ABSTRACT
The new Labour Government is probably going to have to learn that the important offices of state are now the Home Office, Education and Social Security, rather than the Treasury and the DTI. For so long the Labour Party has asserted – quite understandably given its origins and the period in which it came to prominence – that the overriding determinant of welfare was economic. What it now needs to realise, despite the common wisdom, is that we have entered a new era in which that economic problem is largely – and perhaps more because of technology than public policy – solved. It is a matter of empirical fact that this Government, Tony Blair’s Government, is presiding over a country which is three times better off than that which Clem Attlee and his very brave welfare state creators faced in 1945. If you extrapolate the rate of growth that we have had, even though we have moaned about it, over the last 20 years, we are going to be, by the middle of the 21st century, three times better off again. The point is, however, that it is the problem of production which has been solved (or at least is being solved) and not the problem of distribution.
