Overcoming barriers to social justice in the UK and beyond
Published: 25 February 2025
Commentary
A book that focuses on social justice in the UK and how the law fails to protect people’s social rights, especially those who are most disadvantaged, has been published by University of Glasgow academics and collaborators. Dr Diana Camps explains why this conversation around social rights is urgently needed to reclaim the narrative for social rights.
In the UK, we know that the law fails to protect people’s social rights, especially those who are most disadvantaged. These include the rights to housing, food, fuel and social security. As it stands currently, the justice system is not fit for purpose in addressing social rights violations. Our book goes beyond examining legal rights to looking at how these rights are understood and taken up in policy and practice.
We wanted to listen to and share the voices of practitioners across the UK with lived experience of trying to get justice for those they support. They each shared poignant examples of how difficult this journey is for many. One civil society activist put it this way: “if you're already marginalised and then you've got to fight the system which is completely stacked against you - you know what? You really don't have a lot of hope for success unless you've got resilience coming out your pores.”
The lack of legal recognition in the UK causes significant challenges for accessing justice for violations of social rights. Practitioners have to tie themselves in knots, such as making discrimination arguments, because social rights are not directly protected. This gap calls for embedding legal protections for social rights to better address rights violations.
A critical discourse lens highlights how barriers to social justice are socially and discursively produced, meaning that language, or discourse, plays a key role in creating social difference and constructing inequality. The influential work of Dell Hymes reminds us that language forms may be equal in substance, but there may be significant differences in how language actually works in society. This linguistic inequality and, consequently, much social inequality, is the result of differences in the use of language and how/ which discourses are used to reach certain aims.
Jan Blommaert observes that in contemporary societies, issues of voice become all the more pressing, they become more and more of a problem to more and more people. Voice is the issue that defines linguistic inequality and, hence, many other forms of inequality. The silencing of voices is an iterative theme across the data, related to the inability for certain social actors to claim a legitimate voice. Directing attention to discourse is therefore important for better understanding how being able to make oneself heard and understood may be prevented, or even purposely undermined, by other dominant discourses and mechanisms.
One example is how bureaucratic institutions play an important gatekeeping function by regulating access to specific spaces and having the power to assign people particular bureaucratic identities, such as ‘an asylum seeker’, ‘an urgent case for social welfare’ or a ‘criminal’. These ascribed social identity categories are not necessarily negotiable, and as the data on people seeking asylum has shown, certain labels and identities reflect stereotypes and often racialised perspectives that deem particular voices as invalid and not worthy of hearing.
We show how the systematic categorisation and filtering of information and people is facilitated by various mechanisms that have a disproportionately negative impact on certain groups of people, including women, children, lone parents, minority ethnic groups, persons seeking asylum and persons with disabilities (including mental health issues and learning disabilities). These processes intersect with wider discussions relating to immigration, austerity, Brexit and Covid-19, often resulting in the (re)production of stigma, prejudice and exclusion.
It is clear that conversations around social rights need to urgently change on multiple levels to facilitate transformative change and redistribute power. Firstly, we have to reclaim the narrative for social rights as enforceable legal rights in and of themselves and, secondly, we need to produce counter discourses that challenge negative dominant discourses classifying certain groups of people as ‘undeserving’ of social rights and dignity. The systematic silencing of voices points to the inequality embedded in a system that structurally, and often intentionally, undermines the voices of its people, especially of those made most vulnerable.
The overarching aim of our research is to better equip those who support rights holders accessing justice for social rights claims, addressing a significant accountability gap across the UK and in jurisdictions throughout the globe. That’s why we want our book to go beyond an academic readership; to be read by social rights stakeholders, including policymakers, parliamentarians, civil society, legal practitioners and rights holders, both within the UK and internationally – and start these important conversations for change.
New book: Access to Social Justice: Effective Remedies for Social Rights (2025) Authors: Katie Boyle, Diana Camps, Kirstie Ken English, Jo Edson Ferrie, Aidan Flegg and Gaurav Mukherjee
The book is part of the Bristol Studies in Law and Social Justice series, which explores the role of law in securing social justice in society and the economy. The book is accessible via Open Access here and can also be purchased from Bristol University Press.
First published: 25 February 2025