ABSTRACT
In this chapter we examine a range of challenges faced by what we shall for the moment call ‘social national’ citizenship, and we go on to offer a tentative assessment of the prospects of sustaining this form of citizenship in contemporary Britain. Our review in Chapter 1 of the distinctive character of citizenship in Britain has implicitly recognised that citizenship is inherently contested – both as a concept and in terms of the historically specific forms in which it is institutionalised. No less an authority than Aristotle, in The Politics, recognised that citizenship is a matter about which ‘there is no unanimity of agreement’ (1981: 168). Moreover, the progressive establishment and extension of citizenship rights have, to a significant extent, been the product of religious, class, gender and ethnic contestation. And the extension of such rights in the future is unlikely to be conflict-free: as Ralph Dahrendorf has observed ‘the class conflict for the extension of the entitlements of citizenship is the precondition for extending the range of those eligible for them’ (1996: 35).
