In or out of exactly what, one may ask? What, exactly, is reform? Growing up in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s, I recall Willy Brandt, West Germany’s chancellor during some of those years, talking endlessly about reforms. For him, the word meant more workers’ rights and an increase in welfare payments. This has always been the meaning I first think of when I hear it.
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A decade later, in the UK under Margaret (now Baroness) Thatcher, reform became synonymous with privatisation and deregulation, and a reduction in the rights of trade unions. This is closer to the meaning that it holds for most people today.
MG-PT 