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Across Europe and particularly in the UK, governments are adopting policies that give a stronger role to markets and which emphasise competitiveness, opportunity and individual responsibility. Our recent research in the British Social Attitudes survey indicates that the move away from the provider to the opportunity state is endorsed by most British citizens. At the same time, there are indications that social liberalism is spilling over from support for greater opportunity, within a framework of common social provision, to support for an individualism that undermines support for redistribution to help poorer groups and permits the better off to use their money to buy privilege in areas like health care and education.
Many commentators (for example, the Fabian Society Commission on Tax and Fairness, Tom Sefton at the Institute for Fiscal Studies and Alan Hedges at LSE) have pointed to the “disconnect” between tax and spending in UK attitudes. While most people endorse adequate provision for everyone across a range of services, particularly the big spending areas of healthcare, education and training, and basic pensions, they don’t support the taxes necessary to finance this.
In recent years the spending/taxation disconnect has expanded. Figure 1 brings the point out by showing how the proportion has grown of those saying they want more social spending in response to a standard British Social Attitudes survey question, but who don’t also support higher taxes for the better off. Even fewer support higher taxes on middle or lower income groups. The dissociation of taxes and spending is aided by the political tradition that developed social provision in the UK on the back of the resources available in the late 1940s from the extra taxes justified by the war and by the willingness of many politicians to promise better services without confronting the issue of taxation directly.
Figure 1: The tax and spending disconnect
Two further disconnects, both of which are growing over time, also suggest a retreat from support for the idea that government should tackle poverty and inequality. A series of questions asked at separate places in the well-established British Social Attitudes survey show that popular concern about poverty and inequality has remained high throughout the past 20 years, despite fluctuations linked to economic cycles. Support for government intervention to address the issues, however, has trended downwards. While inequality is recognised as a problem by between 70% and 85% of those interviewed, and poverty by between 50% and 60%, the proportion of people thinking government should tackle the issues fell from about half to about a third of those interviewed between the mid-1990s and 2006.
The third disconnect concerns the extent to which market principles are increasingly applied to core areas of social provision. Universal provision is a core welfare state principle, the capacity to use one’s money as one chooses is a core private property right. The percentage of those interviewed finding it acceptable for the rich to buy privilege in health and education was about the same as that disagreeing in 1999. Since then the balance has swung towards the market, with the survey showing a majority of about a quarter in favour of freedom to buy health and education by 2006 (Figure 2).
Figure 2: Right or wrong to pay for private health and education (% right - % wrong)
Further analysis of the data and qualitative surveys indicate that in most areas the shift in attitudes is fairly uniform across social groups, not a matter of class, income, age or gender divisions. Government should have less responsibility for meeting the needs that most people recognise; endorsement for the idea of a universal and cohesive structure of social provision is in decline.
International comparisons using admittedly limited data suggest that the shift away from state provision in the UK is distinctive. An international survey in 1999 (ISSP) showed that people in Britain were about four times as likely as people in Sweden and Germany to think it fair that the better-off should be able to buy better healthcare and education, while those in the US were roughly three times as likely. The same survey shows very little evidence of a tax-and-spending disconnect outside the UK or of trends for it to widen, at least between the early and late 1990s.
The move towards more opportunity-centred social provision is an attractive option for governments faced with mounting pressures to constrain spending and combat greater inequality in a more competitive and globalised world. The indications from the UK are that, in this context at least, liberalism can spill over from support for greater opportunity and individual responsibility, within a framework of basic provision for more vulnerable groups, to declining support for government initiatives to tackle poverty. In turn, the view that better-off groups should be allowed to buy better healthcare and education and to defect from supporting social provision across society, is on the increase.
Peter Taylor-Gooby is professor of social policy at the University of Kent. He spoke at the joint Policy Network and Fabian seminar 'Tackling Poverty and Inequality in an Age of Globalisation : A Comparison of Public Attitudes in Britain, the US and the Nordic states', on 9 July 2008.
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