Theory in British Social Policy

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There is a misconception under which both the architects of British social policy and many of its students have frequently laboured. It is that ‘theory’ is essentially normative (at its worst, a wish-list of the way we would like things to be), whilst what is really important are ‘the facts’, which once allowed to ‘speak for themselves’, will tell us not just what is going on, but also what needs to be done. This view is misconceived. Whilst all theories have an irreducible normative content, the purpose of developing a theory of British social policy is not to speculate about what Britain would be like if only people were nicer to each other. Rather the purpose of such a theory is to explain developments in British social policy. We want our theory to be generalisable across a number of examples/areas, parsimonious (explaining as much as possible as succinctly as possible) and non-trivial (the insights that our theory delivers should be as revealing rather than as obvious as possible). At the same time the twin belief that facts might ‘speak for themselves’ and, in the process, ‘tell us what to do’ is unsustainable. The facts always have to be divined and explained within a particular theoretical framework (however implicit and inarticulate this may be) and the view that we only have to know particular facts (about the incidence of poverty, for example) in order to be able to say what we should do about them is hopelessly naive.