ABSTRACT
An interacting series of factors – including low wages, poor working conditions, reduced rights, shrinking trade unions, few benefit entitlements, limited childcare – would ensure that women were more exposed to the flexible economy and the retrenched welfare state. The economic and welfare reforms created inequalities. Added to mass unemployment and deindustrialisation, the strike broke the spine of the labour movement. The Labour Party would soon start to keep unions at greater arms-length than before – politically if not financially. One aspect of public squalor that forced its way to the front of the political stage was environmental squalor. As government left itself with less to do one obvious consequence lay in Britain's foetid beaches and trash-heaped landscapes. The new government's economic philosophy claimed the status of scientific truths. Markets had to be 'rolled forward' – forcibly if necessary – into the space left by government.
