There are two distinctive features of this book. It first seeks to provide an updated account of the political economic development of late capitalist Britain, drawing on Andrew Gamble's analytical framework most recently outlined in his 2009 book, The Spectre at the Feast: Capitalist Crisis and the Politics of Recession. Gamble helpfully seeks to analyse the 2007–8 Global Economic Crisis as a combined political and economic crisis, avoiding the twin traps of economic determinism and excessive political voluntarism, but was published before this led to the politics of austerity in the 2010s and beyond. Kirk secondly seeks to advance this from a Scottish standpoint, particularly by documenting the neoliberal failures of England-focused Conservative governments through austerity, Brexit, COVID-19 and beyond. It does so by proposing that—at the time that he wrote—the hegemonic social democratic Scottish nationalist politics north of the border might offer a more progressive way forward, not just for Scotland but the UK as a whole, undermining UK Conservative dominance through what he calls 'radical Scottishness'. The book starts at a specific point in the post 2007–8 and 2016 Brexit vote story: the unsuccessful attempt by Teresa May in 2017 to call a general election to gain a larger majority to see off the hard-Brexit faction in her governing party. The hung Parliament that resulted ended when Prime Minister Johnson manoeuvred the Labour opposition into agreeing to an election in which he secured an 80 seat majority sufficient to pursue a hard Brexit, the damage of which has been obscured by the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. It was of course the subsequent Party Gate scandal that brought Johnson down, from which successive Conservative government never politically recovered in the run up to the 2024 general election. This general story is well told and the book usefully does so from a leftist Scottish nationalist perspective. However, although Kirk's book was published in 2024, it fails to take account of the weakening of the nationalists' Scottish radical hegemony in the wake of the resignation of Nicola Sturgeon, and the Conservative culture wars onslaught against trans recognition and equality. Subsequent to this, of course, Scottish nationalism has been seriously weakened by the recovery of the Labour Party in the 4 July 2024 UK general election. Labour centrism seems to have made, at least for the immediate post-2024 period, serious inroads into radical Scottishness. It was undoubtedly the case that the post-2015 Scottish Nationalist triumph in both UK parliament and Scottish Assembly elections, posed a significant leftist challenge to the neoliberal policies of subsequent Conservative governments, and that this also extended to its approach to poverty policy and other areas of social policy. However, from the point of view of readers of this journal, the book mainly provides a general political narrative of the period up to the fall of Boris Johnson, focusing only in passing on Scottish social policy issues. In addition, while Gamble's approach judiciously combined economic and political analysis, Kirk's narrative offers a more limited political empiricism focusing on the ebb and flow of UK level political conflicts during this period. In addition, his book has already become rather dated and does not deliver the promised Gamble-style synthesis of economic and political analysis. Having said that, within its limitations it does offer a useful detailed account from a leftist Scottish perspective of the extraordinary turbulent period after 2017 that led up to the 2024 general election, which might make useful background reading for students of UK and Scottish social policy.

Social Policy & AdministrationEarly View BOOK REVIEW Mobilizing voluntary action in the UK: Learning from the pandemic. By Irene Hardill, Jurden Grotz, Laura Crawford (Eds.), Bristol: Policy Press Shorts. 2022. pp. 202. £14.99 (paperback) or 1447367239OA (open access). ISBN: 9781447367222 COVID-19 and the voluntary and community sector in the UK: Responses, impact and adaptation. By James Rees, Rob Macmillan, Chris Dayson, Chris Damm, Claire Bynner (Eds.), Bristol: Policy Press. 2023. pp. 268. £29.99 (paperback). ISBN: 9781447365518 Mick Carpenter, Corresponding Author Mick Carpenter [email protected] orcid.org/0000-0002-0562-0167 Emeritus Professor of Social Policy, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK[email protected]Search for more papers by this author Mick Carpenter, Corresponding Author Mick Carpenter [email protected] orcid.org/0000-0002-0562-0167 Emeritus Professor of Social Policy, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK[email protected]Search for more papers by this author First published: 22 August 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/spol.12951Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue RelatedInformation

The controversial 'bedroom tax,' or what officially was called 'the under-occupancy penalty,' was a substantial reduction of Housing Benefit imposed on UK council house tenants, who were deemed to have one or more rooms than they required. Since similar measures had already been applied to the private rented sector, it was officially regarded as 'only fair' and came into force from 2013, and is still on the statute books. It was, however, essentially a cruel victim-blaming measure at a time of housing shortage, exacerbating rent arrears for an extremely marginalised group of people, and confronting them with a possible threat of eviction. It was part of a raft of additional measures, which created a harsher benefits environment, aimed at encouraging 'individual responsibility' by the poor, as part of the 2012 Welfare Reform Act, the centrepiece of which was the flagship Universal Credit reform. Though these were justified as attempts to create greater rationality and 'fairness' into the benefits system, there was no doubt that they were primarily imposed in the wider grand cause of pursuing 'austerity' and reducing public expenditure in the name of 'austerity.' As a result, the gap between the so-called deserving and undeserving was deliberately widened, as benefits of the poor were frozen and made harder to get, while old age pensions were inflation-proofed in the political expectation that might deliver votes for the conservative-led government. As for the bedroom tax itself, Ian Duncan Smith as the minister responsible, defended it on the grounds that the taxpayer could not afford to subsidise spare rooms that people did not need. It was also generally justified in terms of neoliberal rational choice notions that individual tenants without rooms they needed would move, and scarce public housing would thereby be appropriately reallocated to those in greater need. Kelly Bogue's excellent book shows the wider context in which this all occurred, linking the bedroom tax to the social and political environment, which gave rise to it, and the crisis in income maintenance and housing policy that it failed to tackle. She shows clearly that it in fact magnified the insecurity of impoverished and materially struggling people, which is structurally explained through Waquant's theory of 'advanced marginality.' However, the great strength of the book is its grounding in deep and empathetic ethnographic research into the lives of people living on a Midlands council estate, on how they managed before and after the imposition of the bedroom tax, in the light also of the other pressures being exerted on their lives. It takes us through their feelings of apprehension as they struggled to deal with yet another set of impositions, including the insecurity caused by the fact that their Housing Association failed to properly communicate the implications of the tax to them. It shows us that real people are not abstract individual rational-choice pawns, in that many sought to absorb the costs of the penalty in order to maintain their existing housing arrangements, linked to neighbourhood friendship and family ties. She shows how these were materially based on networks of assistance that helped them deal with poverty, which was now drawn upon to help deal with the bedroom tax. However, in terms that are distressing because she narrates the experiences of real individuals, there were negative effects on the psychological health and wellbeing of tenants, which also often distressed their children. Bogue also demonstrates how all this further undermined a fragile sense of personal worth and sometimes led to feelings that other people, less deserving than themselves, were being treated better. In some cases, the frustrations that they felt were translated into overt racist hostility. Thus, the bedroom tax, and welfare reform generally, were policies that magnified underlying social tensions in potentially dangerous ways. Her work thus helps to explain how the bedroom tax and so-called welfare 'reform,' connect to wider developments such as the negative Brexit vote of 2016, and generally the rise of an anti-immigration and socially divisive populist politics. This is therefore not a narrowly focused book about the bedroom tax and its specific impacts on an already vulnerable group of people. It shows how one thing connects to others in people's lives, and that any policy intervention needs to understand how people live their lives collectively in communities and neighbourhoods, not just as isolated individuals. The book is a model of how to research and explain social policy in committed and impassioned ways, by connecting broader structural processes to the lived experiences of real people. It shows how poor people in contemporary Britain try to survive, get by and lead meaningful lives, often despite rather than because of external state interventions into their lives. It would be much better if policies worked with, rather than so often against vulnerable people, is the powerful and persuasive underlying message. With that in mind, it is strongly recommended for all students, researchers and practitioners of social policy.

In this important book, Fiona Williams impressively extends her previous pathbreaking work on the intersections between family, work and nation in Social Policy: A Critical Introduction, 1989, to include ‘nature’, in order to map the outlines of a future challenging social policy agenda beyond COVID-19 and the outlines of a future socially just ‘eco-welfare commons’. The resulting book is essential reading for students, practitioners and policy makers. The book is divided into three parts, the first elaborating a theoretical framework for analysing neoliberal welfare since the global economic crash of 2007 and the subsequent austerity decade. However, Williams argues that the crisis in financial capitalism is also compounded by ‘the interconnected global crises of care and social reproduction, the environment and climate change, and the external and internal racializing of national borders. Together these threaten human and planetary sustainability while also generating multiple and intersecting inequalities’ (p. 1). She complains that social policy, despite acknowledging radical critiques and challenges by social movements has only partially taken note of them, continuing to marginalise issues such as race, gender, sexuality and disability. She therefore urges social policy to adopt an ‘intersectional’ approach of ‘social inequalities and power as complex, interlinked, shifting and multifaceted, constituting both penalties and privileges’ (p. 23). While such an analysis is not new, originating with the black feminist analysis of bell hooks and others in the 1980s, she rightly claims that it has yet to have a sufficient impact on social policy. She argues convincingly that this admittedly ‘loose’ framework needs to be integrated holistically with both critical political economy and poststructuralist analysis of welfare power. Thus, while interlocking global crises require global action, they also require national adaptations and changes to everyday practices and new forms of participatory democracy at local community level. The second part of the book applies this framework to British social policy and society across her four dimensions since the 2007 global economic crash, the decade of austerity that followed, and the COVID-19 pandemic. She starts by outlining how in this era ‘anti-welfare’ policy and debate centred on binaries seeking pitch ‘responsible’, hard-working families, the ‘strivers’, against the ‘shirkers’ on benefits to justify harsh cuts to welfare, such as restricting means-tested support to just the first two children. More generally welfare reform devalued family care by reinforcing work imperatives backed up welfare sanctions. Consistent with the intersectional approach, she lays bare the consequential gendered and racialised injustices that this involved. She then goes on to document the ‘bordering practices’ involved in the government's cruel and unjust ‘hostile environment’ which was intensely applied, though not exclusively to non-EU migrants, and asylum-seekers and refugees. She extends this into a telling analysis of what she calls ‘necropolitics’, the state's division into those whose lives are deemed to matter and those who do not, as horrifically exemplified by the catastrophic Grenfell Tower fire of 2017. This was linked to a ‘welfare chauvinism’ successfully mobilised by the Leave campaign in the 2016 Brexit referendum. Her chapter shows this austerity policies were all linked to a range of intersections of class, gender, ethnicity, disability, sexuality, age and other dimensions of inequality and exclusion. This then fed into the differential impact on Britain from 2020 of the global COVID-19 pandemic. However, this led also to unprecedented state intervention to protect people against the virus and provide financial ‘furlough’ support to those who could not work because of it. Thus capitalist priorities were not as immutable as previously claimed, fuelling demands that there should be no return to austerity. The final part of the book—‘praxis’—seeks to map a way forward, which, consistent with her emphasis on ‘care’ seeks to envisage a transformed society built on the forms of mutual aid which became apparent during the height of the pandemic, alongside the collective actions of the state. The Black Lives Matter movement is cited as a campaign that had transnational, national, regional and local dimensions. She then articulates the need to embed this within an ‘ethical politics’ that is ‘grounded in the struggles of care, the environment and decoloniality’ (p. 174). Her bold and well-articulated vision is for a prefigurative politics towards an ‘eco-welfare’ that seeks to transform local economies along cooperative lines, participative needs-based welfare, and broader solidarities across local divides. Within it should incorporated local collective planning and participatory budgeting, deliberative forms of decision-making and a shorter working week buttressed by some form of basic income. What this all adds up to is an impressive and inspiring book, utopian in the best sense of the word. However, I did feel, without being reductionist, that the critique of capitalism and corporate power could have received more emphasis. The crisis in financial capitalism seems be viewed as only one dimension rather than a thread that runs through all others. Consequently, I would personally have preferred an alternative just and sustainable future to be unapologetically named as ‘eco-socialist’ rather than an ‘eco-welfare-commons’, if the whole is to be more than the parts. Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analyzed in this study.

Social Policy & AdministrationVolume 55, Issue 3 p. 519-520 BOOK REVIEWS Social policy review 31: Analysis and debate in social policy , Heins, Elke, Rees, James, and Needham, Catherine. Bristol: Policy Press, 2019. ISBN: 1447343981; £75 (Hbk) Mick Carpenter, Corresponding Author Mick Carpenter m.j.carpenter@warwick.ac.uk University of Warwick, Coventry, UK Correspondence Mick Carpenter, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK. Email: m.j.carpenter@warwick.ac.ukSearch for more papers by this author Mick Carpenter, Corresponding Author Mick Carpenter m.j.carpenter@warwick.ac.uk University of Warwick, Coventry, UK Correspondence Mick Carpenter, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK. Email: m.j.carpenter@warwick.ac.ukSearch for more papers by this author First published: 04 January 2021 https://doi.org/10.1111/spol.12684Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume55, Issue3Special Issue: Inequalities in pension and retirement: Life‐courses and pension systems in comparative perspectiveMay 2021Pages 519-520 RelatedInformation

Sociology of Health & IllnessVolume 43, Issue 6 p. 1558-1559 BOOK REVIEW A Socio-Criminological Analysis of the HIV Epidemic. Meini, B. Delaware: Vernon Press, 2020. 158pp £33 (cloth) £27 (pbk) £55 (ebk) ISBN: 978-1-64889-054-3 Mick Carpenter, Corresponding Author m.j.carpenter@warwick.ac.uk University of Warwick, Coventry, UKSearch for more papers by this author Mick Carpenter, Corresponding Author m.j.carpenter@warwick.ac.uk University of Warwick, Coventry, UKSearch for more papers by this author First published: 18 May 2021 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9566.13295Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume43, Issue6July 2021Pages 1558-1559 RelatedInformation

While it is now often argued that neoliberalism profoundly shapes the context and practice of community development, this is the first major book to investigate the interconnections between populism, democracy and community development. It is undoubtedly overdue, given that the ‘authoritarian turn’—the global rise of right-wing populism and authoritarian politics generally—is one of the most significant, and worrying, developments of the past decade. This is therefore a timely addition to Policy Press’s excellent Rethinking Community Development series, which combines high-quality and thought-provoking chapters by established figures and new voices. It is essential reading for anyone interested in how community development might address the currently challenging circumstances for renewing the appeal of community development and progressive politics. For this reason, it needs to be read widely within community development circles, but also beyond it, as the book shows that progressive community development strategies are central to reinvigorating democracy. As Sue Kenny,...