Why citizenship and welfare rights offer new hope for new welfare in Britain

Abstract

This article outlines the prospects for new political strategies for state welfare in Britain in the 1990s, based upon the notion of citizenship and the idea of right to welfare as alternatives to the Thatcherite appeal for a private market in Welfare provision. The failure of post war state welfare provisions, which has been exploited over the past decade by Thatcher ism, was in large part a product of their failure to recognise the rights of consumers of welfare services. A commitment to guaranteed rights to welfare, coupled with democratic participation in the delivery of welfare services, could be the basis of a universal and popular appeal for renewed support for a different form of state welfare in the future. The development of welfare rights work over recent years provides an (incomplete) model of how such a strategy could be articulated in practice.

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