Paradoxes of New Labour Social Policy: Toward Universal Child Care in Europe's "Most Liberal" Welfare Regime?

This article interrogates recent developments in early childhood education and care policy in Britain, taking care to include the experiences in Wales and Scotland alongside those in England. It focuses on the apparently paradoxical aspiration to "universal childcare" in the state usually identified as the most liberal (residualist) in Europe. It finds evidence of greater policy innovation in Wales than in Scotland, despite the weaker formal powers and flimsier child care policy legacy in the former. England displays a second paradox: policy expansion (from a very low base) against an apparently unfavorable background despite a lack of strategic policy coherence. On the basis of this record, the article goes on to a reappraisal of welfare regime theory. It argues that we should expect a degree of incoherence and inconsistency in social policies. As a result, regimes are better understood as abstract concepts than as precise descriptions of particular welfare states, which are better understood as welfare settlements.