ABSTRACT
These changes in the emphasis and importance placed on the enhancement of individual freedoms and the family unit can also be explained within the context of the Conservative ‘New Right’ anti-welfare ideology of the 1980s. Within this view, the welfare system had come to be seen as a ‘nanny state’. The implication of this term is that the ‘nanny state’ is over-protective and reduces a citizen’s individual responsibility. The key to this view is the emphasis on the individual citizen. Individual citizens needed to be ‘freed from state interference in their lives’. To illustrate this point, taxation came to be talked about as ‘state theft’ which should be reduced in order to allow individual citizens to spend more of their money in whatever way they chose. Organisations that stood in the way of allowing the individual citizen to take responsibility for their own lives needed to be removed or changed. This view was rather selectively applied, with some organisations, like the trade union movement, being subjected to many policies designed to make them either (depending on viewpoint) less effective or more democratic, whilst those organisations that controlled the professional work practices of those like doctors and lawyers remained untouched.
