to make work pay and help people into employment. To this end, Brown claimed, we need an enabling state, which offers unemployed individuals a means of escaping poverty by ‘using the welfare state to foster responsibility and not to substitute for it’. Indeed, he continued, again drawing on the deontological argument, ‘our guiding theme is not what the government can do for you but what the government can enable you to do for yourself’ (Brown 1994, 5). This theme is also present in the FND commitment to creating a welfare state that will support people in developing their capabilities, in return for which they ought to act responsibly by taking full advantage of the opportunities offered to them (DWP 2008a, 29). The notion of enablement is significant, as it implies state intervention in accordance with Old Labour ideals but without the negative connotations of the latter. Thus, New Labour could reassure its followers on the left that it was acting in accordance with socialist values, while simultaneously avoiding the Thatcherite charge of excessive state interference.

A key component of New Labour's enabling state is Jobcentre Plus, which delivers an ‘active service to help people become independent and move from welfare into work’ (HM Treasury and DWP 2001, 32). Here, the word ‘active’ creates a link between New Labour's approach and the activation strategies endorsed by the OECD and implemented by such nations as Finland and Norway. These strategies share several features with the New Deals—such as the ‘regular reporting and monitoring of work availability and job-search actions’, the focus on mutual responsibility and the use of sanctions to ensure compliance with the programme (OECD 2007, 208)—that are given renewed emphasis in the FND. By establishing this connection and claiming that the New Deals ‘incorporated lessons from … successful labour markets in Europe, especially Scandinavia’ (DWP 2008b, 7), New Labour identifies its approach with the success of other schemes and thus gives its policies greater legitimacy. ⁵

The use of the word ‘active’ also creates an antagonism between the New Deals and FND on the one hand, and the Conservatives’‘passive’ approach, which New Labour blamed for encouraging welfare dependency, on the other. In (Charteris-Black's 2005, 7) terms, this is an example of ‘antithesis’, in which a combination of ‘sequencing and comparison’ is utilised to contrast the Conservatives' 18 years in government with New Labour's time in office. Antithesis is a powerful tool in New Labour's rhetorical arsenal because it allows the party to present itself as offering a positive solution to the economic and social problems that stem from poverty and high unemployment, while portraying the policies of the Thatcher and Major governments as an abject failure.

In arguing for its welfare reforms, New Labour also invoked the dire consequences that would follow if the issues of restricted opportunity and social deprivation were ignored. Brown, for instance, asserted that unless action was taken to tackle these problems, Britain would ‘continue to drift towards a low-wage, low investment, low skills economy … with all the economic and social ills that brings’. In these circumstances, he argued, there would be more low pay, slow economic growth, unemployment and poverty, while Britain's communities would be at risk from the social problems associated with these phenomena (Brown 1994, 2; see also HM Treasury and DWP 2003, 50). This argument is an example of ‘emotive coercion’, which can occur when utterances stimulate an emotional response in the listener in order to persuade them of a particular point of view. Thus, an effect of this strand of the consequentialist argument may be to induce fear by ‘making truth claims, in the form of predictions, about causal effects’ (Chilton 2004, 118) that could only be avoided by supporting the New Deals. These arguments proved successful, as New Labour won sufficient support to ensure the passage of the New Deals on to the statute book.

In January 2008, the Conservatives published their own proposals for welfare reform. These measures have obvious parallels with the New Deals and FND, with David Cameron adopting New Labour's linkage of opportunity and responsibility, as well as its commitment to ‘help those who want to work into sustained employment, and cut benefits for those who refuse to work’ (Cameron 2008, 1–2). Echoing New Labour again, Cameron asserted that the Conservatives’ approach would offer some of Britain's ‘most deprived citizens the opportunity to live independent and fulfilling lives. Above all, they will help more people contribute to the responsible society I want to achieve’ (Cameron 2008, 2). These similarities indicate that the Conservatives accepted the basic assumptions of New Labour's policies, and that New Labour had therefore succeeded in setting the agenda on welfare.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the application of the theoretical framework elaborated in this article offers insights into New Labour's choice of argumentative strategy for the New Deals and FND. It shows that these programmes and the moral arguments used to sell them are reasonably consistent with New Labour's ideology; that the arguments themselves are appropriate to the policy area; and that New Labour's choice of a primarily consequentialist strategy—supported by a number of rhetorical techniques—enabled it to set the agenda on welfare policy. The framework thus enables us to expose and analyse the process by which politicians select, modify and apply moral arguments in their efforts to win support for their policy programmes. It also allows us, through reference to the imperatives provided by the three aspects of the ‘context of justification’, to explain why these argumentative strategies developed as they did.

The utility of the framework goes beyond the case study analysed in this article. It could be applied, for instance, to examine how New Labour uses moral language to win support for policies in other areas, such as constitutional reform and foreign policy. The findings would, when taken together, provide a full account of the justificatory strategies employed by a single political party. Equally, the framework could facilitate an examination of the ways in which other parties use moral arguments to sell policy, thus paving the way for a comparative analysis. It could also provide a starting point for a study of the modes of moral argument used by politicians in democratic societies beyond Britain, though further research may be required beforehand. This comprehensive and widely applicable framework thus provides a means for illuminating the complex and under-theorised process of moral justification in contemporary politics.