IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/cambje/v36y2012i1p105-126.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The end of the UK's liberal collectivist social model? The implications of the coalition government's policy during the austerity crisis

Author

Listed:
  • Damian Grimshaw
  • Jill Rubery

Abstract

This paper reviews change and continuity in social policy up to summer 2011, contrasting the liberal collectivist approach of New Labour with the reinforced neoliberalism of the coalition government. Given the ongoing uncertainty of economic conditions and the obvious difficulty of forecasting the stability of coalition policy, it is not possible to arrive at a firm conclusion as to the sustainability of the recent change of policy direction. Nevertheless, in a critical assessment of policy in three areas--labour market governance, the life course and the public sector--the paper argues that the UK is witnessing an intensified neoliberal policy emphasis, a redrawing or abolition of minimum standards and failures to meet changing patterns of social needs. While the collectivist elements of New Labour's social policy approach were contradictory in many respects, the coalition government through a withdrawal of the state and obtuse pronouncements about the big society is seeking to embed in the UK a stronger neoliberal approach to social policy. Flawed assumptions about the scope for traditional families and localised big society programmes to compensate for state withdrawal mean the trajectory of change is not clear-cut; preferences for collectivist and publicly accountable solutions to issues of social policy are unlikely to be easily eroded. However, ongoing policy change during the austerity crisis is already inflicting radical change with adverse impacts upon many groups of society. Copyright The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Cambridge Political Economy Society. All rights reserved., Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • Damian Grimshaw & Jill Rubery, 2012. "The end of the UK's liberal collectivist social model? The implications of the coalition government's policy during the austerity crisis," Cambridge Journal of Economics, Cambridge Political Economy Society, vol. 36(1), pages 105-126.
  • Handle: RePEc:oup:cambje:v:36:y:2012:i:1:p:105-126
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/cje/ber033
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Brian Abbott & Steve Williams, 2014. "Widening the ‘representation gap'? The implications of the ‘lobbying act’ for worker representation in the UK," Industrial Relations Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 45(6), pages 507-523, November.
    2. Mathew Johnson & Miguel Martínez Lucio & Stephen Mustchin & Damian Grimshaw & Jo Cartwright & Jenny K. Rodriguez & Tony Dundon, 2023. "City regions and decent work: Politics, pluralism and policy making in Greater Manchester," Environment and Planning C, , vol. 41(3), pages 504-522, May.
    3. Matteo Tiratelli & Ben Bradford & Julia Yesberg, 2023. "The Political Economy of Crime: Did Universal Credit Increase Crime Rates?," The British Journal of Criminology, Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, vol. 63(3), pages 570-587.
    4. Stephen Mustchin, 2017. "Public sector restructuring and the re-regulation of industrial relations: the three-decade project of privatisation, liberalisation and marketisation in Royal Mail," Industrial Relations Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 48(4), pages 294-309, July.
    5. Lauren Andres & John Round, 2015. "The Role of ‘Persistent Resilience’ within Everyday Life and Polity: Households Coping with Marginality within the ‘Big Society’," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 47(3), pages 676-690, March.
    6. Martí López‐Andreu, 2019. "Employment Institutions under Liberalization Pressures: Analysing the Effects of Regulatory Change on Collective Bargaining in Spain," British Journal of Industrial Relations, London School of Economics, vol. 57(2), pages 328-349, June.
    7. Plomien, Ania & Schwartz, G, 2020. "Labour mobility in transnational Europe: between depletion, mitigation and citizenship entitlements harm," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 103955, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:cambje:v:36:y:2012:i:1:p:105-126. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/cje .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.