The ‘long view’ offered in the contributions to the ‘40th anniversary preface’ offers scant consolation to a social policy analyst today in the UK, and one suspects in much of Europe and beyond. Jonathan Bradshaw notes the alarm 40 years ago from the then Tory government when unemployment reached one million. At the end of 2011, one million was the level of youth unemployment in the UK! Total unemployment stood at 2.64 million. And this is before the bulk of the public expenditure cuts committed to by the 2010 Conservative–Liberal Democrat Coalition government take effect; cuts that Clare Ungerson, reflecting on what was happening during her editorship of the Year Book/Social Policy Review in the 1980s, acknowledges are unprecedented.

The implications of the planned public expenditure cuts and the Coalition's broader ‘reform agenda’ for specific areas of social policy are addressed in Part One of this collection, which focuses on current developments in the UK. In her introduction to the anniversary preface, Caroline Glendinning identified the increasing internationalisation of the Year Book/Social Policy Review as one of its most significant developments. In keeping with that trend, the remaining two parts of the collection turn their focus to other countries. Part Two includes an examination of social policy in ‘developing’ countries, including in Africa and the Arab nations. Part Three considers the fate of social welfare in countries among the worst hit by the ‘economic crisis’, including Ireland, Greece, Spain, Portugal and Iceland.

Part One: Current developments

Majella Kilkey

Part One analyses developments during 2011 in five key areas of social policy – social security, housing, higher education, family support and health. Unsurprisingly given that it was the first year of the Conservative–Liberal Democrat Coalition government, 2011 has been a busy one in all of those policy areas. As we see across the chapters, the ‘politics of coalition’ per se has contributed to the ground upon which developments have been taking place. So too has the continuing global economic crisis and the cutbacks in public expenditure that, for some at least, this is deemed to have necessitated. In all areas examined, though, it is Conservative ideology that seems the dominant component in the developments that have occurred.