What's Wrong with New Labour Politics?

Abstract

She is interested in how spaces and bodies are racialised, gendered and classed, and is particularly concerned with how spatial and stereotypical bodily imaginations are both sedimented and disrupted. Nirmal.Puwar@northampto.ac.uk.

Investing in the Citizen‐workers of the Future: Transformations in Citizenship and the State under New Labour

“…New Labour's avoidance of a systematic gendered analysis and strategy is not, however, simply a function of its child‐oriented priorities. It also reflects its association of feminism with “yesterday's politics” (Coote 2000: 3) and a related reluctance to acknowledge structural inequalities and conflicts of interest in a concern to promote consensus and cohesion (Franklin 2000a, 2000b; McRobbie 2000; Coote 2001). That said, a focus on the child is one way of side‐stepping social divisions, even though these frame and shape children's opportunities and adult outcomes: “because the figure of the child is unified, homogeneous, undifferentiated, there is little talk about race, ethnicity, gender, class and disability.…”

The involvement of university faculty members in social planning: motivating and hindering factors

“…They oppose passivity and expect individuals to be actively involved in and contribute to the community in which they live (Brint 2001;Burtonwood 1998;Selznic 1995). The communitarian approach opposes the weakening of community responsibility that is supported by the proponents of the liberal approach, which favours arrangements that stress individual rights, and isolate individuals as subject to rights and duties, rather than the community to which they belong (Arthur 1998;Dimova-Cookson 2005;Etzioni 2003;Franklin 2000).…”

Changing the educational climate: children, citizenship and learning contexts?

“…This language was linked to a changing wider political discourse named as 'The Third Way' (Giddens 1998), and as a middle path between traditional left and right politics, combining social democracy and neoliberalism creating for McRobbie 'a managerialism of the centre-left' (2000, p. 103). New Labour saw itself as pragmatically drawing on 'what works' to integrate the principles of neoliberal economics and communitarian social policies (Franklin, 2000;David, 2003a). Whereas traditional Labour Governments had developed the welfare state to protect people from the consequences of free market capitalism, this 'modernized' Labour party deconstructed the Changing the educational climate 429 welfare system (Hall, 2003) and created new markets in the education system amongst other public services (Ball, 2007).…”

“…However, focusing on disadvantage on the basis of race, class, disability, sexuality or gender was seen as divisive (Franklin, 2000). The language of instrumentalism is about how initiatives are rationally based on evidence from policies that 'worked'; this is a supremely modernist ideal that the new learns from the mistakes of the old, reflecting the 'need for a cohesive and settled society, essential for social order and economic efficiency' (Franklin, 2000, p. 138).…”