Social Policy

Abstract

The United Kingdom is a welfare state. A fundamental assumption in a welfare state is that citizens should not be denied health care or education or suffer poverty merely because their labour market position deprives them of the earnings capacity to cover these basic needs. To secure these ends governments have developed public programmes and policies whose effect is to insure citizens against the income losses of sickness, injury and unemployment, to provide income in old age and to make available a range of services, most notably health care, on test of need rather than ability to pay. During the 1980s political ideologies and interests came increasingly to coalesce around attitudes to the welfare state and it has been clear since the 1987 election that the politics of the welfare state would be one of the central issues of Mrs Thatcher’s third term of office.