After spending many years engaged in reviewing the relationship between the EU and social policy, Linda Hantrais has turned her attention to the potential effects of Brexit on this. Hantrais provides a clear framework for examining this relationship in this text, which enables those who are less familiar with it to chart its course over the period of the UK’s membership of the EU since 1972, including a helpful timeline. It also sets out what the UK’s role and influence has been on EU social policy during this period, including the use of its veto on occasion. This is followed by two chapters considering the effects of Brexit firstly on UK social policy and then on EU social policy and it concludes with a chapter taking stock of where we are now and where we might be in the future.

Throughout this book, Hantrais recognises that the UK’s relationship with the EU has been one that has been held at arm’s length and never publicly embraced. Hantrais recognises that the concept of social policy can be nebulous and its boundaries porous. There are also definitional differences between the approach of social protection in the EU and of welfare in the UK. The EU approach allows it to stretch into a range of areas that are consistent with social protection for its citizens – whereas the UK concept of the welfare state has been diminishing in the period of the UK’s membership, as successive governments have been reducing its role. As Hantrais indicates, the EU has always argued for a social dimension to its competencies as part of its wider economic functions, although the development and application of policies to support this role have been contested by member states along the way. The UK resisted the development of social protection policies in a variety of ways including Major’s blocking of the Social Chapter in the Maastricht Treaty (1992) although the Blair Government sought to reverse the effects of this decision. While these formal decisions were important, Hantrais also sets out the ways in which the UK had informal or ‘soft’ power through officials and advisers to a range of European agencies and policy bodies. While the UK remained publicly distanced from the EU, she demonstrates how influential it has been behind the scenes.

On considering how influential the EU has been on UK social policy, Hantrais focuses more on the Brexit referendum in 2016, the role social policy issues played as part of this agenda and the implications for the UK on leaving the EU. This is a useful consideration of the wider issues but does not address the wider social protection policies that have been developed in areas such as workers’ rights, policies for economically lagging areas and wider societal protection for consumer goods, public health and environmental standards. It would have been useful to have a discussion here of the ways in which the European Court of Justice has been used to uphold these standards when either absent or misapplied in the UK and the potential effects if these are removed when leaving the EU. Further it could have addressed the weakness of the government’s post-Brexit proposal to ‘roll over’ EU legislation into domestic law, which will be meaningless without the EU treaties on which this legislation is anchored and provides no social protection for individuals who wish to challenge the Government’s approach to delivering them.

In the last chapter of this book, Hantrais summarises the arguments and makes some general assessment of the future. This is always difficult while the form of Brexit and the longer-term relationships between the EU and the UK are not settled. However, there is little consideration of the relationships between the systematic withdrawal of the welfare state’s support of citizens in the UK, particularly England and the outcome of the Brexit referendum. The UN’s report on the rise of poverty since 2010, matched by the government’s growing indifference to the lives of the UK’s population, has its place in this Brexit narrative. It would have been useful to consider the effects of taking a social protection approach to social policy in the UK and how this might have led to a different policy agenda outside the small and smaller state model that has been the mantra of austerity. The relationship between the Government’s inward-looking political preoccupations and the rise of populism during this period, with its projection on to the UK’s membership of the EU, needs some discussion even if explanations remain to be resolved in the future.

This is a useful book for students in setting out the contextual relationships between the UK and the EU on social policy and is to be welcomed for this. It provides a legal and institutional framework within which some of the issues pertinent to Brexit can be discussed. In some cases, it raises wider questions that are not addressed in the book, both about the causes and effects of Brexit; it may be that some of these issues will only be able to be critically addressed in the future.