Introduction

Thus far, this book has principally focused on the relationship between rising material inequality, welfare austerity and social citizenship. This chapter goes further to explore the gendered and racialised character of citizenship and its relation to rising structural inequality in austerity Britain. Liberal citizenship is often critiqued for its failure to recognise and accommodate heterogeneous identities and social differences within the status and practice of citizenship. Amidst rising structural inequality and an increasingly bifurcated system of ‘poor’ and ‘rich’ citizenship, this chapter illustrates how the tensions arising between citizenship status and identity politics are aggravated by the asymmetrical effects of welfare austerity.

The chapter starts by exploring how gender, ethnicity and race differentially structure the lived experiences of poor and rich citizens. By drawing on a number of examples from the qualitative fieldwork for this study, it looks at how gender affects experiences of single parenthood and the relations between racial inequality and residential segregation. In doing so, it demonstrates how deviation from the ‘white, able-bodied male breadwinner model’ incurs a significant ‘citizenship penalty’ that is manifest in but also exacerbated by vertical inequalities (Prideaux and Roulstone, 2012).

Within the context of welfare austerity, the warp of citizenship and the weft of contemporary identity politics have begun to unravel, with those failing to subscribe to and fulfil the ideals of neoliberal citizenship increasingly alienated and disenfranchised from the equality of status notionally guaranteed through collective membership. As a result, those experiencing sociomaterial marginality lack the discursive resources for and means of collective identification to engage in sustained political struggle for their identity, rights and recognition. This appears to significantly affect the political subjectivity of marginalised citizens and their engagement with citizenship structures. This chapter argues that the means of collective identification ostensibly facilitated through citizenship status have begun to structure a collective disidentification that stifles the progressivity of welfare politics. This is reflected in and compounded by the differing degrees and nature of civic engagement exhibited by validated active citizens and residual contingent citizens of austere welfare regimes.