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142 Citizenship

US, where social rights were already far less developed than anywhere
in Europe, cuts in state spending have led to reduced levels of social
insurance and access to medical care for the poorest. Cuts in the federal
budget to help people in the case of emergencies were responsible for the
way poor people in New Orleans were left to deal with the devastation
caused by Hurricane Katrina, which made the realities of life beneath
the poverty line shockingly visible to US citizens, and to the world
(Somers, 2008 ).
The emphasis of neo - liberalism is on freedom rather than equality.
Individuals should be free to choose the best provision for themselves and
their families. In practice, this means that citizens are encouraged to see
themselves as consumers of goods and services, rather than as citizens
with rights to a certain standard of public provision. The language of
“ incentives ” is especially important here; the ideal of marketization is that
standards of all goods and services will be raised when competition
between providers undercuts state monopolies. In both the US and UK,
marketization has been accompanied by an emphasis on developing
“ human capital ” through education, skills development, and training to
increase people ’ s chances of bettering themselves in the labor market. In
this respect, where citizenship was previously understood to involve social
insurance against the risk of unemployment, it is now redefi ned as an

obligation to make oneself fit for the labor market (Roche, 1995 ). The
emphasis on paid employment has been accompanied by real cuts in ben-

efits to those without work. In the most extreme case of “ incentivization, ”
the US government introduced “ workfare, ” a social program introduced
to inculcate work - discipline in welfare recipients (King, 1991 ). In practice,
of course, however disciplined and highly motivated, not all citizens can
earn high wages and become consumers of private services. But one of
the main effects of the restructuring of citizenship is that failure to become
a good consumer is also privatized: it is constructed as a matter of per-
sonal responsibility, the failure to make the right, intelligent, and informed
choices. In a consumer society, the poor are “ fl awed consumers ” rather
than citizens, deficient in the skills and know - how to exercise freedom

and to compete with others in the market (Bauman, 1998 ).
It is not surprising, then, that neo - liberal policies have been accompa-
nied by a polarization of wealth. Britain and the US are now in the bottom
four of the most unequal societies in the developed world (with Portugal
and Singapore), and inequalities in income have increased dramatically

since the mid - ’ 70s (Wilkinson and Pickett, 2009 ). This is a measure of
growing citizen inequality in a straightforward sense in that it indicates
growing numbers of people on welfare support and receiving low pay. It