The New Labour government has arguably broken new ground by making "masculinity policy". Whereas the policy process is always inevitably gendered, with implications for men as well as women, it is only in the last few years that a government has made quite such explicit references to men in some areas of policy. The most high profile initiatives have been in relation to fathering and to the education of boys. In this paper we make out a case that New Labour proceeds with policy optimism about men in the home and pessimism about men outside the home. In contrast, there has been policy pessimism about women in the home and optimism about women outside the home. Where New Labour is optimistic, it tends to produce policies that are encouraging and facilitative, and where New Labour is pessimistic, it can produce policies that are authoritarian.
This article discusses youth justice services in Wales in the context both of devolution and the wider social policy agenda of successive Welsh Assembly Governments. It sets out the operating arrangements and outcomes achieved by Youth Offending Teams in Wales, before arguing that a specific approach has been developed to policy and practice in this field in the post-devolution period. The article traces the main features of this approach, locating it in the wider contexts of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and the development of broader children's policy in Wales. The discussion ends with an account of the most recent developments in Welsh youth justice, suggesting that it provides ample points of interest for those concerned both with the development of devolution in general, and services for children and young people in trouble with the law, in particular.
This article considers the current state of help with funeral expenses
in
Britain. It argues that assistance has been progressively and deliberately
eroded to the point where the famous ‘from the cradle to the grave’
protection
of the welfare state has been removed from increasing numbers of poor
people. The article sets these developments within the context of the contemporary
British funeral industry, with emphasis upon its treatment of
less-well-off consumers. The changing nature of social security provision
for funeral expenses is traced in detail, including the actions of the
incoming
1997 Labour government. This article investigates the public health
role of local authorities in the case of burials, concluding that such
services
are insufficiently robust to meet the new weight placed upon them. The
article ends with a consideration of the impact which these different
changes produce in the lives of individuals upon whom they have an effect.
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