Hated as a foreigner, despised as a woman, I became First Lady of AthensAspasia falls passionately in love with Pericles, the leading statesman of Fifth Century Athens. Artists, writers and thinkers frequent her salon. She hides her past as a sex-worker, trafficked to the city, and becomes Pericles’ lover. Her writings attract the attention of Socrates, and she becomes the only woman to join his circle. She is known throughout the city for her beauty and wit and strives to...

What place for love in a city ruled by greed?Sarah, spirited and caring, is on her first trip outside her village. But the city is dominated by the grim law of the market – the only relations permitted are between buyer and seller. Her gift of a wagonload of food to those who need it is a crime. David, a serious-minded police cadet who naively trusts in the law, arrests her and finds himself falling in love.Franklin, the richest man in Market World, puts a price on everythi...

Auctioning babies makes sense, at least that’s what Market World thinks. After all the baby goes to someone who can give them a good start in life, and the parents get a return for their pain and trouble. For Ed and Matt, the Baby Auction sums up everything that’s wrong with a society based on profit. Then one day Matt rescues a drowning child and they face the question: can love and compassion overcome the harsh laws of Market World?

Public Opinion, Ideology and State Welfare (1985) provides a comprehensive explanation of the patterns of ideas about the welfare state held by both academics and by the general public. It argues that the crisis in the welfare state in the 1980s was misunderstood by most writers in the UK – both on the left and on the right. It presents an alternative account of current developments both in the welfare state and in popular and academic thinking. The author reviews the state of pop...

Could you hate someone enough to kill them? And what if they deserve it?Ade is a tax-inspector. She hates the City of London. She hates the endless corruption, the bland assumption that tax is for the little people. She hates the casual sexism, the smug self-assurance, the inviolability of the men she deals with, and the cold certainty that nothing you can do will ever touch them. Then Webster tries to rape her, and she hates him enough to try to kill him. She finds herself in the ...

Ritchie’s life is shadowed by the death of his wife, Cat, in a car accident twenty-two years previously. He was the driver. He loves his children – Nic, who is bi-polar and often impulsive, and Jack. Both are active in the campaign to welcome asylum-seekers and refugees to Britain. His life comes to a crisis as he realises how much his children despise his trade in advertising and how much the loss of Cat still means to them all.Ritchie abandons his career but achieves new success ...

Throughout the world, governments are restructuring social and welfare provision to give a stronger role to opportunity, aspiration and individual responsibility, and to competition, markets and consumer choice. This approach centres on a logic of individual rational action: people are the best judges of what serves their own interests and government should give them as much freedom of choice as possible. The UK has gone further than any other major European country in reform and provides ...

First published in 1992. In this volume the authors discuss that although the idea that the main object of social security is to regulate the lives of poor people rather than to relieve their poverty which fell into disfavour in the post-war heyday of the welfare state; that this idea has more recently returned, as mass unemployment increases the pressure on welfare budgets and the weakness of the British economy calls into question our ability to maintain social spending.

This re-issued work, first published in 1980, represents a work of normative political philosophy which argues positively for the centrality of the obligation to meet the various demands of social need in our society, and will be of particular interest to students of politics, philosophy, social politics and administration.Bringing the insights of analytical Political Philosophy to bear on the issues of social welfare and welfare provision, the authors discuss such issues as the ba...

European welfare states are undergoing profound change, driven by globalization, technical changes, and population ageing. More immediately, the aftermath of the Great Recession and unprecedented levels of immigration have imposed additional pressures. This book examines welfare state transformations across a representative range of European countries and at the EU level, and considers likely new directions in social policy. It reviews the dominant neo-liberal austerity response and discus...

Throughout the world, politicians from all the main parties are cutting back on state welfare provision, encouraging people to use the private sector instead and developing increasingly stringent techniques for the surveillance of the poor. Almost all experts agree that we are likely to see further constraints on state welfare in the 21st Century.Gathering together the findings from up-to-date attitude surveys in Europe East and West, the US and Australasia, this revealing book sho...

This edited collection uses democratic forums to study what people want from the welfare state in five European countries. The forum method yields new insights into how people frame social issues, their priorities and acceptable solutions. This is the first time democratic forums have been used as a research tool in this field.The contributors’ research show that most people recognize growing inequality, population ageing, paying for health care and pensions, social care and immigr...