Blair Vows to Dismantle 1945 Welfare State in Britain
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

LONDON – Prime Minister Blair promised yesterday to push forward with radical welfare reform as he stamped his authority on the Labour Party’s campaign for a third term in power.
He said he wants to dismantle the 1945 welfare state and replace it with a 21st-century “opportunity society” that gives people the skills to end dependence on state benefits.
In a blunt message to his left-wing critics, he said there would be no retreat from New Labour policies of using private firms to provide treatment within the National Health Service or allowing independent sponsors to run new city academy schools.
Mr. Blair sought to contrast his “big picture” thinking with what he claimed was the “minimalist” approach of the Conservative leader, Michael Howard, who told the annual Tory conference he would “only promise what we can deliver.”
The prime minister dismissed the suggestion that politicians gained credibility by rejecting grand visions and great causes. The big challenges facing the country – pension reform, child care, public health, and increasing employment – would not be met by “minimalist policies” but by bold and far-reaching reform.
The Conservative Party co-chairman, Liam Fox, said Mr. Blair’s speech to the Institute for Public Policy Research in London was just “more talk.”
“He cannot stop talking about building new societies and new economies,” Mr. Fox said. “So far, we’ve had ‘the decent society,’ ‘the creative economy,’ ‘a stakeholder economy,’ ‘a new Age of Achievement,’ and ‘the partnership economy.'”
Mr. Blair said his vision of an “opportunity society” and greater social mobility could not be achieved within the traditional welfare state.
He said his “third term vision” is to alter fundamentally the contract between citizen and state – “to move from a welfare state that relieves poverty and provides basic services to one which offers high quality services and the opportunity for all to fulfill their potential.” Mr. Blair’s speech was intended to demonstrate that he had the drive for a full third term in office before standing down as prime minister.
Downing Street said that over the coming months the government will be publishing a series of policy documents tackling incapacity benefit, housing, skills, child care, asylum, immigration, and public health. There will be a series of reform acts if Labour is re-elected.
Mr. Blair said the state had to move from a “mass production” approach to the services it provided to one centered around the individual. The nature of provision – public, private, or voluntary sector – should be considered less important than the delivery of the service.
There should be “new and imaginative ways” of funding some services – seen as a hint that there could be charges for some services.
Mr. Blair said it would require an inversion of the state/citizen relationship, with people not at the bottom of the pyramid taking what was handed down but at the top with the power to get the service they wanted.
He promised Labour would “open up” the NHS further to demand from patients. The government was planning a significant increase beyond that already announced in the NHS’s spending on independent providers of diagnosis and treatment. A second wave of procurement, worth $899 million, would produce an extra 250,000 nonurgent procedures a year.
Specialist schools would become almost universal and there would be 200 entirely new academies – free to parents, with no selection by ability – run by independent sponsors in areas where schools had been weak or failing.
The prime minister said he wanted to see Britain move from an employment rate of about 75% to about 80% – or 1.5 million more people in work.
He confirmed that the government had Invalidity Benefit in its sights, saying far too many people were trapped into long-term or even lifelong dependency. He claimed a million people claiming the benefit wanted to work, given the right help and support, and the government was trying out new approaches to helping them to get a job.
A forthcoming White Paper on public health would set out the government’s ideas for making it easier for people to make healthy choices.