This book examines the payment systems operating in British hospitals before the National Health Service (NHS). An overview of the British situation is given, locating the hospitals within both the domestic social and political context, before taking a wider international view. The book sets up the city of Bristol as a case study to explore the operation and meaning of hospital payments on the ground. The foundation of Bristol's historic wealth, and consequent philanthropic dynamism, was trade. The historic prominence of philanthropic associations in Bristol was acknowledged in a Ministry of Health report on the city in the 1930s. The distinctions in payment served to reinforce the differential class relations at the core of philanthropy. The act of payment heightens and diminishes the significance of 1948 as a watershed in the history of British healthcare. The book places the hospitals firmly within the local networks of care, charity and public services, shaped by the economics and politics of a wealthy southern city. It reflects the distinction drawn between and separation of working-class and middle-class patients as a defining characteristic of the system that emerged over the early twentieth century. The rhetorical and political strategies adopted by advocates of private provision were based on the premise that middle-class patients needed to be brought in to a revised notion of the sick poor. The book examines why the voluntary sector and wider mixed economies of healthcare, welfare and public services should be so well developed in Bristol.
fellow passengers. Passengers’ dress and demeanour, the crucial markers of one’s social status and respectability, were subject to continuous inspections by others. Even more so than café-goers later in the century, they were captives of each other’s gaze. 11 This chapter traces the complex ways in which omnibus literature deployed the figure of the omnibus to stage class relations and the performance of class identity in the virtual space of the page. If the actual omnibus offered less class diversity than this literature might suggest, the omnibus imaginaire
a propaganda appeal that was designed to be classless. He concludes with a remark that might have been intended as a riposte to Miliband: ‘If it is objected that it has not served the cause of socialism or even the “true” interests of the working class the answer is that it was never designed to do so’ (1974: 247). Class relations McKibbin confronts the paradox of a working-class party that was unable to attract the votes of most of the working class – despite the growth of class consciousness – when he turns to the inter-war years and the Conservative electoral
labour flexibility to concepts of corporate social responsibility is almost certainly just such an attempt to ameliorate the effects of corporate restructuring and silence the critics. A conception of work that extends beyond an understanding of productive or class relations is essential if we are to maintain a critical gaze on the slippery concept of flexibility, even as it adopts the mantle of corporate responsibility and risk management. Second, this book has urged IPE to extend its understanding of workers and their agency beyond a conception of organised labour
through an idealisation of the past or a future of salvation. These tend to simultaneously project an idea of a good leader or king, the arrival of god or a liberator.4 All of these are ways of de-legitimising present arrangements or changes implemented and articulating political alternatives. Although Scott’s work on resistance focuses primarily on the peasantry in South East Asia, it has expanded to generalise to other situations of subordination, going from the relatively narrow class relations to state–society relations.5 54 Patterns and practices of everyday
and thereby upends British class relations with the working and upper classes inhabiting the same social sphere but with a reversal in status and power. Figure 2.4 John Leech, ‘Topsy Turvey – or, our Antipodes’, 1854 Published a year earlier, a poem in the Courier titled ‘Topsy-Turvy’ uses both the theme of the goldfields’ wealth and the legacy of convict transportation to imagine a ‘Bill Sykes at the antipodes’ (line 109) alongside a world that rewards criminality and punishes hard work. 33 Subtitled ‘Being Verses by a Poor Man Puzzled’, the poem
. The action remains at the level of global class relations and it is through understanding these that the Third Way is exposed as a sham which diverts from the real issues of power and domination. While it is important to reveal how political projects may be subservient to enduring material interests, how they are deployed to contain contradictory and potentially antagonistic social relations or even
(Rundell, 1987: 173– 89) –enlarges the influence of the symbolic and normative spheres of social life in class relations, in industry and in the process of production. The struggle of classes determines not only wages and conditions but the shape of the production process, control over it and indeed the terms of engagement of industrialists and workers. However, struggle and political conflict are symbolic as well as being agential. Symbols help make sense of agency, which in turn contests the tracks of progress and alters its course, sometimes dramatically. The
value, was too crude for that purpose – biologically, because life histories cannot be reduced simply to energy, and historically because struggles to control lives could not be reduced to that conversion either. Rather, as so-called ‘soft’ Marxists pointed out, class relations were contingently historical. Each formation of class relations would constitute a unique ‘political culture’ that would mediate historical processes. As a part of this more fluid approach, Thompson's ‘moral economy’ concept fostered rich empirical studies of how identities and interests
non-white immigrants to Australia as equal obstacles. As in the American West, where ‘public anxieties over major shifts in the American industrial landscape and class relations became displaced onto the racialised figure of the male Chinese labor migrant’, as Edlie Wong has shown, so too Chinese workers in Australia were targeted with especial vehemence. 10 According to McQueen: ‘Once the Chinese [in Australia] were perceived as an economic threat the belief in Anglo-Saxon superiority quickly turned Chinese customs into conclusive proof of [Asian] infamy.’ 11 As