ABSTRACT
Two steps seem particularly noteworthy, and are certainly without parallel in the Conservative Party – either when in government, or since moving into opposition. First, constitutional revision, as part of its ‘revisionism’ or ‘modernization’ strategy designed explicitly to secure the trust of the electorate in order to win public office. Clause IV, which epitomized the party’s statism by placing public ownership at the heart of its formal identity was scrapped. ‘Old Labour’, uniquely for a European democratic socialist party, had seen ‘common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange’ as a necessary precondition for the achievement of socialist objectives. No mention was made of voluntary organizations. By contrast, for New Labour, one of the ways of achieving ‘a community in which power, wealth and opportunity are in the
The evidence points to a lack of sustained or concentrated policy attention for the voluntary sector under the Conservative administrations of the 1980s and 1990s. This is not to claim that the Conservative Government and individual members of the party were not aware of the voluntary sector. For example, Mrs Thatcher lauded the ‘volunteer movement’, ‘charitable activities’ and ‘charities’ in several speeches and media interviews (Brenton, 1985; Green, 2002: 277-8, 289-90). And a reviewer of an earlier version of this chapter, who had been based at the VSU for part of her premiership, pointed out that she personally intervened to ensure that funding for the voluntary sector under one particular scheme was protected. Finally, a small number of Conservative thinkers did attend to charity in their philosophical treatises (Willetts, 1994; Green, 2002; see also Chapter 10). However, these are exceptions to the rule that the Conservative administrations did not systematically consider the voluntary sector as central to their priority policy objectives to the same extent that New Labour was to do in the late 1990s and early 2000s (see text). Supporting this interpretation, biographies of influential Conservative ministers rarely attend systematically to this domain, instead categorizing the world according to the state, the market, or the quasi-market in discussing what were seen as the most pressing policy issues problems.
