Republican critique of the welfare state is distinct from conservatism – the premise of the K isn’t the valorization of self-sufficient individualism, but an opposition to the domination imposed by the welfare state absent countervailing democratic power

Nick Pearce, “What should social democrats believe?” Institute for Public Policy Research, 19 September 2013, https://www.ippr.org/juncture/what-should-social-democrats-believe#note1.

Nonetheless, the core insights of the civic republican tradition - particularly its understanding of liberty as non-domination and freedom from the coercive exercise of power by others - remain important resources for the contemporary centre-left. In particular, they furnish intellectual tools and a political language for a critique of 'dependency' that can uncouple the concept from its dominant articulation within conservative discourses. For example, a republican conception of freedom facilitates an acknowledgment that in highly centralised political systems, with relatively weak forms of local or personal accountability, the welfare state is capable of exerting power that is experienced as arbitrary and excessive.

Recent UK welfare reforms have thrown this insight into sharp relief: thousands of people now suffer repeated benefit sanctions and prolonged periods without an income, often for the most minor infractions of job search requirements. At the same time, others are denied eligibility to disability benefits on the basis of often poorly evidenced and arbitrary decision-making by assessors employed by private contractors. These are not the necessary consequences of active labour market policies that prioritise employment and impose conditions of the receipt of benefits. Instead, they flow from inflexible policies, driven by target or profit motives, in a system marked by major power imbalances. Rather than liberating people from dependency, it often traps them in deeper states of powerlessness. Thousands have become supplicants at food banks, appellants at tribunals and applicants to payday lenders. It is no exaggeration to say that current welfare reforms are creating new forms of dependency and social insecurity on a grand scale.