On 28th November OxTalks will move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events' (full details are available on the Staff Gateway).
There will be an OxTalks freeze beginning on Friday 14th November. This means you will need to publish any of your known events to OxTalks by then as there will be no facility to publish or edit events in that fortnight. During the freeze, all events will be migrated to the new Oxford Events site. It will still be possible to view events on OxTalks during this time.
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The UK is going through perhaps the largest retrenchment in welfare programs ever seen in an advanced democracy. Public opinion has also turned against welfare to an unprecedented degree. Until recently, both major parties largely embraced the new settlement, using increasingly harsh rhetoric to describe welfare and its users. This book project asks why these transformations occurred. I argue that the ‘New Labour’ years were most crucial for the long-term trajectory of British welfare provision, and offer an explicitly political and top-down explanation for new Labour’s changes. I emphasize the roles of party competition and changes in the composition of its MPs in driving its decision-making, and the importance of its politicians’ rhetoric in re-shaping public opinion. As evidence, the project draws on biographical and historical accounts, rich public opinion data and survey experiments, together with a database that I have assembled of every speech made about welfare issues in the British House of Commons from 1987-2015, which I use to analyse political discourse on welfare provision.
