When New Labour came to power in 1997 it spun itself as a political project unencumbered by historical baggage, travelling light in a philosophy-free zone.
However, its attraction for workers in the caring industries was not that New Labour was politics-lite, but that it promised more money for this and that. Carers greeted it in relief that two decades of hostility to the public realm might be over.
If people believed that only a comprehensive commitment to redistribution would address the polarisations between rich and poor, ill and well, educated and uneducated, then they reassured themselves that even if redistribution, like equality, was an un-word, anything was better than nothing.
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