Social Justice: strategies for national renewal (Book).

The article reports on the details of the Commission on Social Justice, 1994. It captures so comprehensively the widespread failures of British society the scourges of poverty and unemployment, the gross and unjustifiable inequalities in income and wealth. This report is timely and welcome because it catalogues in grim detail the extent of the national malaise in all areas of our social life in health as well as in housing, in social fragmentation and in economic underperformance, in education and in training, in social security and in taxation, in local democracy and in the crisis of public accountability created by the quangos. One of the central tasks now facing all the European democracies is how to control the global market. Finally, an open acknowledgement that the ambitious vision of the Commission will need additional resources for its realisation would have been welcome. The main purpose of the report to trigger debates about how one can best build an inclusive society where economic success is seen to depend on a greater measure of social justice.