Paper Topic:

‘It is widely assumed that the ‘old certainties’ that governed life in post-war Britain have been, if not completely eroded as a consequence of recent social and economic change, at least undermined (G Mooney 2004 Work, Personal Lives and Social Policy).

Social and Economic Change

2006

The Economic decline compared to the rest of the industrialized world is the standard idea within which scholars study Britain throughout the 1950s , but the historians and political scientists here alter the paradigm to affluence (Black , L . 2004 . The shift necessitates focusing on the domestic rather than international , emphasizes complete growth over relative decline , highlights the gigantic improvement in British living standards throughout the period , and reveals the widespread cultural consequences connected with the growth of post-war consumerism There are three main groups of affected

people in welfare policies (Mooney , G . 2004 . First there are welfare claimants , who under workfare programmes may be obligatory to take unsuitable , low paid work which particularly in the case of single mothers , worsens the home-work balance . Second there are the many low paid , typically female frequently immigrant workers who provide the front-line care in health and social care . Under 'best value 'contracting out , and other 'efficiency ' regimes , their conditions of work and relative pay have worsened , weakening any loyalty to their employers , impacting negatively not only on their own sense of job fulfilment but also on the quality of care they provide . Third are professionals who work within the welfare state . Under current regimes that aspire to render them accountable and to drive up quality by imposing bureaucratically determined targets these workers may discover their professional autonomy undermined leading to the cynicism and demoralisation that is the everyday talk of for instance , university and school senior common rooms . Additionally of course , there are the low paid workers whose take-home incomes are now augmented by the shift from out-of-work to in-work benefits - but the book does not examine this group

One of the most disappointing features of the British economy since the Second World War has been its failure to match the growth performance of the other advanced industrialised countries (Clarke , J , Newman , J Smith , N , Vidler , E and Westmarland , L 2006 . This relative decline began in the late nineteenth century when a number of European countries began to outstrip Britain . With the benefit of hindsight , on the other hand , there was nothing very alarming regarding this . The countries concerned had just entered their phase of modern economic growth and were capable to achieve high growth rates merely by imitating production methods and technologies already developed in Britain and the United States . In any case , Britain was still the wealthiest country in Europe All through the troubled interwar years Britain 's relative decline was if anything arrested . Britain also reconstructed her economy rapidly after the Second World War , and in the late 1940s was still a tremendously rich country in comparative terms . But from the early 1950s onwards Britain 's growth again tended to lag behind the other industrialised countries . On this occasion , on the other hand , it became a greater source of concern , as steadily one country after another overtook her . The result was that by the late 1980s , even though still rich in global terms , Britain had fallen...

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