Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- List of tables and figures
- List of acronyms
- one Introduction
- two Public expenditure and the public/private mix
- three New Labour’s health policy: the new healthcare state
- four The personal social services and community care
- five Education, education, education
- six Housing policy under New Labour
- seven New Labour and social security
- eight New Labour and employment, training and employee relations
- nine The new politics of law and order: Labour, crime and justice
- ten Citizenship
- eleven Accountability
- twelve Bridging the Atlantic: the Democratic (Party) origins of Welfare to Work
- thirteen Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
twelve - Bridging the Atlantic: the Democratic (Party) origins of Welfare to Work
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- List of tables and figures
- List of acronyms
- one Introduction
- two Public expenditure and the public/private mix
- three New Labour’s health policy: the new healthcare state
- four The personal social services and community care
- five Education, education, education
- six Housing policy under New Labour
- seven New Labour and social security
- eight New Labour and employment, training and employee relations
- nine The new politics of law and order: Labour, crime and justice
- ten Citizenship
- eleven Accountability
- twelve Bridging the Atlantic: the Democratic (Party) origins of Welfare to Work
- thirteen Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Introduction
In January 1988, the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party endorsed The Charter against workfare (NEC, 1988). The Charter had been agreed by a number of trade unions and local authorities, laying out four principles for participation in government schemes to reduce unemployment. The most important was a commitment to make all initiatives voluntary:
… people should join the scheme because they want to, not because they fear they will lose all or part of their benefits if they don’t. Compulsion is a recipe for lower standards, resentment and discrimination. (Charter against workfare, PD 1201/December 1987, p 1, NEC, 1988)
Labour's rejection of workfare, an arrangement under which claimants must take work in exchange for social security benefits, was unequivocal.
Labour's approval of the voluntary principle was uncontroversial. The idea that benefit entitlement should be unconditional was at the core of Marshallian social rights of citizenship. This commitment to universal social rights was a benchmark of the Party's welfare programme between 1945 and 1992 (Marshall, 1964; Lister, 1997b; see Deacon, 1996, for a critical view). Labour ministers criticised the various schemes floated by the Conservatives during the late 1980s and early 1990s which attached conditions to receipt of benefit (King, 1995). For example, Robin Cook was blunt in defending the benefit rights of those who voluntarily left work: “Those people's families are entitled to the same diet, clothes and heating allowances as the families of other unemployed people” (The Sunday Times, 6 March 1988). He later criticised the “humiliating hoops” through which the Conservatives wanted claimants to jump by making benefit conditional (The Times, 23 November 1988). When the Tories edged towards workfare in 1992 and 1993, Tony Lloyd, a member of Labour's frontbench described such arrangements as “socially unacceptable” (The Times, 5 February 1993). These schemes were irrelevant to the needs of the unemployed and they were unfair: they would create a two-tier labour force. It was “demeaning”, claimed Frank Dobson, to demand that people “work for next to nothing” (Financial Times, 5 February 1993).
On 9 November 1995, Gordon Brown, Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, announced an ambitious plan, called Welfare to Work, to tackle the problem of youth unemployment (Brown, 1995). Four options would be designed for those aged between 18 and 25 who had been out of work for six months.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- New Labour, New Welfare State?The 'Third Way' in British Social Policy, pp. 257 - 280Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 1999