Introduction: New Labour and framing

‘The figure of the consumer’, Vidler and Clarke have written, ‘stands at the heart of New Labour's approach to the reform and modernisation of public services.’ Consumerism, that is, ‘the commitment to organising services around a public understood as consumers of services’, emerged after 2000 as the central motif in the Blair government's narrative, ‘a generic organizing principle for public service reform’ (Vidler and Clarke, 2005, pp 19, 20; see also Clarke et al, 2007). What were the main elements of New Labour's consumer narrative? Why was it adopted and so vigorously propounded? To what extent did it amount to a major break with past Labour (and traditional social democratic) thinking?

A key objective of this chapter is to elucidate New Labour's understanding of ‘consumerism’. In so doing it shall draw heavily on Schon and Rein's concept of the frame. Frames can be understood as analytical devices which supply order and intelligibility to a complex, ever-shifting and confusing world (Schon and Rein, 1994). The first part of the chapter, after a brief sketch of the concept of ‘framing’, consists of a discussion of what will be called New Labour's ‘diagnostic frame’; that is, the way it defined the problem of ‘modernising’ the public services (for reasons of both space and political saliency, we focus on education and healthcare). The next section considers New Labour's ‘prescriptive frames’; that is to say, its major policy prescriptions which emerged from this diagnosis, The final section explores ambiguities and problems within New Labour's consumerist narrative.

In this chapter I draw upon documentary research (government papers of various types and ministerial policy speeches) and a series of interviews conducted mainly between 2004 and 2007. The people interviewed include former government ministers, former government advisers and MPs, and clinicians. Some were on the record but most were off (for a list, see Shaw, 2007).