ABSTRACT
Health policy pundits such as Chris Ham had provided legitimacy for the Tories' 1990s' national health services (NHS) reforms. The Labour government's initial promise for the NHS was to 'cut the bureaucracy associated with the internal market'. Later research on the 1990s NHS 'market' could take a wider sample over more years, and argued – in a useful, balanced report – that the evidence on the reforms as a whole was fairly equivocal. The organisation of a market within public services tends to lead to central control, a lesson Labour forgot from less than ten years before. Labour sounded 'anti-market' while clearly planning to retain the totem of the Tories' market, the 'purchaser/provider split'. There is a strong strain of thinking which is convenient to New Labour, in that it fulfils the agenda of sounding 'progressive', Old Labour and even socialist, while also promoting the New Labour agenda of markets and managerialism.
