Books

Published: 18/07/2001, Volume II2, No.5814 Page 32 33

Perspectives on Welfare: ideas, ideology and policy debates By Alan Deacon Publisher: Open University Press. ISDN: 0335203205.

176 pages.£15.99 (paperback: hardback also available).

This little book is part of Open University's Introducing Social Policy series and has a dust jacket that could only appeal to students.This is a shame - not because students will not find Perspectives on Welfare invaluable - they will - but because it ought to appeal to a wider audience.

Deacon manages to do three things in eight chapters of less than 20 pages.

First, he identifies five perspectives on welfare and the main writers associated with them.

Second, he analyses how these perspectives have influenced welfare reform in the US and UK, and third, he provides a framework in which readers can locate policy debate.

In doing so, Deacon explains who some of the people who figure in 'quality'press features and think-pieces actually are, and why they think as they do.

If you have ever wondered how Frank Field can be a Labour MP, why Charles Murray is held up as a hero for The Times and who on earth Emitai Etzioni is, Perspectives on Welfare will tell you - the only caveat being that the excellent summaries lose some of the colour of the original writing.Deacon deals, for example, with the validity - or otherwise - of Murray's original data, rather than his jaw-drop inducing rants about the 'new rabble'or his later and more disturbing work on race.

Deacon also provides a coherent account of the 'third way'and how New Labour has incorporated elements of the different perspectives he identifies into its thinking on welfare - a refreshing change from a media debate stuck on the old leftright divides.

Deacon, a professor of social policy at Leeds University, argues that the postwar welfare debate was dominated by the work of Richard Titmuss, first professor of social administration at the London School of Economics.

Titmuss argued that welfare had the potential to redistribute resources and so reduce inequalities and, in doing so, create social solidarity.His views, Deacon argues, were underpinned by a 'remarkable'optimism about human nature.

Titmuss believed that market relationships curtailed a 'social and biological need to help' that could be released by non-discriminatory social institutions such as the NHS - 'the least sordid act of British social policy of the 20th century'.No other writer, even those closely identified with Titmuss, has really embraced this view - and most modern welfare writing rejects it.

Field and Murray see people as self interested, while Etzioni and other 'communitarians'see them as born savage but capable of becoming virtuous.

Field argues that welfare must be reformed to appeal to the wealthy and to avoid the dependency he associates with means testing, while communitarianism demands that welfare should be conditional on recipients fulfilling specified obligations.

Deacon contends that New Labour has fused these ideas to create an approach built on 'enlightened self interest'.

On the one hand, it has sought to rebuild support for the welfare state (most obviously, though Deacon does not use this example, by trying to modernise the NHS).

On the other, it has linked rights to responsibilities: pupils have to sign homework contracts, the unemployed must take part in the New Deal (and, though Deacon does not mention this either, public health is made conditional on adopting healthy behaviour).

Those brought up with the Titmuss paradigm hate the project.Deacon backs it, but would like more redistribution and less means testing.

Readers can see where they stand by following a flow diagram of key questions laid out in the conclusion.