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In general, we have what is called a federal system, where there is a lot of power that States have, and then cities within states and even smaller municipalities within cities can make their own rules. And education is a good example of where it can really depend on where you are. The requirements can be very different from place to place and the type of schools that are offered can vary very much from state to state...

A much debated topic has been the fundamental thrust of the New Labour project. Was it about the modernisation of social democracy or its abandonment? Did it adapt itself to the settlement bequeathed by Thatcherism and the neo-liberal paradigm it entrenched or seek it transcend it? This article discusses these contending interpretations focusing on the issue of public service reform, which lay at the heart of New Labour's domestic programme. It then explores the effects of New Labour's market-oriented 'modernisation' strategy on what social democrats have traditionally regarded as the normative underpinning of the public services, the 'public service ethos'.

Since 1980 the NHS has been converted from a planned, integrated service, to a set of quasi-businesses operating in a health care market, in which an increasingly significant role is being played by for-profit corporations. This policy was initiated by the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher and John Major but continued and driven much further by the Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. The paper outlines the sequence of initiatives through which the transformation has been accomplished and assesses what has driven the change, and why it has been so relatively easy to accomplish.

This paper suggests that the role of the Thatcher governments in changing the course of economic and political development may have been exaggerated, and indeed that the role of political factors in general and "neo-liberalism" in particular is often overstated. An implication is that some current problems, interpreted as primarily political, have an economic dimension which is not fully taken into account. An example is the process of "financialisation"; this is frequently analysed in political terms although there are deep economic forces behind it.