About us

"Morals and manners for the new millennium...."

The Social Affairs Unit addresses social, economic and cultural issues with an emphasis on the value of personal responsibility. We research, challenge and debate issues from welfare to warfare, always seeking to draw out the role of the individual's obligations.

The Social Affairs Unit publishes books, reports, its web review and also the monthly cultural and political news-stand magazine Standpoint.

The SAU is a charity. This means that its role and ambitions are wholly unpolitical. So we don't toe or promote any party line. More than that, we have no "corporate" party line of any kind of our own. We don't "do" propaganda, but argument. The people who write our papers come from many backgrounds and disciplines. They are united in being interested in the value of personal responsibility to individuals and societies, but very diverse in their approaches.

The SAU is forward-looking. It does not favour the historic over the modern, nor the well-established over the innovative, nor the enduring over the fashionable, nor the traditional over the progressive.

Indeed, many SAU supporters are inclined to believe that the generation which fought the Second World War were rather too keen on social engineering over the goals of personal responsibility. That cherished tradition is now being reconsidered by people of every political party and none. People now young are likely to be reinventing the idea of welfare and we are interested to interrogate that process. Similarly, there is a long tradition of English disdain for entrepreneurship and affluence: that is now being challenged from all sides. The SAU is interested to investigate why the English have these mental habits, and what - if anything - we ought to do about them.

Board of Trustees