From mainstreaming to modernisation: challenges of English third sector horizontal policy development under New Labour (original) (raw)

New Labour and Government in Britain: Change or Continuity?

Australian Journal of Public Administration, 1997

The 1997 British election marks a major change in British government. Eighteen years of Conservative rule had brought about growing inequality and social division and have generated powerful demands for new directions in public policy, especially in the areas of welfare and public administration. On welfare state reform Labour is constrained by election promises to restrain taxation and public expenditure. New Labour ministers influenced by the New Right have in any case largely rejected traditional social democratic redistributive strategies and are seeking instead new ways of reducing welfare dependency.The virulent spread of quangos at all levels of government and a marked increase in the centralisation of power in Whitehall have given a new impetus to demands for constitutional reform. Labour's response to these demands is a major program of regional devolution, House of Lords reform and open government measures.This article explains what ‘New Labour’ means and discusses New...

A Glimpse into the Mind of New Labour

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2012

According to a former staffer ''The character of New Labour remains an enigma'. This paper's central contention is that to shed light on this enigma we need to explore how New Labour thought, that is to say the cognitive categories it mobilised to diagnose policy problems and to render complex social reality intelligible. Taking public service reform as a case study it borrows from political cognition and framing theory to delineate what the paper calls the 'New Labour mind .' Using documentary records and interviews supplemented by secondary sources it seeks to demonstrate that the most novel element of the Blair and Brown governments was they extent to which they borrowed cognitive categories from New Public Management to achieve goals which were largely derived from the social democratic tradition. ' One of the most striking tendencies of our time is the expansion of markets and market orientated reasoning into spheres of life traditionally governed by non-market norms' (Michael Sandel, Guardian 20 Feb. 2010) .

Envisioning the Third Sector's Welfare Role: Critical Discourse Analysis of ‘Post-Devolution’ Public Policy in the UK 1998-2012

Social Policy & Administration, 2014

Welfare state theory has struggled to come to terms with the role of the third sector. It has often categorized welfare states in terms of the pattern of interplay between state social policies and the structure of the labour market. Moreover, it has frequently offered an exclusive focus on state policy-thereby failing to substantially recognize the role of the formally organized third sector. This study offers a corrective view. Against the backdrop of the international shift to multi-level governance, it analyses the policy discourse of third sector involvement in welfare governance following devolution in the UK. It reveals the changing and contrasting ways in which post-devolution territorial politics envisions the sector's role as a welfare provider. The mixed methods analysis compares policy framing and the structural narratives associated with the development of the third sector across the four constituent polities of the UK since 1998. The findings reveal how devolution has introduced a new spatial policy dynamic. Whilst there are elements of continuity between polities-such as the increasing salience of the third sector in welfare provision-policy narratives also provide evidence of the territorialization of third sector policy. From a methodological standpoint, this underlines the distinctive and complementary role discourse-based analysis can play in understanding contemporary patterns and processes shaping welfare governance.

New Labour in Britain: new democratic centralism?

2002

This article uses a case study-the introduction in 1997 of new policy machinery-to analyse competing claims about the nature of the Labour Party's organisational transformation. It aims to demonstrate that whilst the new policy process was presented as a move towards greater democracy, both its general design and its modes of operation rendered inevitable the production of a general election manifesto in 2001 (the culmination of the process) whose contents coincided very closely to the leadership's tastes.

Engendering politics and policy: the legacy of New Labour

Policy & Politics, 2010

This article analyses the capacity of a single political party-New Labour in the UK-to engender politics and policy. It draws on Kingdon's (1984) policy streams approach to demonstrate how with the election of New Labour in 1997 a window of opportunity emerged for gender changes in political representation, governance and policy terms. It argues that the commitment to engendering politics was an important step towards engendering policy, but that policy promoting gender equality does not automatically follow from more gender-balanced political representation. Despite some successes, gendered policy change is constrained by: the way gendered policy problems are framed; the slow pace of change in institutions of politics and governance; and the limits posed by policy solutions that had to fit with the dominant liberal market economic approach.

New Labour and the politics of depoliticisation

A number of commentators in the 1980s sought to explain the character of the Thatcher administration. By contrast, relatively little work has been produced that seeks to analyse the principles and governing strategies of the Blair government. Focusing primarily on economic management, this article offers a characterisation of statecraft under Blair in terms of the politics of depoliticisation. In summary, it argues that the Blair government has fused aspects of traditional economic management with new initiatives to create a powerful tool of governing organised on the basis of the principle of depoliticisation. Depoliticisation as a governing strategy is the process of placing at one remove the political character of decision-making. State managers retain arm's-length control over crucial economic and social processes whilst simultaneously benefiting from the distancing effects of depoliticisation. As a form of politics it seeks to change market expectations regarding the effectiveness and credibility of policy-making in addition to shielding the government from the consequences of unpopular policies. A quick survey of the history of 'governing Britain' in the twentieth century is apt to reveal that, despite much rhetoric, governments are unable to solve the fundamental problems that beset the British economy (the relative productivity problem, the decline of the staple industries, recurrent inflationary pressure, the 'boom and bust' cycle). 1 This was well recognised by Jim Bulpitt, who argued that the aim of government is to achieve, in the eyes of the public, a level of governing competence, and