Ashcroft R E, Campbell A V, Jones S
Imperial College School of Medicine, Department of Primary Health Care and General Practice, Norfolk Place, London W2 1PG.
Health Care Anal. 2000;8(4):377-94. doi: 10.1023/A:1026595216507.
Political argument and institutions in the United Kingdom have frequently been represented as the products of a blend of nationalistic conservatism, liberal individualism and socialism, in which consensus has been prized over ideology. This situation changed, as the standard story has it, with the rise of Thatcherism in the late 1970s, and again with the arrival of Tony Blair's "New Labour" pragmatism in the late 1990s. Solidarity as an element of political discourse makes its appearance in the UK late in the day. It has been most strongly linked to the Third Way debate, as framed most influentially in the work of Prof. Anthony Giddens. In this paper we review the history and pre-history of the debate on solidarity in the UK, focussing mostly on its implications for welfare state reform. In particular we discuss the proposals for the long-term care of the Elderly issued by the Royal Commission on long-term care in 1999. In this context we critically examine the idea that solidarity is a new concept in British political culture, and that it is a concept which has real political "bite" in the project of welfare reform. We examine this through a consideration of Gidden's attempted synthesis of political argument and social theory.
英国的政治争论和制度常常被视为民族主义保守主义、自由个人主义和社会主义融合的产物,在这种融合中,共识比意识形态更受重视。按照通常的说法,这种情况在20世纪70年代末撒切尔主义兴起时发生了变化,在20世纪90年代末托尼·布莱尔的“新工党”实用主义出现时又再次改变。团结作为政治话语的一个要素在英国很晚才出现。它与“第三条道路”的争论联系最为紧密,安东尼·吉登斯教授的著作对这一争论的阐述最具影响力。在本文中,我们回顾了英国团结问题争论的历史和史前情况,主要关注其对福利国家改革的影响。特别是,我们讨论了1999年长期护理皇家委员会发布的老年人长期护理提案。在此背景下,我们批判性地审视这样一种观点,即团结是英国政治文化中的一个新概念,并且它是一个在福利改革项目中具有真正政治“影响力”的概念。我们通过考虑吉登斯对政治争论和社会理论的尝试性综合来审视这一点。