Chapter One discusses some of the ways in which Britain's welfare regime differs from that of the United States. These differences are important, but they have not prevented what Robert Walker (1998) has termed the “Americanisation” of the British welfare debate. Indeed there is now an extensive literature on the impact of American ideas upon New Labour thinking on welfare reform, especially its welfare-to-work programmes (Theodore and Peck, 1998; White, 1998; King and Wickham-Jones, 1999). More than anything else, this Americanisation has served to heighten New Labour's preoccupation with the problem of welfare dependency. It has meant that the British debate is less dominated by economic considerations than it would otherwise have been and more concerned with issues of individual responsibility and personal behaviour. In this way the American influence has enhanced and sustained a moralism that the New Labour government shares with its Conservative predecessors, but which distinguishes it from previous Labour governments – and indeed from social democratic governments in continental Europe (Deacon, 2000).

It follows from this that there are now important commonalities between the British and American approaches to welfare reform. They have both been formulated in response to conservative critiques of welfare, and both seek to reach an accommodation with aspects of those critiques. In consequence, the central features of welfare reform in both countries have been an emphasis upon the obligations rather than the rights of welfare claimants, the introduction of work requirements, and the attempt to ‘make work pay’. Both approaches have been influenced strongly by the evidence of so-called dynamic analyses of welfare and incomes, and both have sought to address popular anxieties about welfare. Most importantly, the two approaches share a common perception of the purpose of welfare reform, and draw upon and articulate similar understandings of human nature and of the relationship between welfare and human behaviour (Deacon, 2002). It is these similarities that make it reasonable to talk of policy transfer between the two countries, despite the different institutional and cultural contexts within which those policies operate.

There is, however, one significant difference between the objectives of welfare reform in Britain and the US. This is the commitment that New Labour has made to the immediate reduction and eventual elimination of child poverty.