This article considers the issue of patient empowerment in the context of New Labour's proposed reforms to the National Health Service (NHS) in England. Through an exploration of some of the key measures in the government's white paper High Quality Care for All, the article argues for a conceptualization of patient empowerment as a political technique of governing. Patient empowerment, it is contended, can no longer be understood solely as a quantitative phenomenon to be balanced within the doctor‐patient relationship. Rather, its deployment by the government as a way of governing health and health care more broadly demands that we consider what political functions—including, importantly, it is argued here, managing the problem of the increasing cost of illness and health care—patient empowerment may be involved in performing. In order to assist in this enquiry, the article draws on some of Michel Foucault's work on the art of governing. It is suggested that his understanding of the neoliberal mode of governing best captures the proposed changes to the NHS and the role patient empowerment plays in their implementation.

This article explores what contracts in the field of social policy can reveal about the forms of social solidarity that exist today. Taking workfare as its point of departure, the aim is to shed light on what these "social policy contracts" can tell us about the nature of social cohesion in contemporary Western societies. Drawing on Emile Durkheim's typology of social solidarity inThe Division of Labour in Society, and his later notion of individualism, it is argued that today's social policy contracts disclose, simultaneously, elements of mechanical and organic social solidarity. As such, these contracts can be thought to function in both punitive and restitutive ways. It is argued that the exclusionary and inclusive features of social policy contracts, and their corresponding focus on the classification of parts of the population and individualism, act as important sources of contemporary social solidarity.The second part of the article considers empirical evidence regarding the success of workfare programmes in various countries. This evidence highlights the important role that a number of 1 Sussex Law School, University of Sussex, UK, K.J.Veitch@sussex.ac.uk. The ideas contained in this article were first aired at a workshop on the 'Power of Law' at Helsinki Law School, University of Helsinki. I am very grateful to Toomas Kotkas for his kind invitation to participate in this workshop and to the participants for their discussion and feedback. For comments on a previous written draft, I thank Roger Cotterrell, John Harrington, Scott Veitch, Angela Williams, and the anonymous referees.Page | 2 structural factors play in the degree to which these programmes can be deemed to be successful. Reflecting on this, it is argued that the moralistic nature of the workfare contract, and the social cohesion to which this can be thought to be directed, obscures these deeper structural issues, thereby leaving in place the conditions that ensure the ongoing production of the type of misery and indignity characteristic of our post-Keynesian world. In that sense, it is contended that contract has a de-politicising effect in the field of social policy.

Obligation and the changing nature of publicly funded healthcare Article (Accepted Version) http://sro.sussex.ac.uk Veitch, Kenneth (2019) Obligation and the changing nature of publicly funded healthcare. Medical Law Review, 27 (2). pp. 267-294.

There has been a steady growth in the European Union's (EU) competence in relation to health care in recent years. 1 One aspect of the EU's involvement in this area has been the objective of liberalising the provision and receipt of health care across Member States so that, on the one hand, health care providers are able to offer their services in other Member States and, on the other, individuals may, assuming certain conditions are satisfied, travel to another Member State to access health care. This liberalisation, which is designed to extend to health care the operation of the internal market and competition rules, has given rise to a voluminous literature. 2 Within this, a recurring theme is the potential impact of what Szyszczak calls 'the 1 For an indication of the extent of the EU's legal jurisdiction in health care matters, and the nature of its impact on

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