ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a different approach to evaluating future prospects for social welfare in Britain. It offers a brief description of the emergence of New Labour into British politics. The chapter offers an historical perspective of key ideological positions on welfare, highlighting how different viewpoints came, as a result of key social, political and economic factors, to predominate at different moments in time, influencing the shape and direction of social policy developments. It shows how social policy developments in Britain were largely influenced by two distinct but interconnected bodies of thought: Liberalism and Fabian socialism. The chapter offers a different understanding of how social relationships are mediated through social policy intervention. It describes the five pillars of welfare in Britain –health, education, housing, income maintenance and family policy and concludes by drawing together the threads of these analyses in a critique of New Labour policies.
