Analysis Home

This is the web site of Radio 4's Analysis. Celebrated for 30 years for authoritative, in-depth examination of ideas and influences in policy and society, it reaches over half a million listeners.

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In the new series

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David Walker

The Moment of Truth?

Five years ago as Labour achieved its first landslide election victory, the man who is now Tony Blair's political adviser warned of an impending crisis in the public services. Labour's fear was that the better off would - as they had throughout the 1980s - come increasingly to rely on private education, health, transport and pensions. If this trend continued, it was said, it would reach the point where the wealthy no longer had any vested interest in supporting the welfare state and a fifty year consensus would break down. For if this group, the very people who pay most income tax, had less and less reason to rely on the welfare state, what incentive would they have for paying for it?

Now, with the budget a few weeks away, David Walker asks if we're at a moment of truth. If, as widely forecast, the government raises taxes to pay for improved public services in response to common perception of crisis, will standards rise enough to keep the support of the better off?

Will they stay, or will they go? And if they stay, has the government chanced upon a new formula which increasingly encourages the rich to top up their own welfare in the private sector while maintaining support for a core welfare state?

Producer: Michael Blastland.

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Forthcoming programmes

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Ian Hargreaves

Free Speech For Sale

How far we can trust the market to deliver the diverse and plural news media most of us want? As the Government drafts its new Communications Bill, Ian Hargreaves asks whether the future of free expression will be best served by a market-based model like the British newspaper industry, or one that's more regulated and subsidised, as in broadcasting.

Producer: Zareer Masani

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Why not look in the archive for a treasury of transcripts of every Analysis programme broadcast since October 1999.

Analysis is...the most incisive and challenging current affairs strand on radio or TV (Daily Mail)...Radio 4's most distinguished, thoughtful, far sighted and influential current affairs programme (Telegraph)... ever excellent (Financial Times)...