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Introduction
The core argument of this essay is that the Labour Government elected in 1997 was the first government of what simplistically can be called the global era. This is not to adopt uncritically the notion of globalization but to see Britain operating in a post-Cold War, post-Keynesian era where international borders and relations are more open and complex than in any preceding period. In many ways it is inappropriate to divide the past into distinct epochs. These classifications are arbitrary and they pay insufficient attention to the complexities of history. Nevertheless, the political, economic and social structures that developed during and after the Second World War shaped politics in Britain up to the 1980s, and while the Thatcher government had the difficult task of reshaping the post-war political economy, it was the Blair government that came to power faced with both a new set of politico-economic institutions and differing expectations about the role of the state and its relationship with civil society. Consequently, what the Blair government did was to consolidate the Thatcherite revolution, but also restructure it in a way that reconnected it with some of the social democratic traditions within the Labour Party. This is to suggest that there was with Blair, a third way -- one which in a sense matched some of the means of Thatcherism with some of Labour's traditional ends related to collective provision, social justice and a notion of the public (both as a collective group of people and a shared space) that did not exist with Thatcherism.
The Post-War Settlement and Its Collapse
This is not the place to rehearse in detail the analysis and discussions of the post-war settlement, which are the subject to considerable debate (see Hay, 1996; Ling, 1998; Kerr, 2001), what I want to illustrate is that the post-war era was shaped by a set of institutional arrangements that constrained the options facing government. During the 1970s and 1980s, these structures in some cases collapsed and in others they were reconstituted and so recast the opportunities and constraints that faced the political class.
The post-war era was defined by a number of features:
The co-option of the working class into the political system : Following the defeat of labour in the...