As L.P. Hartley famously wrote, ‘The past is a foreign country’, and indeed, surveying the current social policy landscape – rocked by populist insurgency and riven by social inequality and a variety of social tensions that were exposed by the fallout from the Brexit vote in June 2016 – it is often hard to believe that between 1997 and 2010 a ‘New’ Labour government seemed to have shifted the centre ground of British politics to a Third Way consensus that married economic growth, healthy tax receipts, re-investment in public services and expansion of a variety of novel social programmes. Today we frequently hear complaints about cronyism, failure to assess the impact of policy changes, and more broadly, a seemingly implacable austerity and deep cuts to even mainstream public services – these were all mirrored in the New Labour period by, at the very least, strong rhetoric about evidencebased policy, ‘what works’ evaluation, equality impact assessments, policy experimentation and consultation, and representativeness of public institutions.

Adding to the sense of distance between the contemporary period and that of pre-2010 is the almost complete repudiation of the legacy of New Labourism by the Corbyn-led Labour Party: centrism is much mocked for its milquetoast failure to challenge vested interests, and cautious incremental improvement is out of fashion among those sympathetic to the Momentum movement that favours radical and sweeping changes such as nationalisation, expansion of public spending on public services and enhanced redistribution. Clearly, on a broader canvas the New Labour experiment was ultimately undone by the unparalleled impact of the 2008 financial crisis, which, it is now clear, caused a significant rupture in the public's willingness to support the compromises inherent in the New Labour project: relative freedom for the market, selective marketisation within public services, and acceptance of relatively high immigration. Nevertheless, the typical social policy challenges remain starkly apparent in the UK, and the aim of this themed section was to ask what can still be learned from the approaches developed by New Labour: what is worth salvaging and indeed resurrecting wherever possible in the contemporary terrain with its ever-present constraints of austerity and Brexit.