The Ideology of 'Family and Community': New Labor Abandons the Welfare State

Abstract

In both the US and the UK the decay of the social fabric (apparent in unrepaired and over-crowded state schools and hospitals and breakdowns in social order) has reached a crisis point in the poorest areas and presents increasing problems for the rest of society who are not part of the 'overclass'. The 'new theory' that the centre-left has been searching for in order to combat the ideological hegemony of the New Right, turns out to be a theory that locates the responsibility for the fracturing of society not in the privatisation and inequitable programmes of the past twenty years, nor in government policies and deregulated free markets, but in the families and communities that suffered most from those policies. In the US and the UK 'New Democrats' and 'New Labour' have found communitarian theory useful in constructing a political discourse that it is in the community and in the family, not in the 'commonwealth' (civil society as government), that responsibility lies for social disorder and disintegration. The communitarian position appears to expect that poor, and growing poorer, parents will be able to impose order on their children, and rebuild their own communities. It is therefore important to consider the assumptions underlying the communitarian theory which now provides the theoretical justification for the new consensus between the 'left of centre' (as Blair once described himself), centre and right.