... provision of key welfare services (often confined to health, education, housing, income maintenance and personal social services). Increasingly broadly, however, the welfare state is also taken to define: a particular form of state; a distinctive form of polity; or a specific type of society1. However, welfare state under capitalism is generally understood in this third sense, as defining a society in which the state intervenes within the processes of economic production and distribution, to reallocate life chances between the individuals and classes. Any restrictions in such life chances, such as the Elizabethan Statute of Artifices which limited employment in certain areas to certain classes, "were an offence against the liberty of the subject and a menace to the prosperity of a nation"2. With increased life chances come increased citizenship. However, we live in a society that embraces a very capitalistic notion of the world, and "it is clear that, in ...

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