The Consumer in Whitehall

Abstract

A citizenship regime, an account of the roles and expectations of the citizen and the state, is forged not only in the elite accounts of government leaders. It must also penetrate the bureaucracy and the detail of policy-making. To be a regime, it must hold across a range of service areas and over time. In order to explore how New Labour’s citizenship regime extends downwards from Blair, it is necessary to examine the policy documents emerging from central government departments in the period since 1997.