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This paper reviews change and continuity in social policy up to summer 2011, contrasting the liberal collectivist approach of New Labour with the reinforced neoliberalism of the coalition government. Given the ongoing uncertainty of economic conditions and the obvious difficulty of forecasting the stability of coalition policy, it is not possible to arrive at a firm conclusion as to the sustainability of the recent change of policy direction. Nevertheless, in a critical assessment of policy in three areas—labour market governance, the life course and the public sector—the paper argues that the UK is witnessing an intensified neoliberal policy emphasis, a redrawing or abolition of minimum standards and failures to meet changing patterns of social needs. While the collectivist elements of New Labour’s social policy approach were contradictory in many respects, the coalition government through a withdrawal of the state and obtuse pronouncements about the big society is seeking to embed in the UK a stronger neoliberal approach to social policy. Flawed assumptions about the scope for traditional families and localised big society programmes to compensate for state withdrawal mean the trajectory of change is not clear-cut; preferences for collectivist and publicly accountable solutions to issues of social policy are unlikely to be easily eroded. However, ongoing policy change during the austerity crisis is already inflicting radical change with adverse impacts upon many groups of society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Unemployment varies substantially over time and across sub-groups of the labour market. Worker flows among labour-market states act as key determinants of this variation. We examine how the structure of unemployment across groups and its cyclical movements across time are shaped by changes in labour-market flows. Using novel estimates of flow transition rates for the UK over the last 35 years, we decompose unemployment variation into parts accounted for by changes in rates of job loss, job-finding, and flows via non-participation. Close to two-thirds of the volatility of unemployment in the UK over this period can be traced to rises in rates of job loss that accompany recessions. The share of this inflow contribution has been broadly the same in each of the past three recessions. Decreased job-finding rates account for around one-quarter of unemployment cyclicality and the remaining variation can be attributed to flows via non-participation. Digging deeper into the structure of unemployment by gender, age, and education, the flow approach is shown to provide a richer understanding of the unemployment experiences across population sub-groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on elite interviews with UK asylum policymakers, this article entails a detailed elaboration of how policy programmes are produced by particular ways of imagining asylum seeking in an effort to reduce the complexity of the phenomenon and thus devise policy responses to it. The article explores how such processes can lead to the curtailment of the economic rights of asylum seekers with specific reference the UK policy of severely restricting labour market access for asylum seekers. The policy imaginary—the story which is utilized in reducing the complexity of irregular migration in this context—is the idea of the 'economic pull factor'. That is that disingenuous asylum seekers (economic migrants in disguise) are 'pulled' to particular countries by economic opportunities. This construal of what drives irregular migration for asylum is not natural or inevitable, it is the outcome of institutionally embedded ways of viewing the world and Britain's place within it. This discussion brings insights from critical policy studies to bear on asylum policy making, offering new ways of understanding the practices and processes of policy making in this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]