Strong education, health and welfare systems are crucial to a good society. Yet they have been shaped in recent years by governments sceptical about the ability of the state to provide them. The assumptions underlying recent reforms have often had their roots in neoliberal critiques of state provision. This chapter takes the neoliberal claims seriously, but argues that following those arguments to their logical conclusions leads to more powerful public services, rather than weakening them. Right-of-centre arguments can be used to reach left-of-centre conclusions. The chapter provides an outline of the philosophical justification for an alternative view of public services. As such, it picks out a libertarian strand in socialist and social democratic thought that was often neglected in the twentieth century.

I begin with a schematic overview of some of the key arguments that have shaped the development of public services since the end of the Second World War and examine what social ills those services were trying to mitigate. I then look at the vulnerability of those services to attack as the post-war consensus collapsed in the 1970s. The chapter briefly discusses New Labour’s attempt to combine socially-just public services with a relatively free-market economy that would provide the resources necessary to fund them. It concludes with a discussion of the limited and marketised public services of contemporary Conservatism’s ‘contracting state’, and sets out an alternative account of public services designed to give citizens greater autonomy over their own lives.

Public services and the state

The new public services and welfare reforms that emerged from Labour’s 1945 election victory were heavily statist. They pulled together a patchwork welfare system, created in large part by the ‘new liberal’ governments of the Edwardian era. And while it was a Liberal, William Beveridge, who provided an immediate influence for the post-war reforms, their implementation was carried out by socialists, who argued that the state was best qualified to run them. Nowhere was this centralised state control more evident than in the creation of the new National Health Service. As the minister responsible for the foundation of the NHS, Nye Bevan, noted, the system of political accountability and control from the centre was such that a dropped bedpan in his own constituency of Tredegar should resound through the corridors of Westminster. This was control from the centre.