A key part of New Labour's attack on nationalist-separatist movements in recent years has been a celebration of UK-wide institutions. These are regarded as playing an important role in the construction and consolidation of the UK as a ‘national project’. Among the institutions that Gordon Brown in particular has sought to highlight are ones that will be familiar to most readers of this journal, including the BBC and The Open University. More significantly is the repeated emphasis that is placed on the UK welfare state, and in particular the NHS, as being absolutely central to the development of a popular national purpose in the post-1945 era. Of course, much of the support for the post-War UK welfare state was secured by real material gains in the living standards for the vast majority of the population. While the wider economic, social and political context has moved on somewhat from this period, the role that welfare and welfare states play, actually and potentially, in national projects and nation-building activities are also evident today in the new context of the devolved multinational UK.

For Brown, Blair and other New Labour politicians, assumptions are made of the UK as a unified nation state in the era of the Beveridgean welfare state. But as Nicola McEwen reminds us in her study of nationalism, welfare and identity, the UK has never been a unified nation state but a multi-national entity. McEwen's focus is on the inter-relationship between territorial politics, welfare/social policy and nationalism in the context of recent welfare retrenchment in Canada and the UK. Through a comparative analysis of the emergence of nationalist movements in Scotland and Quebec from the 1970s, McEwen's central thesis is that such retrenchment can encourage the emergence of what she calls ‘welfare state nationalism’. That the expansion of the welfare state in the post-War UK was simultaneously a Scottish, Welsh and somewhat more problematically a Northern Irish construct and project as well as a UK-wide one is something that has often been overlooked in accounts of the development of the welfare state in the post-War era. Welfare states, argues McEwen, play an important role in securing support for existing states as well as marginalising the territorial demands of national minorities.

The choice of Scotland and Quebec makes for an interesting and insightful comparative exploration both of similarities and differences in the respective ‘national’ experiences in both contexts. While the UK was a highly centralised state, at least until devolution in 1999, though with some degree of autonomy for the Scottish and Welsh Offices, Canada has always been a federal state, which constrained the development of a pan-Canadian welfare state and as a result welfare played a lesser role in the development of a Canadian national purpose when compared with the UK.

This is an important book which has a much wider resonance beyond the UK, Canada, Scotland and Quebec. The issue of territorial politics is increasingly central to debates around the development of welfare and welfare states while since 1999 in the devolved UK there have been increasing demands, particularly in Scotland, for ‘more devolution’ including calls that ‘Scotland’ gains powers over areas of social policy currently reserved to Westminster, such as benefits and immigration. The ‘Scottish Government’ and Welsh Assembly Government are largely social policy-making bodies. While the Scottish Government enjoys a wider range of powers, both are actively involved in securing welfare and social policy making for the construction of nation building projects, the creation of a ‘new Scotland’ and a ‘better Wales’. Here there are some echoes of the welfare state as contributing to UK nation building in the 1940s and 1950s.

However, and this is overlooked by McEwen, welfare nationalism post-devolution is working, both at the level of the UK state and devolved government, to secure a neo-liberal and socially conservative shaped welfare ethos across the entire UK, tied to broader and more strategic goals of national economic competitiveness. In other words welfare nationalism in the UK, Scotland and Wales today is being shaped by very different ideologies and politics from that which characterised Beveridgean welfare nationalism. While there is policy divergence across the different constituent nations of the UK today, policy and practice is also increasingly underpinned by the politics and practice of the market, of the consumer and of managerialism. While McEwen recognises (pp. 60–61) that there is an inter-relationship between welfare state nationalism and the attempt to construct cross-class solidarities, she does not develop this to see welfare state nationalism and nation-building also as class projects, which attempt to construct national and or ‘regional’ solidarities in place of class-based divisions.

That aside, this study is an important contribution to our understanding of social policy in the context of multi-national states and for the emergence of multi-national governance within the context of devolved and federal states, here represented by the UK and Canada. As issues of territorial politics and national identity become more important to social policy making, social policy analysis needs to critically engage much more with arguments and debates emerging from concerns with nationalism, federalism and territorialism.

Writing almost three decades ago Robert Pinker criticised the lack of analysis of the ‘positive links between social policy and the recovery of a sense of national purpose’ (Pinker, Reference Pinker1979: 29). McEwen's work is a timely reminder that in the context of a renewed political emphasis on ‘national’ projects and ‘national purpose’ today, the task for social policy is to offer a critical interrogation of the ways in which welfare is increasingly being used to such ends.