David Marsland, Welfare or Welfare State? Contradictions and Dilemmas in Social Policy, Macmillan, Hampshire and London, 1996, ix + 262 pp., £45 hard, £14.99 paper.

Abstract

Lady Thatcher welcomes this book enthusiastically as a telling exposé of the failings of state welfare and the damage it has done to the British people; she is slightly more cautious about endorsing the whole of David Marsland's package of ‘reforms’, amounting to a total demolition of the welfare state. Lady Thatcher's approval suggests that this book lays bare much of the implicit and often unacknowledged ideology which has co-ordinated so many attacks on welfare provision since 1979. The book should be read attentively, for it betrays what many influential politicians really think.