John Hudson

I was lucky enough to have been able attend the 2007 Australian Social Policy Conference hosted by the Social Policy Research Centre, University of New South Wales, Sydney last month. Apart from being a great chance to catch up with some old friends (I was a visitor to the SPRC in 2005), it was also a very stimulating conference. Myself and Stefan Kühner presented our paper ‘Towards Productive Welfare?‘ at the final paper stream of the conference (on Friday 13th!).

The two of us also spent some time visiting the University of Sydney, where we met up with former York colleague Gyu-Jin Hwang, who has just started a lectureship in social policy there. Aside from giving Jin mountains of abuse for having landed a job in one of the world’s greatest cities, the three of us also put together some plans to take forward our work on the interactions between ideas, institutions and interests; a paper outlining our early ideas (and drawing on case studies of Third Way politics in Germany and the UK) is appearing in the Journal of Social Policy early in 2008.

A reflection on the rise and fall of the philosophy Blair had hoped would form the heart of a new era for the centre-left; penned originally for Policy World.

The closing of the Blair era has sparked an inevitable debate about his policy legacy. While it is, arguably, too soon to offer a balanced assessment of Blair’s place in history, it has been evident for some time that Blair himself has been concerned with the ‘legacy issue’. It might even be suggested that since taking over as leader of the Labour Party, Blair has had a strong desire tie his leadership to an epoch defining shift in the values of the (centre-)left: in abandoning the historic Clause IV of the party’s constitution, rebadging the party as ‘New Labour’ and weakening its links with the trade union movement, Blair has been keen to demonstrate his modernising instincts and to draw clear blue water between the ‘Old Labour’ approach and his own.

Yet, while Blair was clear from day one in office that New Labour needed to be different from Old Labour – and equally clear that it must be distinct from the New Right - he was acutely aware that that his early ideas might appear somewhat anchorless. While a new language accompanied New Labour - his speeches were peppered with terms such as ‘community’, ‘opportunity’ and ‘responsibility’ and traditional staples of Labour Party rhetoric such as ‘equality’, ‘redistribution’ ‘socialism’ and even ‘Labour’ were rarely used – his approach often appeared to be defined in opposition to an established set of values rather than offering a deep and coherent alternative philosophy. Though his New Labour vehicle instantly struck a populist note that appealed to voters, after just a few months in power Blair publicly expressed concern about the need for New Labour to outline a defining philosophy for his government that could rival Thatcherism. It was at this time that references to the potential for a ‘Third Way’ began to appear in his speeches, with Blair’s thoughts inspired in part by the exchange of ideas between his own team of policy advisors and the then US President Bill Clinton’s advisors during an extended ‘wonkathon’ that took place in Chequers in November 1997.

However, quite what a ‘Third Way’ would mean in practice remained a moot point. In January 1998, Blair turned to academe and the think tanks for help. Over the course of January and February, Downing Street, together with the Cambridge based think tank Nexus, ran an open seminar on the Third Way. The choice of Nexus as the partner is this endeavour was something of a surprise. It was hardly an established Labour Party leaning think tank akin to the Fabian Society or even the IPPR. Nor had it blazed a media trail with its work in the way that the then recently established Demos had done. In fact, few people had heard of it and, perhaps, few remember it today (it has long since perished). Perhaps this was because Nexus was not a formal organisation at all, but an internet based network. The early days of New Labour coincided with the early days of the world wide web and the choice of a new think tank that presented itself as being at the cutting edge of the internet ‘revolution’ chimed thoroughly with New Labour’s own image. Much of the debate took place online, with papers from (amongst others), the (then) Director of the IPPR, Gerald Holthan, the (then) General Secretary of the Fabian Society, Michael Jacobs, and the MIT’s Stuart White. Follow ups included many pieces by academics, including David Marquand of Oxford University and Julian Le Grand of the LSE. There was a large element of interactivity, with 300 members of the NEXUS network mailing list (which was semi-open) able to discuss the papers and offer their own thoughts via e-mail.

While critics might suggest that the outcomes of the debate were, at best, somewhat fuzzy, a summary of the debate was produced by the NEXUS director, David Halpern, and discussed at a Third Way seminar in Number 10 in May 1998 that was organised by the (then) Director of Policy in the Downing Street Policy Unit, David Miliband. But, what the ‘Third Way’ lacked in intellectual coherence it more than compensated for with political momentum. Over the course of the summer, the ideas developed during these discussions were fleshed out and in September there was a triple whammy of Third Way landmarks. Firstly, the Fabian Society published a short pamphlet by Blair on titled ‘The Third Way: New Politics for the New Century’ in which the Prime Minister outlined his version of the new philosophy. At the same time, the (then) Director of the London School of Economics, Anthony Giddens, published ‘Third Way: the Renewal of Social Democracy’. Giddens had been working with Blair for sometime – he had been invited to the New Labour-New Democrat wonkathon that had taken place in Chequers – and his book provided some intellectual boosterism to the Third Way concept. Finally, to coincide with these events, Blair (and Giddens) flew to New York to join Clinton and the then Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi for a high level seminar on the potential for the Third Way concept to the form the basis of a new (cross-national) approach to social democracy.

These events placed some serious political momentum behind the idea of a Third Way and the following year-and-a-half probably marked its political high-point as Blair and Clinton continued pushed the idea hard while also aiming to flesh out its meaning. Significantly, further high-level, cross national seminars took place throughout the next 18 months, with an increasing number of political leaders joining the gatherings. The increasing scale of these events is certainly worthy of note. In April 1999, a roundtable discussion in Washington titled ‘The Third Way: Progressive Governance’, was attended by Blair and Clinton, along with the newly elected German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and Italian Prime Minister Massimo D’Alema, and the longer standing Prime Ministers of Sweden and the Netherlands - Wim Kok and Göran Persson. This was event was soon followed by a further seminar in Florence in November, where the French Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, and the Brazilian President, Fernando Cardoso, joined the discussions. A still bigger meeting took place just over six months later, this time in Berlin, with the launch of a Third Way rooted ‘network for progressive governance’ being attended by 14 centre left leaders. Much emerged from these events, not least a joint communiqué issued by Blair and Schröder in May 1999 that looked to map out a path for social democracy throughout Europe. In ‘Europe: The Third Way/Die Neue Mietee’, the two leaders openly invited all European social democrats to join them in their plans for modernisation of centre-left thinking and, with social democrats seemingly in the political ascendancy across Europe, their prospects for forging a new political movement seemed very bright indeed.

Yet, despite all of this activity, the very idea of a ‘Third Way’ was greeted with much scepticism, particularly within the UK. During the Nexus debate in early 1998, the Fabian Society’s Michael Jacobs had effectively summed up the views of many when he argued that ‘in the context of Blairite politics the concept of a ‘Third Way’ [is] an exercise in ‘phrase-making’, an attempt to find a new label for the political philosophy / ideology towards which New Labour is groping’. Little had seemed to change in the subsequent period. At the close of the Florence seminar, Will Hutton appeared somewhat perplexed by the discord between the energy being invested by so many political leaders in exploring the potential for a Third Way and the idea’s reception more generally. Writing in The Observer he said he had ‘witnessed nothing like it my journalistic career… six purported Left-of-Centre heads of state will spend a day in Florence talking about what it will mean to be progressive in the next century… Not since the war has there been such a concentration of international political power discussing a political idea’. Yet, he noted that ‘The Third Way has not had much of a hearing in Britain… dismissed as purposeless guff; substance-free, New Labour meanderings lacking rigour’. Indeed, while not without sympathy for the project itself, he suggested that, in the UK at least, ‘the Third Way has bombed before it has even been properly launched’.

Certainly the muted reception of the idea seemed to rankle with its key exponents. In 2000, Giddens tried to respond to much of the scorn in a new book, ‘The Third Way and its Critics’. However, with Clinton’s term of office coming to a close – and Bush poised to replace him in the White House – the slowing political momentum behind the Third Way made it difficult to tackle such strong scepticism. Certainly Clinton seemed to concede as much when, making one of his final speeches as President, he told an invited audience at Warwick University that: ‘We [Blair and Clinton] have worked hard in our respective nations and in our multinational memberships to try to develop a response to globalization that we all call by the shorthand term, the Third Way. Sometimes I think that term tends to be viewed as more of a political term than one that has actual policy substance, but for us it’s a very serious attempt to put a human face on the global economy’. Reflecting on the speech in The Times, Peter Riddel noted that ‘The imminent departure of Bill Clinton from the White House is in marked contrast with the triumphalist days of just two years ago’ and he concluded that, for all their hopes of providing a new political philosophy for the 21st century, just one year into the new millennium ‘The Third Way has become unfashionable’.

Blair and Giddens, however, looked to keep the momentum going after Clinton’s departure. Perhaps as a response to the growing scepticism at home, they looked to emphasise the Third Way’s global reach. Writing in Prospect magazine in March 2001, Blair bemoaned the reception given to Third Way ideas in his own country, claiming it was ironic that while the movement commanded international attention that ‘in Britain, where New Labour pioneered some of these ideas, the Third Way is often disparaged as ‘meaningless’, ‘reheated liberalism’, ‘neither one thing or the other’.’ Rather than ditching the idea, however, he promised a ‘Third Way, Phase Two’, arguing the new movement offered an effective modernisation of social democratic values and was already of great historical significance on the grounds that ‘It is a Third Way for Britain because it represents a third phase of post-war history - following the settlements of 1945 and 1979.’ At the same time, Giddens published another book on the concept - ‘The Global Third Way Debate’ – that struck many similar notes, though it lacked the coherence of his earlier works insofar as this piece was an edited collection drawing on mainly already published pieces written by a mixture of politicians, policy analysts and academics from across the world.

Significantly, by now there were signs of admissions from Blair and Giddens that the label itself was perhaps unhelpful: a small passage in Blair’s Prospect piece said as much when referring to ‘Third Way politics, or ‘progressive government’ as some describe it’. The gatherings of ‘Third Way’ leaders that had begun in Washington in 1999 with the explicit purpose of discussing the concept – and coincided with the launch of Blair’s Fabian Pamphlet – had now been rebranded as ‘Progressive Governance Summits’. Indeed, when, in December 2000, Blair, Schröder, Persson and (then) Italian Prime Minister Giuliano Amato helped launch ‘Policy Network’, a more formal institute designed as a vehicle for sharing thinking about the future of social democracy, the term ‘Third Way’ was notable in its absence, replaced, for the most part, by meeker notions of ‘progressive politics’ and ‘progressive governance’.

How far this disagreement over labels represented a disagreement over ideas is a difficult question to address. Certainly the historical connotations of the ‘Third Way’ were problematic in some countries and, for instance, Schröder’s preference for the term ‘the new middle’ over the ‘Third Way’ seems to owe more to linguistic heritage than policy difference. How far the loss of momentum behind the idea represented its failure to capture the political imagination is a more straightforward question to address, for by 2002 it seemed to be rapidly moving off the radar. In March, Blair delivered a keynote speech to an invited audience of academics, policy analysts and think tank staff that reflected on five years of New Labour in power. The venue, the London School of Economics, Giddens still its Director, seemed tailor made for a set-piece talk about the virtues of Third Way thinking. Instead, Blair conceded that the New Labour philosophy had been ‘unclear and controversial’ and that there was a danger that, in dealing with the daily concerns of government, New Labour had ‘lost sight of the destination’. Rather than outlining how the Third Way had provided a clear vision of where New Labour should be going, Blair instead admitted that ‘sometimes it can seem as if [governing] were a mere technocratic exercise, well or less well managed, but with no overriding moral purpose to it… [we need] to explain the ‘why’ of the programme, to describe it not point by point but principle by principle.’

Significantly, it was not the need for a ‘Third Way’ that featured heavily in this speech about principles, but the need for a ‘Third Phase’ of New Labour: the first being shifting to the centre-left after defeat in 1992, the second laying firm (economic) foundations after gaining power in 1997 and the third phase being delivery of public service reforms in Labour’s second term. Indeed, the phrase ‘Third Way’ did not feature: ‘progressive consensus’ was the preferred terminology on this occasion. In the media – and on the Conservative Party benches - the speech was widely interpreted as an attempt to ‘relaunch’ New Labour. A headline in The Independent neatly summed up the views of the commentariat: ‘Forget the Third Way, now it’s the Third Phase’.

At this time, media perception that the Third Way was already an idea whose time had been and gone was heightened by the declining political fortunes of many of the leaders who had attended the early Third Way summits: by the summer of 2002 Jospin had given way to Raffarin as Prime Minister of France, Kok to Balkenende in the Netherlands and Amato to Berlusconi in Italy. A swing to the right seemed to be in evidence and when Blair hosted a Third Way meeting in Chequers during the summer of 2002, it was a reduced gathering as a consequence, with Schröder, Persson and the Finnish Prime Minister, Paavo Lipponen, being the only national leaders in attendance. Clinton, amongst others, was invited too in order to add some political weight, but for some commentators the dwindling attendance at the event was proof that whatever momentum there had been behind the idea was well and truly lost. The, Sunday Times, interpreted the event as an emergency summit convened to save the movement and concluded that ‘The ‘Third Way’ championed by Tony Blair and Bill Clinton has been blown off course by the rise of the right in Europe.’

The Chequers meeting may well have been a last ditch crisis meeting for the Third Way. If so, how far Blair and Clinton decided it was worth fighting for the concept itself is unclear. Certainly it seems that Clinton agreed to make it the theme of a speech he would deliver to the Labour Party annual conference later that year at which he told party members that the ‘Third Way works’. Blair defended the concept in an interview with Prospect magazine too, telling its editor David Goodhart that, far from being redundant, all of his New Labour agenda could be read in Third Way terms. Added to this, in the summer of 2003 Blair hosted another of the Progressive Governance conferences in London, with an expanded gathering billed as the ‘largest ever gathering of international centre-left leaders, policy-makers, politicians and thinkers’. Fourteen heads of state were in attendance (from: Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Czech Republic, Ethiopia, Germany, Hungary, New Zealand, Poland, Romania, South Africa, Sweden and the UK), along with participants from some thirty countries. Yet, while speeches by Clinton (who argued that ‘the Third Way should be the dominant mode of thinking about change in 21st century’) and Blair (who claimed ‘only a modernised social democracy – the true description of the Third Way… can offer a sensible answer to [globalisation’s] challenge’) front-staged the Third Way, they appeared increasingly isolated in their advocacy of this terminology. Indeed, a joint communiqué issued by the heads of government at the end of the conference did not mention the ‘Third Way’ at all, with ‘progressive governance’ again being the preferred term.

Moreover, for all the hubbub surrounding the London Progressive Governance conference, 2003 did not represent a good year for Third Way leaning social democrats. There were further changes in political fortunes that robbed the movement of some of its main figures, Finland’s Paavo Lipponen losing power to Anneli Jäätteenmäki’s centrist party and Canada’s Jean Chrétien resigning as Prime Minister after becoming mired in scandal for instance. But above and beyond this, Bush’s increasingly belligerent foreign policy began to place a wedge between leading social democrats in Europe. Most notably, less than five years after issuing a joint manifesto on the future of social democracy – and calling on all European social democrats to work together with them on their project - Blair and Schröder disagreed so vehemently over the question of military action in Iraq that it became difficult to imagine that they had ever shared a joint platform.

Iraq, as with so much of Blair’s legacy, seemed to be the turning point in his ambitions for an international Third Way project. Shorn of the support of Schröder and increasingly allied to Bush in a manner that made overt links with the Democrats all but impossible, Blair now lacked the political capital he had earlier been able to draw on in his dealings with social democrat leaders. Blair’s ambivalent position towards John Kerry’s campaign during the 2004 US Presidential election seemed a far cry from the days when the Clinton and Blair teams had worked so closely together on policy ideas and campaign strategies. Likewise, Schröder’s implacable opposition to the war drove him ever closer to the French political leadership – despite their centre-right leanings - and, ultimately, led him to condemn Blair’s approach as being too ‘Anglo-Saxon’ to be of use in shaping German public policy. Iraq also divided New Labour from their social democratic counterparts in New Zealand and Australia at this time: in both countries the Labo(u)r Party leaders were, unusually, relatively happy to sign up to the label of the ‘Third Way’ (in fact, Mark Latham, the (then) leader of the Australian Labor Party, even had a chapter in Giddens ‘The Global Third Way Debate’), but both were also heavily opposed to the war.

By the time the Progressive Governance network assembled for another of their international summits in October of that year in Budapest, the band of leaders sharing the platform with Blair had noticeably thinned. Helen Clark, Prime Minister of New Zealand, was the only other serving head of a high-income OECD nation present, some of the others were rookies on the world stage (Hungarian Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány was less than month into office) and many of the more established leaders, such as South African President Thabo Mbeki and Romanian Prime Minister Adrian Nastase, had previously been very much on the margins of the network. They might, perhaps, have been joined by Australia’s Mark Latham had his ALP not, in a general election held just days previously, failed dismally in their attempts to dislodge John Howard’s government. As with the US Presidential elections, once close ties that had existed between New Labour and the ALP during the mid-1990s were nowhere to be seen during this campaign, not least because Howard’s decision to join Bush and Blair in deploying Australian troops in Iraq (and Latham’s commitment to withdraw them by Christmas if he took over) again made it impossible for him to be critical of an important right-wing leaning military ally. In the wake of the Iraq conflict, the sense of unity and common purpose to be found amongst the centre-left parties at the turn of the century had dissipated almost as quickly as it had emerged.

From hereon in, the Third Way appeared to slip away into the ether. There were further electoral defeats: Romania’s Nastase fell just months after the Budapest summit; while Blair and Clark squeaked home in 2005, Schröder, his government in gridlock, called a snap election that he lost to Angela Merkel; and, in 2006, Persson’s Social Democrats lost their grip on power in Sweden. But, aside from the electoral defeats, talk of the Third Way itself seemed to almost die out completely. Media discussion of the idea began almost non-existent and even Giddens’ output on the topic waned: there were no new Third Way themed books and, aside from the odd short piece (including a slightly odd article in the New Statesman in which he suggested that Gaddafi was using Third Way ideas to transform Libya), his attentions appeared to be shifting elsewhere. Less than a decade into the new millennium, the new philosophy for the 21st century appeared to be dead-in-the-water.

Or was it? There are good reasons for us being wary of calling time on the Third Way. Its exponents might well claim that there has been a shift towards the centre ground in many of the nations where the Third Way social democrats lost power. In Germany, Merkel’s Chancellorship is only possible on the basis of a power sharing arrangement with the Social Democrats. In the UK, the Conservatives appear to have shifted to the centre also. Certainly Blair regards this as a central part of his legacy; in a dossier outlining his legacy that was recently sent to all Labour MPs, he claimed: ‘Labour in office has combined objectives which had once been considered competing opposites… [consequently] the essence of Third Way politics is now the guiding principle for all mainstream British political parties.’

On top of this, while Blair’s time in the political spotlight has drawn to an end, many of those who played such a key role in cooking up the Third Way in the first place remain very much on the scene. In particular, David Miliband’s role should not be under-estimated: as Head of the Downing Street Policy Unit during Blair’s early years, he was played a leading role in the joint meetings between the New Democrats and New Labour, was responsible for drawing Giddens into these discussions and for mobilising the Nexus network that played an important early role in the debate. Quite what the election of a President Hilary Clinton in 2008 would mean for the Third Way remains to be seen – if it occurs; she was heavily involved in early Third Way events too (in fact, it was Hilary, rather than Bill, Clinton, that lead the New Democrat party delegation at the first ‘Third Way’ gathering at Chequers way back in November 1997).

Ultimately, we might also ask whether the disappearance of the label equates with the disappearance of the political agenda. This seems unlikely. In his latest book – ‘Over to You, Mr Brown – Giddens largely eschews the phrase ‘Third Way’ and even concedes that it ‘is not an especially luminous term’. Yet, his suggestions for a future agenda do not differ radically from his earlier thoughts. What is more, he is resistant to suggestions that it was a mistake to use the term, not least because the choice of such a bold phrase helped open up a wide debate about the future of social democracy. And, despite the debates over terminology, the modernisers looking to push social democrats towards the political centre seem to retain the political momentum across much of the world. How far Blair can claim to have been responsible for shaping this movement is open to question; but in making such a bold attempt to drive the debate along, it seems likely that, though the hand of history is no longer on his shoulder, Blair has ensured that the Third Way will need to merit more than a mere footnote in the history of social democracy.

Below is an interview I conducted with Hugh Bochel, Professor of Public Policy at the University of Lincoln about his book, ‘Welfare Policy Under New Labour: Views from Inside Westminster’ - co-authored with Andrew Defty. The interview appeared originally in Policy World.

Policy World: Hugh, thank you for talking to Policy World about your new book ‘Welfare Policy Under New Labour’. The book itself is based on extensive interviews with MPs and Peers and offers us a fascinating picture not only of the role that Parliament plays in the making of social policy but also documents the views of Parliamentarians themselves about welfare policy and, indeed, the welfare state. Before we talk about some of the detail of the book, could you begin by telling us a little about the history of the project? Some of your earlier work explored the role of Parliament in welfare policy and the new book clearly builds on this.

Hugh Bochel: I was very lucky to have done some work on parliament with Peter Taylor-Gooby in the mid-1980s, effectively at the height of Thatcherism, when we interviewed nearly one hundred MPs. Unsurprisingly, at that time there were major differences between Labour MPs, who generally tended to favour high levels of state spending on welfare and (fairly) redistributive policies, and Conservative MPs who wanted much more minimal, safety net provision, and tax cuts (with consequent reductions in public expenditure). It has always been in my mind that it would be good to be able to repeat that piece of work again, partly because of the changing debates about welfare, but also because I think that until relatively recently the ‘policy’ side of social policy had perhaps had a relatively low profile.

Policy World: So the new book, in effect, represents the picture 20 years on from the earlier study: you asked many of the same sorts of questions in order to both document the views of Parliamentarians on welfare policy now and to compare them with the views of a previous generation of Parliamentarians?

Hugh Bochel: Yes, we wanted to try and make some comparisons between the position at what was a very similar stage of the Blair governments with that of the Thatcher period. And, where general beliefs and attitudes are concerned we were able to do that. Compared with the 1980s Labour MPs had clearly moved towards the centre, driven at least in part by a perception that the public were unlikely to support tax increases to pay for welfare and for many of them this was reinforced by the election defeats of 1979 to 1992. The same was true of Conservatives, who had moved towards the centre, believing that the public would not support tax cuts, again reinforced by consecutive election defeats. It was interesting in some respects, that pre-Cameron, we were picking up some indicators from Conservative MPs that there existed a more liberal, socially-responsible leaning - saying things like ‘There is such a thing as society’ – and this was even among some of the party’s frontbenchers, but given the more right-wing leaning of the party, some of those people felt that they were the only ones; they did not talk to their colleagues about these things. It was only when we looked at the responses to a number of interviews that we became aware of it, and that was probably before the Conservatives themselves did!

Policy World: It is interesting that you say that: I am not sure why, perhaps because the focus of debate tends so often to be on the government, but I wasn’t expecting the story of the Conservative Party to feature so strongly in the book. In the end, the story of its journey seems as important as Labour’s to me, because you seem to be suggesting that both Labour and Conservative MPs have shifted towards the centre somewhat: you even suggest that a new welfare consensus may be emerging. That is quite a bold claim and one that many of the MPs you spoke to seemed uncomfortable with too!

Hugh Bochel: Well, the book is about Parliament, rather than the government, and there are arguments for and against concentrating on one or the other of those, but yes, the Conservatives in Parliament have certainly shifted substantially too. I think that the reasons for the movements of MPs and parties are interesting - there is not one simple explanation, so it is a combination of ‘lessons’ from elections (especially defeats), perceptions of what the public want and will accept, turnover of MPs, and so on. We have tried to be a bit careful about a new consensus, although other people have certainly used the term to describe what is happening in terms of policies and approaches, and many of the pressures may be the same as those observed in Parliament. There is, among many MPs, certainly a relative commonality of views that there is no real public appetite at present for tax cuts or for tax increases, and that in itself limits policy options significantly. There is also considerable agreement among MPs of all parties that the state needs to play an active role in helping people who are in need, particularly to help people out of poverty and to some extent into work. But it is a limited consensus: there are many Labour MPs who continue to favour a redistributive approach to welfare with a significant role for the state; there are also many Conservatives who favour tax cuts and a smaller state; and there are also similar divisions within the Liberal Democrats on these topics. If there is a consensus it may therefore be about what the role of the state can or should be at present, rather than about long-term ideals and deeply held values. There is also, as you say, a general consensus among MPs that there is not a new consensus on welfare!

Policy World: The divisions you found within the parties were very interesting: for one of your questions about who should be responsible for providing welfare, the Conservatives were equally divided three ways between favouring the private sector, public-private partnership and a more general mixed economy of welfare! Am I right in thinking you found that while there seems to be more consensus between parties than in the 1980s, the parties themselves are actually more divided internally than during the Thatcher era?

Hugh Bochel: Yes, that is more or less the case, perhaps reflecting the pressures that the parties have been under since the 1980s. The number of rebellions against the government since 2001 has been one symptom of this, although we found even Labour loyalists, for example, disagreeing on the direction of government policy, so that it is too simplistic to try and draw a clear line between ‘New’ and ‘Old’ Labour MPs, or to portray rebels as ‘the usual suspects’ on social policies. Similarly, while the majority of Conservative and Liberal Democrat MPs are content to follow their Leader’s positions for now, should they enter government, it would appear that there is also the potential for their internal divisions to emerge on welfare issues.

The changes to the House of Lords appear to some extent to have encouraged MPs to rebel, since with no party now having a majority there, MPs know that they can knock bills back and forth between the two Houses, and there was some evidence of attempts to coordinate opposition on some legislation. Again, this may well set precedents that future governments may have to deal with.

Policy World: The role of rebels and rebellions has had quite a lot of attention recently, partly because of Phil Cowley’s book ‘The Rebels’. Cowley is quite forthright in his criticism of simple views that Parliament has become subservient to strong party leaders, pointing to the increasing frequency of rebellions under New Labour. As well as exploring MP’s policy values, you also asked them to reflect on their means of influence. Voting against the government certainly featured, but less formal means of influence often seemed to matter more to MPs.

Hugh Bochel: Absolutely - MPs made the same point back in the 1980s, that they use all sorts of means to influence government - and governments frequently do not even raise the possibility of legislation if they feel that they may not get it through parliament. Rebellions normally take place when other attempts have failed. However, for academics that is very frustrating. We can identify a range of mechanisms that MPs can and do use, but it is almost impossible to say how much these get used or what their impact is. And this is, of course, further confused by the other influences - the media, pressure groups, public opinion, and so on. We need to try and come up with means of taking our analyses a stage further so that we can start to get to grips with these problems.

Policy World: MPs from all parties seemed to be very positive about the role of select committees. People often don’t realise that these committees were only established as recently as 1979. Select committees would have been in their infancy when you conducted the mid-1980s. Would it be right to describe them as a success story or are their merits exaggerated somewhat? I know that some of the MPs you spoke to felt there were still considerable weaknesses in the system.

Hugh Bochel: The Departmental select committees were introduced in 1979 and in many respects they have had a very good record of scrutinising the work of government - they have produced some excellent reports based upon good quality evidence. The change to make Chairs of the committees to some extent a career path - as opposed to moving into ministerial office - has probably also been a helpful reform, although overall the turnover of members means that it is difficult for MPs to develop real specialist knowledge of the areas of work of the committees.

However, there remain some problems with them. Even though more of their reports are now debated - including in Westminster Hall - there is no requirement for this. Also, to have any impact, their reports really have to be unanimous, which some people have argued encourages them to choose topics upon which they are more likely to agree, so some of the more contentious policy areas may not be examined. And, when government is apparently trying to be more joined-up, it can be hard for departmentally based committees to scrutinise such activities.

Policy World: MPs are, of course, representatives of the people. You also explored the extent to which changes in MP’s views have matched changes in public opinion. There were no easy answers here: you did find some evidence that there had been a ‘hardening’ of public attitudes on welfare to accompany the shift of MPs to the centre, but express caution about interpreting the data here.

Hugh Bochel: Well, we did not, of course, do a survey of public opinion, but there is some evidence of a hardening in the work that others have done (but no clear agreement on this). In some ways this uncertainty feeds into MPs views, both because of their representative role and their wish to get (re)elected. There is also some concern among MPs that the attempted solutions of the past have failed - so some Labour MPs believe that universal benefits, for example, did not remove poverty or reduce inequality, and have therefore shifted to favour selective or targeted benefits; similarly, some Conservatives feel that the individualism and market mechanisms of the 1980s and 1990s failed to achieve what they wished, and have consequently come to support some greater role for the state. Having done the research in the 1980s it was at times slightly surreal having Labour MPs called for selectivity and Conservatives for universal provision, although the particular contexts in which they were doing so obviously need to be taken into account. Also, our system obviously means that we elect MPs to be representatives, rather than delegates, and it would be unrealistic to expect them to reflect public opinion on everything. And if we, the public, want more spending on public services, but want to pay the same or less in taxation, we are making politician’s jobs difficult!

Policy World: Finally, I wonder if I could ask you to speculate a little on what your findings might imply about the future social policy in the UK. We have talked already about a possible new cross-party consensus on welfare that is emerging. As you said earlier, this is a limited consensus and, in many ways, a fragile one. However, I was interested in some of the analysis you undertook that compared the views of well established MPs with those of recently elected MPs. If I understood this correctly, for all the parties the values of the latter group appeared to be less sympathetic towards the traditional welfare state than the former. Only one of the Labour MPs elected after 1997 that you spoke to was in favour of a return to universalism and many of the recently elected Conservative MPs had a clear Thatcherite edge. Do you think we will see this tentative new welfare consensus harden as this new generation of MPs starts to replace the older generation - or should we avoid reading too much into this?

Hugh Bochel: I think that this is a difficult area to try and predict, but you are correct in identifying the apparent position - that the more recent cohorts of Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs are perhaps more favourable to an active rather than a universal welfare state, whilst the Conservatives do appear to be more favourable to a basic safety-net role for the state. However, the numbers are rather small here and so this should be perhaps seen as indicative. It might not be too surprising if more recently elected MPs tended to reflect ‘traditional’ party positions - after all, for the most part they are still selected by ordinary party members - and it may be that with time in Westminster their views will change somewhat. However, this is an area about which we know relatively little, so this is largely speculation. Where any ‘consensus’ is concerned, there are also likely to be many other influences, and the views of MPs can only ever be one part of this.

The BBC are reporting a ‘Big rise in broadband connections‘. They say:

“Almost three out of four British households have broadband connection to the internet, figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show. Nearly 73% of homes used broadband in June, up from 54.4% in the same month last year and 18% in 2003.”

Great news! Except it is based on a complete inability to read statistics… in fact, the ONS data they refer to clearly states that only 57% of households have access to internet (be it broadband OR dial-up) - up from 55% in 2005.

What they actually mean to say is that 73% of households with internet connections have broadband access: around 40% of households in total.

The ONS release contains some interesting data not mentioned in the BBC story, including:

• confirmation of the continuing geographic element of the digital divide in the UK (with a clear north-south divide);
• a widening of the gap in usage between men and women (10 percentage points in this survey); and,
• new figures on usage by income (those earning £36,400+ are more than twice as likely to have used the internet in the past three months than those earning <£10,400).

A report on the 2006 SPA conference that took place at the University of Birmingham 18– 20 July 2006; a longer version appeared originally in Policy World.

The 2006 Social Policy Association Conference took place in the middle of a record breaking heat-wave. Temperatures across the UK soared to unrecorded heights with an officially recorded peak of just under 37°C (around 100°F) – the hottest level in 95 years. But that was outside in the sunshine; inside the packed conference rooms on Birmingham University’s Edgbaston campus, hot bodies and heated debate must have pushed the temperature above 40°C on occasions and the weather, that staple of polite British conversation, threatened to displace social policy as the main topic of conversation. Fortunately, the conference organisers swiftly responded to this threat by bussing in gallons of bottled water, though there was little they could do to help speed the arrival of delegates whose train journeys were delayed by the usual buckled train-tracks that seemingly accompany any significant outbreak of sunshine in the UK.

Day 1
The theme of this year’s conference was ‘The State of Welfare: Past, Present and Future’ and the plenary sessions addressed each of these themes in turn. First up, on Tuesday afternoon, was a consideration of the past. Under the heading of ‘Reflections on the Post-1945 Welfare State’ the conference heard from Jose Harris (University of Oxford) and John Macnicol (London School of Economics).

Harris asked us to reconsider the link between the old Poor Law and the post-1945 welfare state, arguing the influence of the former on the latter was probably greater than is usually imagined. She felt that the presentation of ‘heroic’ stories of transformation in the early post-War period had resulted in an unbalanced picture of social policy before and after the War and, indeed, that a reassessment of the Poor Law might lead us to conclude that it was less dreadful than is commonly presumed.

Much of the discontent with the Poor Law, she argued, came from its use as a tool of economic, rather than social, policy. She noted that between 1830 and 1890 Britain’s GDP doubled but its welfare expenditure halved, not least because Poor Law spending was functionally linked to the Treasury’s core economic policy: the gold standard. Yet, a consideration of the detail of provision on the ground – such as the service provided by Poor Law hospitals – showed the Poor Law was far removed from the harsh Dickensian stereotype. While there was discontent, Harris suggested that it was often because people wanted more, not less, of what was being provided by the Poor Law system.

Warming up to the theme of the link between social and economic policy in the Poor Laws, she suggested a window of opportunity for policy change had opened in the inter-war years when the Poor Law’s value as an economic tool declined. There were many factors that contributed to this, including the failure (and subsequent abandonment) of the gold standard as an economic policy, but the Second World War was crucial, not least because it precipitated a move away from an emphasis on international trading that formed the core of Britain’s economy – and shift in focus towards producing essential goods and services internally instead – and because the City of London fell silent during the War too. With this changed economic context, Beveridge’s proposals for National Insurance became functionally suitable and tied in with the new economic orthodoxy propounded by the Treasury and by Keynes.

However, Harris observed there is ‘always a snake in Eden’ and suggested the post-War welfare reforms established in the wake of the Beveridge Report contained two. First, there was what she termed the ‘monetary snake’ that came in the form of inflation. As post-war life slowly returned to normal, demand for goods rose and so too, therefore, did prices. In turn, rising inflation reduced the real value of social security benefits more quickly than had been presumed. Secondly, Harris suggested there was an ‘administrative snake’ that came in the form National Assistance Board (NAB) whose role was to deal with means-tested benefits for the dwindling minority. Harris argued that these two snakes inter-twined as rising inflation lead to pressure for increased social spending, because the Conservative governments of 1951-64, while committed to the welfare state, gave a higher priority to re-establishing Britain’s role in the global money markets. Their strategy for balancing these competing demands of social and economic policy was simply to place more emphasis on means-tested benefits when allocating funds. Harris noted that by 1964, spending on the supposedly dwindling means-tested benefits actually exceeded that on the supposedly core national insurance benefits established in 1946. She argued that when Labour returned to office in that year they did little to reverse this situation and little has changed since.

Harris’ explanation for this was that the situation by 1964 merely reflected a return to the long-term orthodoxy: it was an inevitable outcome of the British economy’s return to its traditional global banking and financial services base and its move away from the temporary post-war emphasis on domestic production. Moreover, she suggested that the antecedents of the contemporary focus on selectivity can be seen here too. Ergo: the legacy of the Poor Law may have influenced current policy more firmly than is often suggested. Harris argued that a reassessment of the Poor Law might, therefore, lead to a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the British system. She offered the conference a few thoughts to take home on this topic:

• the Poor Law may have been more innovative and evolutionary than is often allowed

• the governance structures of the Poor Law were highly democratic and the elected boards were often very representative of their communities

• the vast majority of adult paupers applying for assistance were women, but they were only tenuously included in the universalist turn of the 1940s

• the Poor Law did not legally discriminate against the ‘undeserving’ poor – it actually legally forbade refusal of assistance on moral grounds – and much of the stigma came from general public attitudes rather than the Poor Law itself

• whereas Beveridge established a contractual basis for social support, the Poor Law offered absolutely unconditional rights to support that emanated from its ancient strictures. Beveridge does not, therefore, have a monopoly on the morality of rights.

Harris was followed by John Macnicol who addressed some of the dilemmas that face those trying to analyse social policy from an historical perspective. There were problems, he argued, in handling structure against agency, in deciding whether to place an emphasis on continuity or change and in the temptation to periodise policy eras when policy often evolves in an incremental manner. However, rising to the challenge of reviewing 61 years of policy in just 25 minutes, Macnicol offered us a three-part periodisation of the post-War British welfare state.

Firstly, he suggested, we had the period of the ‘classic welfare state’ that began in the immediate aftermath of the war and with the implementation of the key recommendations of the Beveridge report. He noted that hindsight was a wonderful thing and that many key issues were simply not addressed or were given scant attention in the 1950s – educational disadvantage, NHS underinvestment, poverty and inequality for instance – but felt there was no real shift in the core policy frameworks in this decade. The cracks, however, were beginning to show in the 1960s and in terms of picking a year which marks the end of the ‘classic welfare state’, Macnicol thought 1965 was a good candidate: it was the year the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) were formed and that President Johnson launched his war on poverty in the USA.

However, 1973 was the year that he picked as marking the watershed moment: the Yom-Kippur war and the oil crisis lead to a speeding up of economic change in the UK. He argued that from this date we saw a second period of social policy: one marked by much tighter budgetary control and major shifts in the role of the state. 1973 marked the peak of council housing and the dilution of comprehensive schooling soon followed. Major demographic and family changes took place during this second phase and, of course, Thatcher played a significant role in repositioning the state too.

Indeed, for Macnicol, Thatcher’s role is such that her departure effectively marked the end of this second period of social policy, the final of his three eras being that from 1990 to the present day. He suggested that the social policy of the John Major was well worth investigating, for while he continued many of the Thatcher reforms, her governments had only really turned their attention to social policy in the late 1980s, so many of the reforms were somewhat immature or were still ongoing when Major came. Marketisation of the NHS and the promotion of greater diversity in the format of schools were two key examples he highlighted here. Moreover, Macnicol argued that many of these reforms had strong similarities to those pursued by New Labour. It was because of these similarities – and some of the common pressures such as the increased economic globalisation in the post-Cold War era – that lead to him grouping the Major and Blair governments together in this way.

The first day of the conference also included a pre-dinner address from the SPA President Polly Toynbee. She told the conference that the present was something of an ‘odd time’ for welfare. There was, she argued, a great deal of cynicism that often denigrated the welfare state: from some parts of the media, from the new Conservatives and from the government themselves. With an often weary government drifting towards the final days of the Blair era, there was a real danger that this cynicism may pose some real perils for the welfare state.

Toynbee noted that despite the increased investment in public services, people were still not satisfied with them and often tell pollster that they do not believe things have improved. Yet, they also tell pollsters that their own local school or hospital is good and reconcile the two views by regarding their own experiences as lucky in the face of poor national services. Toynbee worried that the government’s response to this has not been to mount a stout defence but, instead, a buckling at the knees. She firmly believes that things are getting better - that a decade of New Labour has made a difference - but we face a situation where a politician brave enough to say this clearly, as Patricia Hewitt did when addressing Unison delegates about the NHS, is likely to ridiculed or hauled down.

At the same time, Toynbee was keen to note that New Labour’s reforms have been far from perfect. She argued that instead of rallying enthusiasm for the welfare state they have been trying to become more like their predecessors in many areas, often divesting the state of its responsibilities for provision. Toynbee worried about the impact of this on public ethos and asked where the line between public and private ought to be drawn.

Toynbee also had some harsh words for the latest idea to become flavour of the month with the main political parties: the ‘new localism’. She worried about the impact breaking up the centre would have on the idea of the state and wondered if the government had thought about what might happen if responsibility for key social policies is devolved to local communities that are hostile to them. Indeed, she argued that the evidence shows people want good quality, national and universal services – they do not want devolution or local variation in services.

Toynbee concluded by saying there was a need to get back to first principles and praise what is good about the welfare state we have. She asked where the loud voices raised in praise of the state and the good work it is doing are and concluded that many of them are to be found in the SPA. But she reminded the conference that, from time-to-time, there is need to send out a message of support to the welfare state – otherwise it may be too late to do so.

Day 2
The second plenary session – titled ‘Neglected States of Welfare’ – examined the present. Gary Craig (Hull University) and Jean Carabine (Open University) shared the platform on what was the official hottest day on record.

Gary Craig spoke first and addressed the neglected issue of ‘race’. He argued that the overarching nature of discourse around minorities has not been a positive debate about welfare rights but a negative one - with often racist overtones - about the impact of immigration. He said that the ‘war-on-terror’ was bringing an even more hostile tone for certain minority groups and forcefully argued that sections of the press were now out-of-control, printing downright lies about certain groups, safe in the knowledge they will not be punished. The failure of state to enforce anti-racism laws in such instances was, he suggested, shameful. Craig’s critique of the state went further. He suggested the state was not only failing to confront racism, but that its own race relations mechanisms are inadequate too. In particular, he pointed to the way in which many public sector bodies were failing to carry out even some of the most basic tasks that are necessary such as collecting relevant data on its service users. ‘Race’ is relevant dimensions when studying poverty, employment and housing trends, for instance, yet the state’s own data often lacks robustness in these fields. This, Craig suggested, was indicative of the merely marginal concern the British state has with regard to the welfare of ethnic minorities. Craig also had some words of admonishment for the social policy academic community too. He argued that it is still far from uncommon for social policy academic texts to overlook or underplay issues of ‘race’ and that this lacuna extends to social research too. In particular, he suggested there was an absence of coverage in high levels journals – with the honourable exception of Critical Social Policy.

Jean Carabine then spoke on the neglected issues of ‘sex and sexuality’. She argued there was a very rich research agenda that is opened up if we consider the ways in which sexuality and sex might be important to social policy. While these issues are very private and intimate, invoking a complex web of notions, she argued they were not just about what we do but about cultural values attached to sexuality also. Indeed, she argued that sex and sexuality are, in fact, far from private matters in many spheres of social policy, particularly when sexuality falls outside the ‘norm’. Firstly, she suggested, there are areas of social policy where sex or sexuality is the explicit focus of social policy. She noted that social policy often tries to directly control sexuality – in terms of reducing teenage pregnancy for instance. Secondly, there we areas of social policy which speak of sexuality but it is not the explicit focus. Housing policy, for instance, can convey assumptions about sexuality. Finally, she noted that there where many areas of policy where the issues of sex and sexuality are ignored when they are relevant to the needs of individual citizens.

Day 3
The final day of the conference focused on ‘The Future of the Welfare State’, the theme of a plenary session in which Joakim Palme (The Futures Institute, Stockholm) and Stephan Liebfried (University of Bremen) delivered talks. Palme explored the Swedish model of welfare from its origins through to its proclaimed crisis of the 1990s and beyond. In terms of its origins, Palme noted that these were rooted in both political and economic structures. He argued that though the 1930s depression had been crucial in terms of promoting earnings related social insurance benefits, the model had modernised as a response to changes in the labour market – particularly greater female participation and in response to increased ageing of the population. The Swedish model, consequently, delivers low levels of poverty across the life-cycle, low levels of inequality, high levels of employment and high female participation in the labour market while maintaining broad social support.

However, he suggested the 1990s had been a dramatic decade for Sweden, both in terms of its social policy and its economic policy. Palme was part of a commission appointed in 1999 to review the impact of these changes. He highlighted some of the key reforms that had been implemented during this period, including a tightening of some core social security benefits and a reduction in their generosity, greater rationing of some key social services and more user charges and increased concentration of support on those with the greatest need for assistance. In terms of a ‘balance sheet’, these changes had resulted in some things getting worse – employment terms, unemployment, stress and health – but some things had also improved – wages, education and life expectancy. Similarly, while class and gender divisions had remained largely as they were beforehand, divisions around age and ‘race’ were becoming more prominent. In terms of inequality, the pattern of change was complex too: if capital gains were excluded then the there had been little change to the Gini index scores for Sweden, but including it showed a degree of flux. All this hinted at the future challenges he expected for the Swedish model; in particular, he suggested ageing, capital mobility and regional variations would be key policy issues for the model in the coming years.

Liebfried explored the possibility of a social Europe and, more particularly, how the federal structure of the EU might shape future social policies to emerge at the European level. To do this, he drew on an extensive analysis of how federalism had impacted on social policy development in individual countries, but noted that in most developed countries that federalism came before the welfare state rather than the other way around. Indeed, the fact that the EU faces such well developed welfare states may well be the greatest barrier to a social Europe, particularly given the wide variations in welfare regimes see across the continent. He noted that it was somewhat ironic that the moment at which a social model seemed most probable was likely to have been at the time of the Europe of six, for the founder members had the same type of welfare regime. Yet, he was also keen to stress that the EU now has more competency for social policy than the pre-New Deal federal government did in the USA, so the future was by no means certain. Nevertheless, his analysis suggested that federal structures offer by-passes that can undermine social policy development and, given the EU’s structures - particularly its lack of tax raising powers - the most likely future for social policy at the EU level is that of a fairly limited regulatory model.

A longer version of this piece originally appeared in Policy World.

Remember, remember the 28th November… 1990. On this day, some fifteen years ago, and after more than eleven years as Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher’s period of power came to an end. After scraping through the first round ballet of the Conservative Party leadership race - where Michael Heseltine dealt her a fatal blow by gathering the support of more than forty percent of MPs - she eventually announced her intention to stand down on the morning of 22nd November and formally handed over power to John Major almost a week later when he topped a second poll of Conservative MPs.

It goes without saying that her premiership was one of dramatic and often traumatic social and economic change. I was part of the generation dubbed ‘Thatcher’s Children’, a term often invoked but rarely analysed. The idea that a whole generation have grown up with a more selfish set of attitudes because of the values at the heart of government during their formative years remains a powerful one and ‘Thatcher’s children’ is a widely understood – if sometimes throwaway - phrase that is regularly used in everyday speech. Indeed, last year, the then President of the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers (NAS/UWT), Pat Lerew, blamed the group’s ‘devil take the hindmost’ attitudes for classroom indiscipline and the lack of respect shown to teachers. She told delegates at the NAS/UWT conference that: ‘Today’s parents were growing up in the 1980s, Thatcher’s children, when there was no such thing as society and it was everyone for themselves, when anything that had a monetary value was sold and anything that had no monetary value was therefore of no value […] Small wonder then that the children of the day grew up with attitudes that have manifested themselves in their own children.’ (see: Ward and Woodward, 2004).

Yet, while the term is commonly understood, it is less clear whom the term applies to. Martin Powell and John Stewart (2005) had a different group of people in mind – and less dramatic concerns - when, in a recent issue of Social Policy & Society, they worried that the academic world of ‘social policy has lost its ‘historical imagination’, with many students – Thatcher’s children, and in a few years Major’s children – not being exposed to social policy history’. When novelist Malcom Bradbury penned a piece on ‘Mrs Thatcher’s Children’ for the New York Times way back in 1988 he had yet another group in mind as he explored the values and lifestyle of the wealthy yuppies who ‘belong to her post-Industrial Revolution, her high-tech, innovation-driven, banking-led world [and] have made their dreams, careers, fortunes, and sometimes misfortunes, in the Thatcher era’.

All this begs the question ‘who are Thatcher’s Children?’ The people Bradbury described were hardly children – most being in their thirties and some in their forties during the Thatcher era - and almost all had done their growing up long before Thatcher came to power. While many academics are inclined to use the term as Powell and Stewart do when talking of their undergraduate students – often when bemoaning their lack of perspective or lack of sympathy for particular social groups or social policies - the truth is that few current students have any memory whatsoever of the Thatcher years; indeed, those 18 year olds who entered university this autumn had yet to start school when Mrs Thatcher left office and, outside of the circle of mature students, only those candidates with truly remarkable abilities of recall will have any first hand memories of the Thatcher era. Of course, Thatcher’s influence reverberates beyond the time she spent in power and the values of today’s teenagers are likely to have been heavily shaped by both the policies she introduced and the values of friends and family who lived through the Thatcher era; then again, much the same applies to the Major years, the Callaghan years, the Wilson years and so on.

If the term means anything, then surely it applies – as used by Lerew - to those who were children during the Thatcher era: people whose formative years spanned the period 1979-90, whose memories of Prime Ministers before Thatcher are at best hazy and whose first opportunity to cast a vote came after the Iron Lady had left office. In other words, Thatcher’s children are those who are aged around 25-35 today, many of whom, as Lerew observed, are now parents with children of their own.

A quick exploration of the British Social Attitudes allows us to compare the attitudes of Thatcher’s children with those of the rest of the country’s adult population. While the analysis here is rather crude, the data offers us some interesting discussion points.

Firstly, it is worth noting that – despite the hype offered in some quarters - the differences between the Thatcher generation and the rest are often very small and sometimes as good as non-existent. For instance, there is hardly a cigarette paper between the two on opinion about the gap between rich and poor, with 85% in both groups thinking it too large, 1% too small and the rest about right (these figures disregard ‘don’t knows’). Similarly, in both groups around a third agree strongly with the proposition that people who break the law should be given stiffer sentences and around 30% strongly agree that for some crimes the death penalty is the most appropriate sentence. Indeed, the survey’s composite left-right scale showed no discernable difference in the traditional left-right political leanings of Thatcher’s children.

Graph 1

In terms of support for the welfare state, the survey again found much to unite the two groups. So, for instance, in both groups around 85% agree that ‘large numbers of people these days falsely claim benefits’ and just under 80% believe the government should spend the same or less on supporting the unemployed. In fact, the survey’s composite welfare scale – which aims to measure the respondent’s degree of sympathy towards the welfare state - shows almost identical mean figures for the two groups.

Graph 2

However, the survey data does highlight some differences between the groups. In broad political terms, there seems to be a slight but significant lowering of interest in public affairs, with a smaller percentage of Thatcher’s children describing themselves as having much interest in what is going on in politics and fewer having ever written to a Member of Parliament. (Interestingly, despite common suggestions that the younger generation are now more inclined towards direct action, there is little difference between the groups in terms of having ever participated at demonstrations, though more of Thatcher’s children seem willing to go on a march if they were to be suitably angered by an issue.)

Graph 3

In social policy terms, there are some slight differences over priorities for public spending – Thatcher’s children placing a little more emphasis on education – but the significance of these differences are somewhat moot given that these two items are easily the top two priorities for both groups and the overall rank ordering of spending priorities shows no major differences. More interesting, perhaps, are differences between the two groups with regard to social support for specific groups within the society: Thatcher’s children are less supportive of increases in spending on benefits for retired people than the rest of the nation – though both feel more should spent (66% amongst Thatcher’s children against 75% for the rest) - and for increases in spending on benefits for disabled people who cannot work (though again with a majority favouring more: 61% amongst Thatcher’s children against 71% for the rest).

Graph 4

So far, so true the stereotype perhaps? This may be so, but if we look at attitudes towards support for some other groups in society we see a more complex picture emerging. With regards to social support for parents working on low incomes we see the picture reversed, with Thatcher’s children being slightly more in favour of increased spending (71% against 68%) but with twice as many being in favour of much more spending here (14% against 7%). Moreover, in terms of social support for single parents, Thatcher’s children prove to be much more supportive of increases in expenditure with 52% of them in favour of such action compared to just 34% amongst others.

Graph 5

These differing attitudes towards social support may in part be attributable to the two groups’ chances of falling into the specified client groups: Thatcher’s children are more likely to be working parents with young children and are still some way from retirement for instance. However, they also hint at a third area where there are some clear differences between the two groups: attitudes towards family forms and family life. So, for example, Thatcher’s children have a much more relaxed view towards marriage (with more than twice as many of them when compared to the rest of the population strongly agreeing that it is ‘all right for a couple to live together without intending to get married’) and differing views on the impact of female employment on children and family life (Thatcher’s children are around half as likely to agree that pre-school children suffer when their mother works for instance). Indeed, the survey’s libertarian-authoritarian scale – which aims to gauge adherence to ‘traditional values’ – is the only of one its three composite measures that shows any sort of generational patterning, with Thatcher’s children showing a small but significant shift away from authoritarian social views.

Graph 6

In short, Thatcher’s children show clear signs of being more socially liberal than their forbearers and a majority of them are clearly in support of increasing state expenditure in many policy areas and, indeed, favour it more heavily than other generations in key areas. While there are certainly areas in which they are less supportive of the welfare state than other generations, it is worth noting that their position is far from straightforward. Indeed, when asked whether the creation of the welfare state is one of Britain’s proudest achievements, they are less likely to agree with this proposition than previous generations but few regard it is a failure either; instead, they are much more likely to say the neither disagree or agree with what is a rather crude question - a reflection of their more complex position perhaps? Either way, the evidence does little to support the picture of a generation whose hearts and minds have been captured by Mrs Thatcher’s extolling of ‘Victorian’ social values and economic libertarianism.

Graph 7

In many ways this is hardly surprising. As the more astute reviews of her legacy have observed, Mrs Thatcher lives on not in the values of a single generation that grew up with her as their Prime Minister, but in the institutions she created and removed and the policy programmes she instituted and eradicated. How, of course, could it be any other way? If her influence on values was so great, then surely we should all, as Nick Assinder (2004) observed, be ‘Thatcher’s children and grandchildren’ now rather than just one cohort of us? It is puzzling too that it should so often be presumed that those of this generation who grew up outside of the bubble of prosperity Thatcher created mainly in South East England should be so fond of her values. Might it not, on the contrary, be that many of the twenty- and thirty-somethings who witnessed first hand the impacts of unemployment, the miners’ strike and rising inequality on their own parents are instead driven towards greater support for strong social policies? As North East based film maker Craig Hornby recently said when being interviewed about his documentary on the collapse of mining in the region, A Century of Stone, ‘I’m one of Thatcher’s children. I left school in 1983 and I’d like to thank her for giving me something to rebel against’.

Hornby’s usage goes against the grain of its popular understanding. So too does much of the statistical evidence. Fifteen years after Mrs Thatcher left office, perhaps its time to kick into touch the idea that ‘her children’ are carrying forward Thatcherite values.

References & Sources:

Assinder, N (2004) ‘Are We All Thatcher’s Children Now?’, BBC News Online, May 5th, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3670179.stm

Bradbury, M (1988) ‘Mrs Thatcher’s Children’, New York Times, December 11th.

National Centre for Social Research (2004) British Social Attitudes Survey, 2002 [computer file]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Archive [distributor], March 2004. SN: 4838.

Newton, K (2004) ‘The hills are alive’, The [Middlesbrough] Evening Gazette, October 8th.

Powell, M and Stewart, J (2005) ‘History and Social Policy’, Social Policy & Society, 4 (3), pp293-4.

Ward, L and Woodward, W (2004) ‘Thatcher’s children are today’s parents - and we’re paying price, say teachers’, The Guardian, April 13th.

Science dull and hard, pupils say (via BBC):

Some 51% of teenagers think science lessons are boring, confusing or difficult, a survey suggests. Figures from the OCR exam board, which interviewed 950 children aged 13 to 16 in England, showed 7% thought people working in the area are “cool”.

No information, though, on whether these teenagers find other subjects any less boring, confusing or difficult. (And, after all, it’s school, not a trip to the amusement arcade.) Only 7% thought scientists were cool. So? Are all scientists definition cool? Should they be? Maybe if they’d asked the teenagers a more sensible question (a more scientific one?) they might have got a more meaningful answer.

Clara Kenyon, director of general assessment at OCR, said: “The results go to show the growing apathy in today’s students about science and their ignorance of modern day achievements. It is startling that no students named those responsible for recent scientific advances, for example, Ian Wilmut who cloned Dolly the sheep or Professor Colin Pillinger who headed the Beagle 2 space probe to Mars project.”

Again, why should teenagers be familiar with these personalities? Many, I am sure, would be familiar with the general stories behind Dolly the sheep or Beagle 2 (though it might be argued that neither was much to write home about!) - does it matter if they can’t recall the names of the chief investigators? Would we be concerned if they couldn’t name some high profile geographers, historians or mathemeticians? I don’t think so.

So what was the point of this unscientific survey of science?

OCR is launching a different type of science GCSE from next year, which it says will encourage more involvement with modern topics such as cloning or mobile phone technology.

Ah, I see…

Last week, the GMB raised concerns about the government’s use of private consultants, claiming that it had bought in advice and support to the tune of at least £1.47 billion in 2003/4 (the figure being based on answers to Parliamentary Questions about specific parts of government and, therefore, not covering its full range of functions).

Their Press Release notes that ‘At the average rates of pay for consultants that means the government are employing an army of 27,093 private consultants a year’…. and this is on the assumption (based on Official Statistics) that consultants earn £51,770 pa on average.

There was little surprise in the finding that the Department of Work and Pensions tops the table here: it spent £307 million on consultants (which the GMB claim approximate as 5,930 consultants). Paul Kenny, the GMB Acting General Secretary, was pretty enraged, arguing: “These figures show that the tax payer is paying far too much for management and consultancy advice. There is scope to save money on these consultants and to spend the money instead on the front line public services. The culture of continual re-organisation in the public sector is creating a field day for consultants”.

Much of the usage of outside consultants is, of course, as a consequence of large scale computerisation programmes, where external contractors are routinely used. However, the story stretches beyond the front-line and right up to the top policy making echelons of the civil service too according to a story on the front page of today’s Guardian: ‘Fears over management consultant’s role in No 10‘.

A former management consultant controversially hired by Tony Blair to head Downing Street’s policy unit will have a role in deciding the appointment of Britain’s most senior civil servant, the Guardian has learned.

The prime minister has delayed the decision on who should become the new £220,000-a-year cabinet secretary while he takes the advice of David Bennett, a former partner with the global US consultancy McKinsey, on the appointment. Mr Bennett has no experience of politics or government.

His arrival in Downing Street on June 1 has attracted criticism from Labour backbenchers and trade unions who are unhappy at the number of management consultants being brought into Whitehall. His involvement in such a sensitive decision involving the civil service will be taken as proof of the influence that figures from the private sector now wield.

Interestingly:

Mr Bennett, who has a 20-year association with McKinsey - dubbed the “Jesuits of capitalism” - is expected to press civil servants to become more entrepreneurial and push through an electronic revolution in the delivery of all services. He backs the McKinsey slogan that “everything can be measured, and what gets measured gets managed”.

This policy could have massive implications for further job cuts - on top of the 84,000 already due to go - and will put him on a collision course with the Whitehall unions where resentment is already high about the appointment of business analysts and computer project failure.

And:

He came to Mr Blair’s attention after he was involved in the ground-breaking NHS project - due to start this year - to put everyone’s medical records online. He produced a report by McKinsey which urged the purchase of off-the-shelf software from major commercial companies or paid them to adapt of one of their systems. Critics say the report sounded the death knell for small computer firms or for the government developing its own systems to bid for the project.

Also:

He previously advised Tessa Jowell on IT strategy

Is all of this, perhaps, an illustration of how deeply the IT/consulting interests have penetrated the core policy networks in the UK?

Not that we are aware of the full nature of Bennett’s role. In the spirit of open government, ‘Downing Street yesterday declined to provide any details of Mr Bennett’s appointment by not disclosing his six-figure salary, duties, hours or his age. A spokeswoman said: “No press release is being issued, and MPs will have to table questions if they want to ask about his salary or job.”‘

According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Information Technology Report, the Nordic countries account for four of the six most networked economies in the world. The USA slip down to fifth (from first), being replaced at the top by Singapore, while the UK come in at number 12 (up from 15).

Leading Nations:

1. Singapore

2. Iceland

3. Finland

4. Denmark

5. US

6. Sweden

7. Hong Kong

8. Japan

9.Switzerland

10.Canada

11.Australia

12.United Kingdom

13.Norway

14.Germany

15.Taiwan

There’s an interview with the Chief Economist and Director of the WEF Global Competitiveness Programme, Augusto Lopez-Claros, on the site too, in which he says:

The Nordic countries again top the rankings this year, with Iceland, Finland, Denmark and Sweden in the second, third, fourth and sixth place respectively. Iceland, in particular, recorded an impressive ICT performance, climbing from 10th position in 2003 to second out of 104 economies in 2004, which represents the greatest improvement among the top performers.

Such a development does not come as a surprise as Nordic countries have consistently shown very high ICT penetration and usage rates and come out among the top performers over the last four years.

Besides having an excellent macroeconomic, regulatory and infrastructure environment, those countries share a commitment by their governments, business communities and households to ICT use. In addition, they are constantly innovating.

As a result, Sweden, Finland and Denmark outrank some of the larger European economies in the number of US patents registered per million population, a frequently used indicator of a nation’s innovation record.

World Usability Day (via usabilidadedigital) has a focus on e-government this year. Events are planned for November 3, 2005.