ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the relationship of the social services to the system of representative government and its administrative apparatus. A number of assumptions and understandings that have underpinned the postwar social democratic state are ceasing to hold good. Since the oil crisis the rate of economic growth has dropped in Britain almost to zero. There is no longer the wherewithal to finance extensions to social services and to give everyone a bit extra. In future the real cost of energy and raw materials is likely to rise instead of declining, and thus to absorb more of the results of the improvements of productivity that would otherwise have been released for consumption. In the case of the conventional left or state socialist approach, the solution represents an intensification of the problems rather than an answer to them. The state socialists would extend and strengthen the existing structures of the state, and by democratic control usually mean party or trade union control.
