ABSTRACT
Following its landslide election victory in 1997, the ‘New Labour’ government in Britain has adopted the express aim of changing social behaviour as part of its project of ‘modernisation’. A major objective of this drive is to use legislation to sustain and induce particular types of partnership and parenting and to discourage other, less favoured, forms. This is because, as Prime Minister Tony Blair put it in a 1996 speech, while ‘family values’ are the key to a ‘decent society’, there is a ‘moral deficit’ that leads to an ‘indifference to the undermining of family life’ (Blair 1996a). Drawing on a communitarian discourse (see Etzioni 2000), governments should use the law to inculcate appropriate family values and so ‘rebuild social order and stability’ (Blair 1996b). This remoralising of the family links to a concern to extend paid work as a moral duty for citizens (cf. Lister 1998), or as the Prime Minister wrote in the popular tabloid newspaper the Daily Mail, ‘If you can work, you should work’ (10.2.1999). ‘Work’ in this discourse simply means paid work – unpaid caring work is not included, and those using benefits to support parenting, for example, are implicitly seen as workshy and even immoral. Thus in launching the Social Exclusion Unit in his first major speech outside Parliament since the 1997 election, Blair (1997) talked of a growing underclass of unemployed young men and young single mothers, and the need to bring this ‘new workless class back into society and into useful work’. It was, he went on, ‘an offence against decency that work should be allowed to disappear … to be replaced by an economy built on benefits, crime, petty thieving and drugs’. In this speech, lone mothers’ labour in bringing up children is not counted as useful, and ‘society’ seems to be limited to the employed. Receipt of benefits is not only set alongside criminality but is also held to mean both economic inactivity and personal idleness. This reform discourse was subsequently codified in policy terms in two 1998 Green Papers: Supporting Families and A New Contract for Welfare.1 Both set out frameworks for much of the succeeding legislation in the first New Labour government up to 2001 (see also Chapter 3.3).
