ABSTRACT
New Labour’s welfare reforms are supposed to improve Britain’s competitiveness and prosperity as well as to tackle social exclusion. Just as communitarians and new institutionalists argue that social cohesion and networks lead to more committed and dynamic companies that are capable of a stronger and more competitive performance, so New Labour evokes a society in which morally empowered individuals promote social cohesion and so an economically vibrant nation. However, the main policies by which New Labour seeks to improve the country’s competitiveness and prosperity are, of course, economic ones. As we saw in the last chapter, some political scientists assimilate these economic policies to those of the New Right. They deploy rational-choice theories of party competition to argue that New Labour has pursued a politics of catch-up in which it has adopted the economic policies of the New Right in order to compete with the electoral successes of the Conservatives. An interpretive approach suggests, in contrast, that we should explain New Labour’s economic policies as a product of a contingent process in which it has modified the tradition of social democracy in response to issues highlighted by the New Right, where its response to these issues reflects the influence upon it of communitarianism and new institutionalism.
