The Citizen's Charter and Radical Democracy: Empowerment and Exclusion Within Citizenship Discourse
| Date | 01 June 1993 |
| Published date | 01 June 1993 |
| Author | Davina Cooper |
| DOI | 10.1177/096466399300200202 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
THE CITIZEN’S CHARTER AND
RADICAL DEMOCRACY:
EMPOWERMENT
AND
EXCLUSION WITHIN
CITIZENSHIP DISCOURSE
DAVINA COOPER
Warwick University
,
Coventry
,
UK
’
INTRODUCTION
Public services should belong to citizens.... Not to the government.... The
Citizen’s Charter is about just this. It is about returning public services to the
public.... The first aims in the Citizen’s Charter is to create more choice, and more
power for the citizen. (Citizen’s Charter Unit, Press Notice, 7 November 1991)
N
MARCH 1991, British Prime Minister John Major launched his ’big
initiative’: the Citizen’s Charter. Precipitating a flurry of departmental
documents, all promising service standards in areas of public provision such
as education, health and transport,’ Major’s Charter has taken the lead in
rearticulating citizenship with right-wing discourse.
In contrast to a public sector model of citizenship based on need, Major’s
Charter reconceives welfare state users as paying customers within a ’contractual
relationship’ (Times Higher Education Supplement, 4 September 1992), entitled
to a level of quality comparable to that provided under market conditions. Thus,
as Barron and Scott (1992) discuss, the Charter can be seen as an integral part of a
more comprehensive Conservative strategy either to privatize public provision
SOCIAL &
LEGAL STUDIES (SAGE, London, Newbury Park and New Delhi),
Vol. 2 (1993), 149-171
, 149-1
150
or, where this proves impossible, to introduce private sector mechanisms -
financial, organizational, motivational, cultural and ideological - into public
sector practice.
Yet, in addition to the penetration of state practice by market discourse, there
is another dimension to the Charter, one central to this article: the reconceptual-
ization of relations between the state and domestic realm - between the public
and private. For the way in which this relationship is understood, I argue, lies at
the heart not only of relationships formed by citizens as citizens, but, in addition,
of citizenship itself.
Within modern British political discourse, citizenship holds a key place. Its
connotations of empowerment, membership and rights have made it a favoured
term with both right and left seeking to gain support for their disparate political
projects. In this article, I examine the use of citizenship in two such projects, first
within the context of John Major’s Citizen’s Charter - a prime-ministerial
initiative operationalized in the early 1990s - and second, as the conceptualiz-
ation of radical democratic citizenship theorized by Chantal Mouffe (1992a,
1992b, 1992c). In both models, citizenship is equated with empowerment - in
one, as increased choice and autonomy for the public services’ client and
purchaser, in the other, as membership of the political realm with greater equality
and liberty for citizens within a radical pluralist society. Yet, how unproblematic
is citizenship as a strategy for empowerment? Historically, citizenship has
carried with it another powerful set of connotations: exclusion, obligation and
duty. Thus, in examining the two paradigms of citizenship, I explore the ways in
which these different traces of meaning affect and shape its use. In addition, I
consider the extent to which such meanings or connotations are consciously
drawn upon as part of Major and Mouffe’s political project. Broadly, my focus is
whether either framework can achieve its stated goal of empowerment, and, if so,
for whom?
THE CITIZEN’S CHARTER
The late 1980s and early 1990s witnessed the emergence in Britain of a plethora of
rights’ charters; the civil liberties organization Liberty, the Liberal Democrats,
Charter 88 and Tony Benn MP, all put forward proposals for constitutionally
strengthening civil and political rights. These developments were the outcome of
a combination of interconnected and interdependent trajectories: the juridi-
fication of politics; the growth of a rights-based discourse (particularly within
new social movements [for example, within lesbian and gay communities, see
Cooper, 1992]); as well as the ongoing political success of the new right
(Durham, 1991). The latter was important in several ways to accelerating
demands for charter protection. Under the political leadership of Prime Minister
Thatcher and Conservative central government, the new right in Britain
redefined public policy in areas such as housing, education and labour relations
to privilege conservative Christian morality and a legal individualism based on
economic rights, contract and legal remedies. Additionally, in these fields, as well
151
as in their treatment of civil liberties and public order, Conservative central
government asserted a radicalism that brought the full implications of parlia-
mentary sovereignty to people’s notice. Liberals and progressives responded
with countervailing demands for meaningful constitutional protection, since the
informal guarantees provided by consensus and tradition could no longer be
relied upon. Among other proposals, they argued for a bill of rights.
Yet the charter implemented by government was not among the handful
developed, amid much publicity, in response to perceived governmental
excesses. Rather, it was a charter few had heard of, with little history of debate.
This was the charter of John Major, launched six months after he became Prime
Minister. In contrast to the left-wing charter advocates who focused on the
traditionally liberal arenas of civil and political rights, the Conservative leader’s
priority was the ’socialist’ territory of welfare protection and public services.’
In critically examining the ways in which Major’s Charter conceptualizes
citizenship, and its potential as a project of empowerment, I focus on the
following: (1) the Charter’s objectives and structure; (2) its use to affirm and
implement Conservative policy; (3) issues of inclusion, interpellation and
exclusion from citizenship status; (4) the construction of the state; and (5) the
way in which the Charter construes the relationship between the individual,
government and civil society.
I
I
THE CHARTER’S FRAMEWORK
AND
PROMISE
Major’s Citizen’s Charter was initiated by a government White Paper
(Cm. 1599) in July 1991, with the following four aims for public services: better
quality, more choice, information on available services and knowledge about
remedies - legal and otherwise (The Citizen’s Charter - A Guide). Alongside
these general objectives, the White Paper also set out some key proposals for
changes to public provision that would comprise the core of the initial Citizen’s
Charter project. These included guaranteed maximum waiting times for
National Health Service (NHS) treatment; league tables of school examination
results; improving compensation for late trains; and further contracting out of
local authority services (The Citizen’s Charter: A Guide). The Citizen’s Charter
was
to be centrally co-ordinated by a unit in the Cabinet Office, with ministerial
leadership, and Prime Minister’s seminars to ensure progress was taking place.
However the Charter was not a single, coherent initiative or document. On the
basis of the key aims and programme established by the government, ministerial
departments were to produce their own charters, for users of their services. Thus
there are charters for patients, council tenants, parents, travellers and passengers
among others.
The status of the Citizen’s Charter is somewhat ambiguous. It is not a
legislative instrument, although many of the standards promised have been and
continue to be entrenched through statute, government regulations or by
contract. Remedies too reflect the Charter’s ambivalent position. In certain cases
compensation may be received, for example, for late underground trains; in other
152
cases judicial review may be possible. However, many of the remedies rely on
complaints procedures involving internal or external officials. For instance, the
Council Tenant’s Charter informs tenants that they can take complaints to their
councillor or the local government ombudsman. However, the government also
promises to introduce a ’simple form of court action ... if you and the council
cannot agree about your legal rights’ (The Council Tenant’s Charter).
In the Citizen’s Charter Guide, Major explains that he wants the Citizen’s
Charter to be ’one of the central themes of public life in the 1990s’. Yet is it not
strange that a Conservative, British Prime Minister, an advocate of neoliberal
economics, should commit himself to improving public provision? And, if the
Charter is not really about developing and expanding the public sector as seems
likely from the ongoing financial reductions public provision is encountering,
why did Major choose to turn this issue into his ’big initiative’?
Several answers present themselves. (1) He wanted to make his mark, anxious
not to remain in the shadow of his highly controversial and colourful
predecessor, and public provision was a popular choice for promises of
improvement. (2) Major and his government wished to distance themselves from
taking responsibility for the state of public services by presenting themselves
instead as the party concerned to improve quality. (3) The Charter, with its
rhetoric of returning power to the ’people’, was an attempt to challenge
perceptions of Conservative government as autocratic and authoritarian, and to
thereby disarticulate (or separate) democracy from progressive discourse. (4) The
Charter provided the government with a legitimate reason for a range of
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