The Labour Party is recasting its policies on the welfare state and one substantial contribution to its thinking is the Report of its Commission on Social Justice.footnote1 What informed the Commission’s approach? Without saying as much, they appear to have been governed by the belief that to win the next election the Labour Party must bow to the pressures of the international market, reduce long-standing aspirations to social equality and withdraw from the most costly commitments to the welfare state. This led them to neglect what might be done about globalization, to discount stark national evidence about current economic trends and to ignore the implications of that evidence for social policies.
The Commission’s Report attempts to bring off a fine balancing act—but on several counts does not succeed. Modernization is conceived as a problem of maintaining the allegiance of traditional Labour supporters while persuading them that it is no longer necessary or possible to aim for social equality and community through stuctural change. In the process, it is supposed, Labour will placate business interests or even harness them to its cause, and appeal to middle-of-the-road voters. New Labour will ‘transform the welfare state from a safety net in times of trouble to a springboard for economic opportunity’ with measures which enhance employability by investment in training and adult education, establish a minimum hourly wage and other legal rights, and possibly shift taxation from earnings to environmental pollution and resource use, including the use of roads.
If this characterization is correct, Labour’s domestic policies on health, education, housing, community care, social security, personal taxation and employment will now be altogether different from those it pursued after the War. The policies seem to depend on vacating the ‘social’ place in Europe and the world associated with Labour’s construction of a welfare state. This conclusion, if not the exact policies which flow from it, appear
There is an alternative approach, which the Commission did not seriously consider. It starts from the recognition that problems of impoverishment, social polarization and political instability have reached dramatic, and indeed threatening, proportions because powerful forces within the international market are operating in conditions of diminishing democratic restraint. The evidence for these disturbing trends is overwhelming.footnote3 As a consequence poverty and inequality are deepening at an alarming rate.footnote4 In these circumstances, a major national plan for social reconstruction, put forward in common cause with partners in Europe and elsewhere, is urgently needed to slow down, halt and even reverse these disastrous social trends. Given this background, the tasks for domestic policy then fall into place: complicity with international market forces
This alternative approach can be considered at various different levels. If we consider different models of the ‘Welfare State’, then we must ask whether Britain should, following the United States, take the path of the ‘gradual erosion’footnote5 of what is already close to becoming a ‘residual’ welfare state; or whether it should instead emulate the greater resistance to such institutional dismantlement displayed by some of the central European and Scandinavian countries; or even attempt to reinstate welfare in conformity with a new European model involving better integrated social and economic development.footnote6 Of course, a more forthright case for measures to establish a radically more democratic and equal society, with necessarily a much larger public sector and system of public service, should be argued. But we can start by registering the decline from past standards. Social scientists attempt to classify the policy systems of different countries—sometimes in relation to measured fulfilment of declared objectives like social equality or equality of opportunity or sometimes just in relation to expenditure on certain arbitrarily defined public (and private) services. The uk seems to score better on the latter than the former criteria, partly because of its entrenched class system,footnote7 but nevertheless even on these grounds, when compared with other industrial countries, it ranks low.
In the past some social scientists and historians saw the British welfare state largely as an accommodation to capitalism, and as perpetuating, rather than seriously modifying, class inequalities.footnote8 Such criticism did not
The Borrie Commission’s formal assignment was therefore potentially path-breaking. Its work was bound to reflect the preoccupations of its members. The Commission was set up in December 1992 and its report was published in November 1994. Its chairman was Sir Gordon Borrie, formerly the Director-General of Fair Trading. Among the fifteen other members of the Commission were some who were not members of the Labour Party and one, David Marquand, who had been a member of the Steering Committee of the sdp from 1981 to 1988. Trades union and public service representation was very thin. The chairman declined to reassure Labour supporters that their historic commitments would be respected. Indeed, his press comments often gave the Conservatives a stick with which to beat the Labour Party. For example, an article in the Observer on 2o June 1993 indicated that the Welfare State was at risk. It