ABSTRACT

The General Election in May 1997 saw a radical shift in political power in Britain. After eighteen years of Conservative government a self-defined ‘New’ Labour government came to power. For New Labour, the challenge was to set about ‘modernising’ Britain. The challenges for the renewal of Britain included the development of top-quality public services, especially in education and health, tough action on crime, forging a new partnership with business, introducing radical constitutional reform, and reconfiguring the UK’s relationship with Europe. While Labour made it clear that it accepted many of the changes in economic and social policy made by the previous governments, it stressed that such policies had been socially divisive, leading to unacceptable levels of inequality, exclusion, insecurity and polarisation (Hay, 1999). In direct opposition to Margaret Thatcher’s (in)famous statement that there is ‘no such thing as society’, the Labour government (and especially Prime Minister Blair) stressed its commitment to a set of core values or a distinctive political morality that underpinned its policies (Driver and Martell, 1998). Blair announced his aim as nothing less than ‘to define a new relationship between citizen and community for the modern world’. The moves to make education for citizenship a statutory part of the school curriculum must be read as part of this modernising ‘project’.