Public leisure provision and the good citizen

Abstract

In the last decade Britain has witnessed a cultural transformation from the municipal socialism enshrined in the post-war development of the Welfare State to the Thatcherite urban entrepreneurialism of the 1980s. One of the consequent effects has been a change in the way in which government services and resources are allocated. This has involved the competitive tendering of most local government services, including leisure provision, to the private sector. The result, in terms of the management of facilities, has been a shift from the values of social equity to those of the free market. Paradoxically, while the primary function of this transformation was a transfer of power from the state to individuals, through the market, the effect has been a transfer of power from local to central government, with a consequential shift in the type, rather than amount, of people able to benefit from government services. Indeed, it can be seen that there has been a significant shift in policy, away from local democracy and towards the support of bourgeois individual self determination through the market. This has meant that leisure provision has become a primary instrument of government policy, rewarding 'successful' supporters of capitalist hegemony and penalizing those who are unable, or choose not, to conform to this model. The primary effect of this shift is the division of society into 'leisure gainers' — predominantly employed middle class white males and those able to emulate them — and 'leisure losers' — the remainder of society. This divisive construction of a new citizenship, with material wealth and freedom available to the 'good' citizen at the expense of the deprivation, rejection and suppression of the 'deviant' citizen is at the centre of a new political order where choice has been replaced by means and where the classless paradigm envisaged by John Major will be a classlessness of constructed omission.