ABSTRACT
As has been noted in earlier chapters, with the arrival of the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 government policy shifted from the Keynesian demand management of the economy, the principles of social justice, full employment and the eradication of poverty to deflationary macro-economic management and the advocacy of flexible labour markets (see Chapters 3, 4, 6 and 12). The net result has been that paid work and earnings have become more and more polarised in the UK. And as ‘income is one of the most important influences over the patterns of life chances’ (Hamnett 1999:129), in this chapter we highlight the socioeconomic impacts of the ‘fissuring’ of the population into segments, while in Chapter 16 the spatial consequences are explored in detail.
