British Welfare for British Citizens; Or, Brexit As an Opportunity for Neoliberal Welfare State Retrenchment?

United Kingdom European Union membership referendum represents a remarkable case study of welfare chauvinism in action. One widely contested aspect within the Brexit debates relates to social rights of EU citizens. It is a renegotiation of the understanding of deservingness (c.f. Van Oorschot 2000) and represents a particular operationalisation of this discourse. Hence, while Brexit has been presented as a constitutional issue for the British state and an opportunity to “take back control”, we argue that there is also a very important welfare state dimension to it.

However, rather than merely reinforcing deservingness along racial or ethno-national lines, Brexit represents a specific process of invoking social citizenship to deligitimise European Union institutions, in which the EU and its institutions are the main targets, rather than EU citizens per se. This involves not only depriving EU citizens of social rights in the UK, but also a deepening of discourses of responsibilisation within an increasingly neoliberal British welfare state. Indeed, rather than empowering the British state and its citizens, Brexit is significantly more likely to empower capital in the form of big business (Farnsworth, 2017). Brexit is significantly about the welfare state and the renegotiation of deservingness. However, questioning EU citizens’ access to social rights advances not only a particular take on welfare chauvinism but also an acceleration of welfare retrenchment through a transformation of deservingness and conditionality. The paper is based on a combination of Qualitative Content Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis of elite discourses from the EU membership referendum debates.