You would be hard pressed to find a person of left leaning who does not hold the landslide victory of 1945 as the high watermark for democratic socialism in the UK. An era by which all Labour governments who came after will be judged. The establishment of the NHS and the creation of the modern welfare state are held up as the prime example of what democratic socialism can achieve. Whether it is, indeed, fair to base expectations on those achievements is a long and complex debate to which more space is required than allowed here. However, those who do regard this period in such high esteem will always wonder where it all went wrong. Since the end of the post-war settlement and the emergence of neoliberalism the left has struggled to articulate a clear narrative when it comes to the welfare state.

One important lesson that we should always draw from the election of the Attlee government are the possibilities created by a vision and the ability to sell that vision to the country. This is where the job at hand becomes difficult, almost too difficult for those who are inclined to be driven by public opinion and the ‘floating voter’. The question is do we fight for the principles that we hold in such high regard or do we ‘move with the times’? Of course that is not to say that there is anything wrong with moving with the times, revisionism is key to the survival of democratic socialism, and many of the issues faced today could never have been imagined in 1945. However, we must stop to question the path taken and the development of a strategy that produces ‘piecemeal’ social policy that attempts to take the rough edges off capitalism, with little success. We must instead discuss the possibility of creating a more far reaching and transformative vision for the welfare state rather than one that provides accommodations to the market, the right and neoliberalism in general.

This chapter seeks to the make the case for a new welfare state fit for the challenges of the twenty-first century. I would like to do this in three parts. First, we must understand the nature of what the welfare state has become. Not just the ideological assault of the Right but also the pervasiveness of neoliberal agency in society.