Taking Stock: Scottish Social Welfare after Devolution (review)

In this book John Stewart, who views Scotland from the vantage point of Oxford Brookes University, discusses the development of welfare policies in Scotland since devolution. The substantive areas on which he focuses are education, including lifelong learning and child welfare policies, and health, as the policy fields in which the Scottish Executive has the greatest degree of autonomy. These discussions are preceded by three chapters on the background and extent of devolution, welfare and expenditure in Scotland compared with the rest of the UK, and Scottish patterns of poverty, inequality and deprivation. These are clear and informative, though at times limited by the author's focus on the specifics of policy-making: for example, Stewart mentions 'the obvious but crucial point'(p.53) that Scotland has become an increasingly segregated society, but neither the nature of this segregation nor its obviousness is explained.

In discussing education and health, Stewart concentrates on the ways in which policy in Scotland has diverged, or may diverge in future, from New Labour orthodoxy in England. Necessarily, he often has to rely on the words of Scottish ministers rather than their deeds, as when (p. 145) he cites Jack McConnell's claim that 'social justice for any one of us only comes through social justice for all' and treats this as marking a 'clear and deliberate contrast to the fragmentation and alienation of the unfettered market economy and individualism'. This may be an over-statement; whatever McConnell's intentions, it is not difficult to imagine similar rhetorical flourishes from London government ministers. In terms of deeds, Stewart singles out student fees as the best publicised Scottish divergence from the London government's policy in education, but suggests that the Scottish Executive's continued commitment to comprehensive schools will prove more important in the longer term (if he had been writing a little later, he might also have mentioned its opposition to 'city academies'). Similarly, in health policy he notes that free social care for the elderly is the best known case of policy divergence, but identifies opposition to foundation hospitals as the most important example, because it symbolises a thorough-going resistance toNewLabour'modernisation' ofthehealth service.

This is a work of social policy analysis, not of history. Although the author tells us (p. 69) that it 'is a fundamental premise of this volume that, to understand the present, 'we need knowledge of the past', his brief forays into history rarely go further back than 1979, and when they do it is by way of very general invocations of Scottish 'tradition', particularly in education. This is a pity, since it leaves unanswered some questions of central relevance to welfare policy, for example on the origins of the 'Glasgow effect', which receives several mentions, mostly in connection with the overall poor record of Scotland's health outcomes, but remains unexplained. The other major omission that arises from the lack of a deeper historical dimension to the study is an analysis of Scottish politics. Stewart really only addresses the distinct Labour and Liberal Democrat domination of the Scottish Parliament, and wonders how far a Conservative government in London would allow Scotland's welfare policies to diverge from its own; but even a brief discussion of political preferences in Scotland since 1945 would have helped to explain what Stewart sees as distinctively Scottish commitments to comprehensive education and a corporatist and consensual, rather than competitive, approach to health service provision.

The book, then, has what I regard as the virtues and vices of the tradition of social policy analysis to which it belongs. The virtues include clarity of exposition, a rigorous use of sources, and a commitment to empiricism. The vices include a suspicion or neglect of economic, social and political theory, and a consequent tendency to treat social policy as the product of reports, consultation papers, declarations of intent, committee minutes etc., viewed in abstraction from their social and political context. Stewart is of course aware that what matters...