It was a social democracy which understood society being composed overwhelmingly of heterosexual families with male wage earners and female carers. For those who fitted those roles (or choose to fit in with them or could see no alternative) it could and did supply significant economic, social and even cultural benefits. For those unwilling or unable to meet the demands of social democracy - e.g. the need economic participation and social conformity - the spaces left were to be cared for, cured or disciplined; it was sometimes not possible to distinguish between these alternatives.
However in this parliamentary democracy for many many people it was a vast improvement over what had gone before; as an example the emergence of the NHS general hospital from the corridors of the the workhouse was a genuine step in the right direction (even if those hospitals carried the taint of their prior use for decades to come.
As for deinstitutionalisation, it's famous proponent Enoch Powell, championed the cause on the basis of a thoroughly individualistic liberalism (economic and philosophical); his was a politics and an economics which had starved and bullied those disabled by society in the past. The fact that the mistreatment took place outside of the confines of a bricks and mortar institution didn't make it any less abusive (indeed it protected it from any sort of democratic oversight); just as the abusive treatment that people are subjected to (the poverty, the lack of support, the discrimination) are no less abusive for happening in 'the community' today.
Cheers - Louis MacNeice
