Welfare Policy in Great Britain
from 1942 until the present day
(Keith
Dixon, 2003-2004)
What I would like to do, firstly, is put the
question of welfare in Great Britain into some sort of historical perspective.
In order to understand the new perceptions of welfare and the new visions of how to provide it that emerged during and
immediately after the Second World War, and have come in turn to be vigorously
contested since the nineteen-seventies,
it is no doubt useful to have some sort of understanding of what they
came to replace. This is all the more the case as the Beveridgian vision of
welfare included an explicit rejection of what had been done for and, above
all, to the poor in the inter-war period and before : a refusal, for example,
of generalized “means-testing” (i.e. selectivity of state assistance based on
the observable material means of those who request assistance) and the shame
and stigmatization that went with it
during the depression years of the Thirties; a refusal also to accept a related
distinction borrowed from XIXth century British social policy and political
discourse between those vulnerables who should be actively assisted by the
state because of their evident incapacity to work (the sick, the disabled, the
mentally handicaped) or their manifest desire to overcome their adversity – the
“deserving poor” of Victorian discourse – and those whose behaviour was deemed
not to be up to standard, the recalcitrant, the rebellious, the unworthy, the immoral,
in short the “undeserving poor”. As the Charity Organisation Review
pointed out in 1881 :
“There can be no doubt that the poverty of
the working classes of England is due, not to their circumstances (which are
more favourable than those of any working population of Europe); but to their
improvident habits and thriftlessness. If they are ever to be more prosperous,
it must be through self-denial, temperance and forethought”[1]
As we shall see later, this distinction and the
moralizing that goes with it have
regularly continued to resurface in various forms in the dominant
discourses on poverty up until the very recent period. Thus we find Margaret
Thatcher, a key influence on the re-thinking of welfare that went on in Britain
in the eighties, singing the praises of the old Victorian distinction in her
memoirs, The Downing Street Years :
“The Victorians had a way of talking that
summed up what we were now rediscovering – they distinguished between ‘the
deserving’ and ‘the undeserving poor’. Both groups should be given help : but
it must be help of very different kinds if public spending is not just going to
reinforce the dependency culture. The problem with our welfare state was that –
perhaps to some degree inevitably – we had failed to remember the distinction
and so we provided the same ‘help’ to those who had genuinely fallen on
difficulties and needed some support till they could get out of them, as to
those who had simply lost the will or habit of work and self-improvement.”[2]
For most of the XIXth century and well into the
XXth, welfare was provided in Britain according to the Benthamite principles
laid down by the New Poor Law of 1834. The basic philosophy of this
system of “assistance” to the poor and
needy was that they should be held
responsible for their situation, and strenuously encouraged to improve it. It
was not providence that had made them
poor or led them into difficulty but their own individual failings; as a result
poverty was to be clearly stigmatized and the poor made to feel that it was
urgent to make efforts to improve their situation. The poor law system and the
“workhouses” (poor houses in Scotland) which went with it, in which the poor
were housed for “indoor relief”, were
essentially punitive. It was made clear by the Commissioners who prepared the
way for the new legislation that the “principle of less eligibility” should
apply : i.e. relief was to be provided only to the able-bodied poor and their
dependents in workhouses, under conditions inferior to those of the poorest
labourer outside. The commissioners argued that “every penny bestowed that
tends to render the condition of the pauper more eligible than that of the
independent labourer is a bounty on indolence and vice” (in modern English :
“every penny, given in subsidy, that tends to make the condition of the poor
better than that of a wage-earner is an encouragement to
laziness and vice”). Later in the century, when the vote was at last granted to
the majority of working men, the rule that removed the right to vote
from the pauper became all the more effective. Thus to be poor was not only to
be seen as being morally reprehensible but the request for assistance led to
the removal of political rights – to be poor was to be outside democratic
society (the rule that withdrew the
political rights of the pauper was not in fact removed until 1918). Poverty was
a crime and it was to be punished and stigmatized “without sentimentality”. The
main function of the workhouse, in which the poor were subject to the most
severe of disciplines, was however economic : to push the able-bodied back onto
the labour market where they belonged. As one of the major actors in setting up
the Poor Law, Sir George Nicholls, made clear :
“I wish to see the Poor House looked to with
dread by the labouring classes, and the reproach for being an inmate of it
extend down from father to son. . . For without this, where is the needful
stimulus to industry?”
* *
*
We will be looking at welfare policy in the
post-Second World War period, i.e. from 1942 until the present time. This
choice of periodization might be misleading. 1942 was indeed the date of the
publication of William Beveridge’s[3]
famous report to the coalition war government on social insurance, entitled Social
Insurance and Allied Services, but arguably not the beginning of the
British “Welfare State” . Although we have little time to go into the detail of the report
itself or the context in which it was
delivered, it is worth remembering that
the Churchill government and the wartime Conservative party were not exactly enthusiastic in their
reception of Beveridge’s proposals. Not only did the Beveridge vision attempt a
break with the previously stigmatizing
perceptions of poverty and the poor (and thus with the philosophy of the
Poor Law) , it also represented a political critique of essentially
Conservative welfare policy during the depression years. The report did however
raise great hopes among the population, and the Labour party immediately
realised the enormous potential for progressive social change that it
represented. 1942 in this sense was a turning point in the history of
social policy in the United Kingdom, as Beveridge exhorted post-war governments
to intervene in the social field (just as Keynes was to advocate intervention
in the economic field) to provide social protection “from the cradle to the
grave”, i.e. to eliminate once and for all the fear of poverty (as a result of
ill health, unemployment, the loss of a spouse, old age, etc.) that had so
marked the previous decade, the so-called “Hungry Thirties”.
It would at least be contentious to date the
beginning of the British Welfare State in 1942. It can at least be argued that
the first stirrings of what was not yet called the Welfare State[4]
are to be seen at the beginning of the XXth century as the Liberal
administration began to realize the urgent need for social reform in order to
stave off the threat from organized labour, and particularly from the nascent
Labour party. It is worth remembering that the question of welfare and the question of social peace and discipline
are almost systematically interrelated in British history. Thus, with the
emergence of an autonomous labour movement,
the Asquith government introduced, in 1908, the old age pension, with
its Old Age Pensions Act (this applied only to those over the age of 70
and was subject to a means test) and in 1911 it introduced a first scheme of
social insurance, with the National Insurance Act, against the effects of ill health and
unemployment, to be administered independently by non-governmental “approved societies”, but covering only a
limited number of vulnerable categories of workers. The scheme was funded by contributions by the worker, the
employer and the state. It did not cover the self-employed, the non-employed
and those already provided for in the other insurance schemes. This was already
a first step away from the notion that the “poor” should be forced, in as far
as this was feasible, to provide for themselves and that state assistance
should be minimal and sufficiently stigmatizing not to encourage laziness or
“scrounging” (the basic philosophy of poverty in Victorian Britain). This early
Liberal legislation was to be consolidated in
piecemeal fashion – i.e. with no major
and coherent overhaul of the whole system - during the inter-war
period, although means-testing remained predominant and many were left out of
what was still far from a system of universal social protection.
No doubt the dominant perceptions of welfare
and what to do about the poor and poverty were shaken by the emergence not only
of political democracy (as the suffrage was gradually extended to working
men - and later, much later, to women)
but of working class politics. Working and workless people became gradually the
subject and no longer the object of political action and discourse. This
process was accelerated by the electoral breakthrough of the “political wing” of the labour movement[5].
By the early twentieth century, the “poor” - for many in the labour movement
had experienced poverty at some time in their existence and most lived with the
fear of falling back into it - began to
have a political voice which proposed an alternative to the punitive Victorian
practice of the workhouse or to the
enlightened paternalism of the concerned middle classes.
Concomitantly, the poor became the object of social observation, and
the major enquiries of Charles Booth (Life and Labour of the People of
London, the first volume of which was published in 1899) and Benjamin
Seebohm Rowntree (Poverty : A Study
of Town Life – 1901) contributed to a better, and more scientific,
assessment of the reality of poverty, over and beyond the dominant moralizing
discourses, and did much to subvert the dominant images of the poor. One would
do well not to idealize these initial attempts to put the discussion of poverty
on a more rational and less moralizing footing: Booth, for example, continued
to purvey in his writings some of the most salient prejudices of his day,
despite his undoubted sympathy for the plight of the poor. His notion of a
“residuum” among the poor
of the unrepentent and irredeemably
lazy and criminal minority finds an
echo in present-day theorisations about the “underclass” (which we will be
discussing in due time).
Thus, although 1942 is no doubt a major moment
in the construction of the “Welfare State” it cannot therefore be seen to have
emerged ex nihilo.
I will be proposing a specific historical
perspective on welfare and this perspective will also be based on a periodization.
Like all periodizations, mine is open to discussion and I will be willing to
defend it if you should ask me to do so. I will be suggesting throughout my
class that the post-war period in Britain can best be understood in terms of two phases (or eras, call them what you
wish), which saw the construction of a new consensus (or hegemony, if you
prefer the conceptualisations of Antonio Gramsci) of economic, social and
political ideas. Let me make it clear that when I refer to the Keynesian
consensus of the immediate post-war period, or the Hayekian consensus of the
more recent period, I am in no way suggesting that there were no differences of
opinion among the political and economic protagonists on the British scene.
That would be a caricature : even during the hey-day of “Butskellism” there were very real differences of approach
between Labour and the Conservatives,
or between employers and the trade unions. There was however a general
framework of economic and social policies (broadly inspired by Beveridge and
Keynes) which few were willing (or able) to call into question. Dissidents of
the Right or the Left to the Keynesian consensus were just that : dissidents in
a cold climate, no doubt “thinking the unthinkable” to borrow a phrase from the
neo-liberals, but unable to make any political capital out of their dissidence.
Keeping these qualifications in mind, let me
briefly sum up my own thinking on the two phases of post-war British society.
The first phase spans from 1945 (but if we take into account the enormous
influence of Beveridge on the first post-war Labour government, I’m quite
willing to extend that back to 1942), until the mid-seventies. I’m not
particularly keen to give an exact date here since we’re talking about a long
and complex process, but if you’re happier with clearly delineated landmarks,
then by all means chose 1974 with the defeat of the Heath government in the
middle of the miners’ strike (and the creation of the Centre for Policy
Studies by two relatively junior ex-ministers of the Heath government,
Margaret Thatcher and Keith Joseph, who both had radical new ideas about how to
deal with welfare and the poor) or, if you prefer, 1975 when Margaret Thatcher
unexpectedly toppled Edward Heath and became the new leader of what was to
become a new brand of conservatism, which later was to carry her name. During
the whole of that period, it was generally believed by the major political and
administrative decision-makers that a moderate degree of state intervention, in
both the economic and social fields, was necessary not only to ensure the
stability of what remained a predominantly market economy, but also to improve
its efficiency. Demand management (i.e. the manipulation of demand by various
fiscal and monetary measures) was the order of the day for the economy, and a
universal network of state-provided social protection for all British subjects.
This new framework of social and economic policy was, at least apparently,
remarkably successful not only in ensuring economic growth and progress during
the long “post-war boom” but also in guaranteeing a large degree of acceptance of the new order. It is hardly
surprising that early critics of the “post-war consensus” saw it as
“corporatist” in nature, i.e. incorporating the major social and political
actors in the management of the status quo.
It was not until the social and economic crisis
of the early seventies undermined the credibility of what at least had passed
for Keynesianism that new alternative arrangements to those proposed by the
illustrious founding fathers of the post-war settlement could be envisaged.
They could and were envisaged, all the more so as there had been waiting, on
the political wings of the British stage, so to speak, a strong body of social
and economic doctrine which today we would call neo-liberalism.
I would like to point out here that the
constituent elements of the “British crisis” of the seventies were, of course,
not all British. One of the major factors in the decline of the British economy
was what was called at the time “the loss of the Empire”, i.e. the attainment
of at least political independence by the great majority of Britain’s former
colonies and possessions overseas. But another of the contributing factors of
the British crisis, or the more general crisis of Keynesian demand-management
was the increasing internationalization of the economies, especially of the
developed world. Britain, like many of its rivals became increasingly dependent
on foreign goods to meet the demands of its domestic market and in turn British
industry was increasingly dependent on foreign demand for its products. The
result was that national forms of demand management, based on the notion of a
relatively close (national) relationship between supply and demand, became increasingly
difficult to implement.
From the messy political battles of the
nineteen seventies emerged a new consensus of opinion, to be consolidated under
the Thatcher régime of the eighties, quite radically in opposition to the
“old ideas”, in particular among the
social and economic elite, and which called for a radical re-ordering of
British society and British priorities. The market and not the state was to be
driving force behind this re-ordering . Privatization, deregulation, individual
initiative, a return to law and order were to be its watchwords. Socialism,
social democracy, the Keynesian consensus, and, above all, the trade
unions were to be its diabolized
adversaries. The doctrine was given a name in the mid-seventies by the British
sociologist, Stuart Hall. Henceforth, that conservative radicalism which
changed the face of Britain in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, and
radically transformed perceptions of
good and bad in the economic and social fields was to be “Thatcherism”.
As I will argue in more detail later on, the seminal ideas of the Thatcher
revolution, and in particular in the field that is of interest to us (equality
and inequality of access to welfare services and the respective roles of the
state and the private sector in providing these ) were mainly borrowed,
directly or indirectly, from the Austrian philosopher and economist (who
sojourned for long periods in Britain and the United States) Friedrich von
Hayek, and, to a lesser extent from the American monetarist, Milton Friedman.
Hence what I will be calling the “Hayekian consensus”.
These two eras were accompanied by a climate of political, economic and social ideas, a “common sense”, to employ another Gramscian turn of phrase. As we shall see the dominant perceptions of welfare, of poverty and the poor, of equality and inequality, of redistribution and its effects, were all to undergo radical alterations as we move from one period to another. Whereas the Keynesian / Beveridgian perceptions of welfare were in the main “structural”, i.e. seeing poverty as the result of deficient economic and social structures of society and the role of the state as primordial in welfare provision, the dominant vision of welfare which emerged in elite discourse in the eighties and nineties was “individual” if not “pathogical”, i.e. essentially it was believed that the poor were poor because of their own individual behaviour or “maladjustment”, their own failings, and that state interference was often counter-productive. Thus the onus of explanation for poverty moved away from society and back towards the poor themselves. The policy decisions which resulted from these two visions were, of course, quite substantially different.
William Beveridge is a
major, albeit often mythologized, figure in the historical debate on poverty
and its possible eradication in Great Britain – no doubt as important as Booth
and Rowntree at the beginning of the century, although his contribution was of
a different nature. Beveridge was
intent on developing what we would now call social security[6].
I wish now to look more closely at Beveridge’s contribution to policy debate on
social security in the forties and his influence on the legislation of the
immediate post-war period under the Attlee governments.
The remit of the committee
presided by Beveridge in 1941-1942 was not particularly subversive or
revolutionary:
“To undertake, with
special reference to the interrelation of the schemes, a survey of the existing
national schemes of social Insurance and Allied services, including workmen’s
compensation and to make recommendations”.
If we translate this from
bureaucratic newspeak into plain English, the Beveridge committee were being
asked to make proposals to improve and better co-ordinate the existing system
of social protection in Britain, as it had developed from the modest
legislation of before the First World War, with piecemeal additions during the
inter-war period. For the later left-wing critics of the Beveridge proposals,
this was indeed its basic flaw, i.e. that it was intended to consolidate and to
rationalize rather than to transform, and that certain principles of the
earlier legislation - that of compulsory contributions in order to obtain
certain benefits, for example - could
well have been jettisoned.
The very fact that Beveridge
was asked to consider reform was however a sign of the times : the war had
created both new social demands and the more favourable conditions for
their reception. There was also a
recognition, even at a government level, that social security arrangements in
Britain, although “on a scale not surpassed and hardly rivalled in any other
country of the world”, as the Report was proudly to proclaim, were something of
a jigsaw puzzle and had resulted in a
number of unjustifiable anomalies. Not to mention what had become self-evident
during the period of mass unemployment
in the mid-thirties, i.e. that they were not preventing large numbers of people
from falling into dire poverty.
Before going any further in this particular
discussion, I would like to borrow a helpful distinction between the various
supporters of the Beveridge proposals,
during and after the War, put forward
by Rodney Lowe in his book, The Welfare State in Britain since 1945
(second edition) Macmillan, 1999. Lowe distinguishes between two groups of
supporters of the post-war settlement :
Throughout the first phase of British post-war
history, support for (but also tensions over) the welfare settlement inspired
by Beveridge came from these two quarters, despite their obviously diverging
political agendas. As we have already seen, those who rejected the
interventionist state altogether, believing in the “blind, unplanned,
uncoordinated wisdom of the market”[7]
were in a minority and politically impotent. However, as we move into the
period which I have described as the age of von Hayek (from the mid-seventies
on) then we see a growing potential for agreement between the “reluctant
collectivists”, many of whom come to consider that the Welfare state had done
its job in eliminating “absolute”
poverty and that state intervention had been overstretched, and those we would
now describe as neo-liberals, who had always opposed the Welfare state for
doctrinal reasons.
The first Beveridge Report (1942)
William Beveridge, then, seized the opportunity
given by his report to the Churchill government not only to make proposals
towards the effective and better co-ordinated management of the existing system
but also and above all to shift towards what we might legitimately want to
describe as a new philosophy of social welfare (although aspects of the
existing system and framework of ideas were to be conserved). In Rodney Lowe’s words, the report (which
was prepared by a large number of civil servants but whose recommendations
carried Beveridge’s signature only) “revolutionized perceptions in Whitehall
and Westminster of what was politically possible – and necessary”[8].
It was to propose to wide-ranging scheme of social
insurance defined, in the report’s own terms, as being “against the interruption and destruction of
earning power” (i.e. to provide benefits to protect people from poverty
in case of illness, disablement, unemployment, old age, or other forms of
interruption of earning power (maternity, etc.)). The new system, unlike
inter-war practice, was to be universal and comprehensive, and
the majority of benefits would be flat-rate (i.e. the same for everyone)
and funded by flat-rate contributions from those who were occupied in the
labour market (as well as contributions from the employers and the state). This
means that the network of social protection should cover all British subjects
without discrimination, and that it should not, in the main, proceed by means-testing (associated in
public opinion with the humiliating and stigmatizing practices of the so-called
“Hungry Thirties”). Thus in his report (followed by a first series of White papers in 1944 and by a second White
paper under the new Labour government in 1946) Beveridge proposed to reorganize
insurance policy to provide what he described as a social insurance (i.e. an insurance system that would be
thereafter guaranteed by the state, and not by private companies or the
voluntary sector) based on a principle of solidarity between those at risk or
in difficulty and those at less risk and/or in employment.
The report rested on
assumptions that were to become part of the “common sense” of post-war Britain
: for example, that the government should provide universal family
allowances (to put an end to child poverty) and a comprehensive health-care
system (both to be funded through taxation) and that full or high levels of
employment should become a government priority. Beveridge was to recognize in a
later report (Full Employment in a Free Society, 1944) that high
levels of employment were the key to success in the fight against poverty and
that the state had a duty to ensure these, thus taking up a notion that had
already been defended at a more theoretical level by Keynes in his General
Theory of 1936). Indeed, as one recent commentator has argued[9],
the most radical of Beveridge’s ideas were in fact on the margins of his Report
on social security, like his support for full employment policies or a free
health service.
One of the early
contradictions, or at least tensions of the Beveridgian vision of social
protection was his insistence on the construction of a universal (and therefore expensive) system of social protection
on funds gathered essentially from relatively precarious financial base, i.e.
low flat-rate contributions (they had to be low so that the poorest worker
could afford them). This lack of adequate funding was to lead to recurrent crises
in the welfare system (the first was to emerge already in in the early fifties
under Labour) and a constant pressure from those who were sceptical about the
feasibility of the system, both in favour of
selectivity or targeting (concentrating assistance on
those who really needed it, was how it was usually put, through means-testing)
and earnings-related contributions (which was indeed introduced later). Another
basic weakness in the Report was Beveridge’s insistence on providing only subsistence-level
support for those in need : here we have not only an echo of Rowntree’s “absolute” notions of poverty but
also the old preoccupation of keeping the poor on their toes, as self -reliant
as possible and ready for re-insertion on to the labour market. Thus the levels
of provision for those dependent on benefits were designed not “ to stifle incentive, opportunity,
responsibility : in establishing a national minimum (the State) should leave
room and encouragement for voluntary action by each individual to provide more
than the minimum for himself and his family ”[10]
The immediate
reaction to the report was politically conflictual (although in the muted terms
of the wartime coalition), with the Labour party in enthusiastic agreement and
the Conservative leadership preoccupied with the eventual cost of the new
scheme and its possible impact on the incentive to work. Since this is an aspect which tends to be
glossed over in many of the more consensualist accounts of the period, I would
like to grant it some attention.
There were indeed
good reasons for this difference in appreciation and reception of the Beveridge
proposals between Labour and the
Conservatives. After all, it had been predominantly Conservative governments,
inspired by the old (Victorian) notions of self-help and self-reliance, that had pursued policies in the Thirties
intended to ration state assistance to the poor and the unemployed, for reasons
of budget equilibrium (among other, more directly political or ideological
factors). There were those in the Conservative party in 1942, and not least
among them Churchill himself, who very much doubted the economic wisdom of
extending state-funded social security, and the political wisdom of
“feather-bedding” the unemployed. We must also keep in mind that Beveridge’s
second Report, Full Employment in a Free Society was published in the
same year as F. von Hayek’s political tract, The Road to Serfdom (1944),
which had some considerable resonance within the Conservative leadership. Von
Hayek’s basic argument was that all forms of state-intervention, no matter how
well-intentioned, be they socialist, social-democratic, Keynesian, or of a
right-wing authoritarian character lead inevitably to totalitarianism. This is
the notion of the “ratchet effect” : intervention breeds intervention, thus
restricting steadily the space for individual initiative and freedom.
On the other hand,
the Labour party already had an agenda for social security reform in the 1930s.
Thus, Clement Attlee, writing in 1937 could state that his party, once
elected
“does not intend
to delay the introduction of measures
calculated to effect an immediate improvement of a far-reaching character in
the social services. It is determined to put an end once and for all to the
insecurity suffered by millions through the fear of unemployment and the loss
of livelihood. (…) Labour intends to see that all those who have reached an age
at which they are entitled to retire from industry shall be given adequate
pensions on condition of retirement.
(…) It is inevitable that during
the period of adjustment to the new conditions a certain volume of
unemployment should continue. For those who still remain unemployed there must
be adequate maintenance. The means test will be abolished, and the whole
treatment of the unemployed will be radically altered. Instead of being
considered, as they are by the National Government, as little better than
criminals, they will be treated by Labour as the unwilling victims of
circumstances over which they have no control…”[11]
As the results of the
1945 general election amply illustrate, it was the Labour party that turned out
to be nearer to capturing the post-war public imagination on these issues, and
Labour’s resolute defence of a new deal on social protection was undoubtedly
one of the keys to its unexpected electoral success.
It is, of course, a
matter of speculation whether the Conservatives, had they been elected in 1945,
would have have felt compelled to bend to the popular mood and introduce
similar legislation to that actually defended and implemented by Labour. Although there was, as we have seen,
criticism of Beveridge in the Conservative ranks, and Churchill was extremely reluctant to tread the path of interventionism (influenced in this by the
arguments of von Hayek in The Road to Serfdom), nonetheless, the fact
that the Education Act of 1944 (often seen as another legislative pillar
of the post-war welfare state) was prepared by Rab Butler, Conservative Minister
of Education in the coalition government, and implemented by Labour, lends some credence to the notion of a
“consensus” (or at least an armed peace) of political opinion in the immediate
post-war years that there could be no return to pre-war policies, especially in
the sensitive area of social policy. This is no doubt what led the later
Right-wing conservative leader and friend of Margaret Thatcher, Keith Joseph,
to describe war as “the midwife of socialism”, suggesting by this rather
provocative turn of phrase that it had been in the aftermath of war that
Britain had been most tempted along the interventionist road.
There were then the
constraints of the immediate post-war “mood” of the country which no doubt did
much to stifle dissidence within the Conservative ranks on these issues. As we
shall see, little political resistance was displayed in these early years to
the Labour legislation in both the economic and social fields, with the notable
exceptions however of the nationalization of the health service and the later
nationalization of the steel industry
(in both cases the Conservatives lent political support to what can be
considered to be their natural political constituencies among the doctors, and
later the steel-masters).
* * *
We have mentioned
some of the problematic consequences of what we might call the underlying
philosophy of the Beveridge proposals – the lack of adequate long-term funding
for what was indeed a very ambitious project, and the adoption of a very basic
subsistence level of support (which in any case was not respected in the
practice of governement and led many beneficiaries of state assistance to be
actually below the subsistence level, cf. old-age pensioners). Another basic problem with Beveridge’s
proposals and which did not go unmentioned at the time (although the criticisms
were to have no effect) was his insistence on setting up a contributory scheme
which implied participation in the labour market. Of particular
salience here was his vision of women within the system of social protection. This is something
which has in recent years become the object of a more systematic feminist
critique of the “paternalism” of British welfare provision. It has indeed
become fashionable in certain quarters to see the Beveridge-inspired reforms as
essentially inspired by a male-centred vision of the labour market.
Like Rowntree and
Booth before him, Beveridge was both a progressive thinker for his period in
history and his social class, but also the carrier of some of the prejudices of
both. From Beveridge’s point of view, although social protection should be
extended to women (all women) it was essentially as spouses that women
were to benefit. It was thus
recommended that all married women should qualify for a wide range of benefits
“by virtue of their husbands’ contributions”. And if the reasons for this were
not fully understood, Beveridge made his own position plain and clear : “the
attitude of the housewife to gainful employment outside the home is not and
should not be the same as that of a single woman”. In this Beveridge was merely
echoing the prejudices of many male politicians of the time (only of the
time?), of Right and Left, who believed that a
woman’s place (or to be more precise the place of the mother or wife)
was definitely in the home. The objective consequence, however, of tying the
right to social benefits to contributions made through non-domestic work (i.e.
through participation in the labour market) was to relegate women to a place of
secondary social citizenship. To defend this position is of course not
to deny the immense improvement in the lives of many women which resulted from the implementation of
Beveridge’s proposals in the legislation of the Labour government (concerning maternity
or widows’ benefits, for example).
* * *
Although there is a
clear relationship of cause and effect between the proposals to reform social
protection in Britain as formulated by Beveridge and the legislation finally
implemented by the Labour government from 1946 to 1948, we would be wrong to
assume that the latter was simply the direct translation of the former. As we
have seen, Labour already had its own agenda in the Thirties, but it was of
course of crucial symbolic importance that Beveridge, a member of the Liberal
party should join them in demanding more systematic state intervention in this
field. But all Beveridge’s ideas did not survive the political process, and
some of his most radical proposed reforms were diluted or, indeed, dropped from
the very beginning. This was the case for
his plan to provide the
unemployed with benefits for an indefinite period (as long as there was
need, as in the case of disablement or old age). The full impact of this
particular retreat from Beveridge’s proposals was not to be felt until the
return of mass unemployment in the late
sixties. As we will see, in fact, as we move from the post-war boom years to
the years of social and economic crisis, access to unemployment benefit was to
become increasingly restrictive (in terms both of the criteria for
qualification and the duration of benefit), and the unemployed once again were
to fill the growing ranks of the poor.
Secondly, what Beveridge had seen as a
“residual” form of relief from poverty, for those who could not qualify for the
wider insurance scheme (because they were outside the labour market or had not
paid enough contributions to the national insurance fund) , what was to be
called national assistance (later supplementary benefit and later
still income support), turned out to be more important than foreseen and
this from the very beginning. The major consequence of this was that the
practice of means-testing (Beveridge
conceded that national assistance, which he believed would only concern a feeble
minority, should be provided on a selective basis to those really in need)
remained at the heart of the system, and was to provide a basis for its own
extension in later years. In fact by the seventies, means-testing (the hated
practice of the Thirties) had returned with a vengeance throughout the benefits
system, and in the eighties and nineties the neo-liberals were explicitly and
ostentatiously in favour of selectivity.
Between 1945 and 1950 the first post-war Labour
government, under the leadership of Clement Attlee, implemented a programme of
social and economic reform which was to change the face of British society :
the underlying principle that characterized the Labour reforms of these years
(from the ownership of industry or town planning to health provision, education
and housing) was the legitimacy of state intervention to regulate market
mechanisms in the economy and, in the case of social security reform, to compensate for the loss of earning power
(caused by the dysfunctioning of the labour market) among the working population. Nationalization of certain key sectors of
industry was to accompany the establishment of a comprehensive network of social protection.
As a major step towards reducing inequalities (and the effects of poverty) in
two particularly sensitive areas major reforms of the education system and
health care were enacted. The so-called Butler Education Act of 1944
made secondary education free and compulsory for all until the school
leaving-age of 15, and brought a large majority of school-children (90%) into
the state sector – but it did not abolish that “bastion of class privilege” (as
it was later to be described by Anthony Crosland) the public school
network, as some on the Left had hoped.
The health system was reorganized to become an integrated and state-funded
National Health Service (National Health Service Act[12]
of 1946). Health care also was
to be free at the point of access, with the evident objective of eliminating (or at least reducing) a major
consequence of social inequality (i.e.
the equation of ill health and poverty). However, the battles waged by the
Minister of Health at the time against a majority of health professionals who
were hostile to the government’s plans to reorganize their profession and
regulate their earning-power left their mark on the new system. The fact, for
example, that Bevan finally gave in to the hospital doctors’ demands to
conserve private beds in the public hospitals, and the acceptance of private patients for General Practitioners were
not only in contradiction with the general philosphy of the reform but were to
be the first signs of future inroads into the very notion of an egalitarian
public health service.
The three major pieces of legislation of the
period, however, directly concerning the prevention of poverty were :
1.
the Family Allowance Act of
1945, which was to introduce family allowance, a non-contributory and universal
benefit, paid out of general taxation, intended to put an end to one of the
salient forms of poverty of the inter-war years, i.e. child poverty.
2.
the National Insurance Act of
1946 which introduced a wide-ranging network of social benefits for those who,
temporarily or permanently, were suffering from an “interruption or loss of
earning power” (such as retirement
pensions, widows' and widowers' pensions, sickness and maternity benefits,
unemployment benefit - provided you had
worked for a given period of time).
Despite the early departures from Beveridge’s
initial plans, it was hoped by those who fought for these major social reforms
that they would put an end to the poverty that had been a blight
on the British social landscape until then. Not only was it hoped that this
would be the case, but by the early fifties with the publication of the last of
Seebohm Rowntree’s surveys on poverty in York and his discussion of the effects
of welfare reform (B. Seebohm Rowntree, Poverty and the Welfare State,
1951), it was initially believed to have been the case. Beveridge himself had
referred to the work of Rowntree in the introduction to his 1942 report as one
of the major incentives for reform, and the fact that the famous social
investigator could conclude on the virtual disappearance of absolute poverty as
a result of the social reforms that we have just discussed seemed to provide
ample justification for the new system of social protection.
As we shall see, with emergence of new and more
demanding criteria in the definition of poverty and as the result of new
contributions from social science, these initial reactions of the fifties
turned out to be more than a little complacent in their underestimation of the
mechanisms of reproduction of poverty that post-war Britain continued to
harbour. It is to the “rediscovery” of
poverty during the so-called “post-war boom” that we will now turn.
The Conservatives and the
welfare settlement
Perhaps surprisingly, given
the past record of the Conservative party in power (before the Second World
War, that is) the “welfare settlement” that was established by the reforming
Labour government of Clement Attlee was to become the object of a political
consensus[13] in the
fifties, at least among party leaderships, while the Conservatives were in
power. None of the major objectives of the social legislation enacted by Labour
were called into question during these years of Keynesian intellectual dominance, although as Lowe
points out the Conservatives did grant a lower priority to the N.H.S. and no
doubt many Conservatives continued to question the wisdom of high levels of
social expenditure. Nonetheless, the
initially reluctant conversion of the leadership of the Conservative party to the Welfare State was complete by the
Fifties and whether through expediency or belief, or a mixture of the two, they
pursued most of the social policies of their predecessors.
Indeed, if anything, the
Conservative leadership, from 1951 to 1964, was intent in certain fields (in
housing, for example) on outdoing their Labour opponents in terms of welfare
provision. Continuing high levels of social expenditure were maintained despite
at least one major attempt to reverse government policy from within (the
Thorneycroft revolt of 1958). This
strategy was, of course, made somewhat simpler by the general economic
atmosphere of the time. Although, already by the early and mid-fifties, as I
have suggested in my introduction,
there were ominous signs that the British economy was falling behind its
West European rivals in relative terms (productivity growth, domestic
investment etc.), in the main the economy appeared buoyant, ensuring steady
growth rates and historically low levels of unemployment. It was of course this
latter factor that contributed largely to the disappearance of what Beveridge
had called “Want” or subsistence-level poverty as a mass phenomenon.
Britain had apparently
entered into what J.K. Galbraith was to call, in 1958, “the affluent
society”. Following on from the
findings of Rowntree, published in 1951 (in which he reported that there were
only 3% of the population of York – the town of his historic case studies - living in poverty, compared to 47.4% in his
first study of 1901 and 6.7% in his second study of 1936) we could point to
many indicators of improving conditions for the whole population, including the
working class. Growth levels were
historically high (though not as high as many of Britain’s economic rivals),
with an annual increase of 2.9% in the Gross National Product throughout the
fifties. With an average of 1.5% of unemployment, also throughout the period,
many in the working class benefited from rising living standards. This was the era of mass access to consumer
goods and particularly to the new consumer durables : by 1960, 73% of British households possessed television sets, 53%
had a washing machine and 34% a fridge. Whereas in 1951 only 14% of households
owned a motor car, by 1960 27% possessed a car and 2% had two cars. Whereas
only 66% of manual workers benefited from the two-week annual holidays that had
been introduced by Chamberlain in 1938, the figure had risen to 97% in
1960. From the austerity and rationing
of the immediate post-war years, which had no doubt cost the Labour government
the 1951 election, prosperity had become widespread.
We would do well however to
keep in mind that most of the statistics that are used to highlight these
“boom” years of the British economy – and which did show unprecedented
improvements in general standards of living and much-increased access to the
consumer goods market for large numbers of working people – were national
averages. They thus tended to hide the relative unevenness of the spread of poverty and prosperity over
the national territory. Thus although unemployment, as we have seen, averaged
1.5% for the whole of the UK throughout the fifties, during the same period it
averaged around 7 per cent in Northern Ireland. Parts of Scotland and Northern
England were also left out of the general increase in prosperity. Although
housing conditions definitely improved for the whole of the population during
the period (with, among other factors a decline in house-sharing among
poor families), as a result of higher
incomes and the development of publicly-provided, low-cost rented accommodation
(council housing), there remained nonetheless notorious slums in some of
Britain’s major cities (in Glasgow, for example) and therefore many people
still living, essentially in private-rented accommodation, without basic
amenities. Similarly, within the relatively wealthy areas of Britain, there
remained substantial pockets of poverty, which the overall improvement in
general living standards had done little to alleviate. Inner city areas of
London, for example, illustrate well the phenomenon of want among plenty. This
was not a new problem, and it was to re-emerge with a vengeance as Britain sunk
into recession in the 1970s.
Nonetheless, as Harold
MacMillan, speaking to a Conservative party ralley in Bedford in July
1957, put it : “Let us be frank about it, most of our people have never had it
so good”. This was one political indicator among many of the mood of economic
optimism (which turned out to be both short-lived in historical terms and
unwarranted) which affected the Britain of the nineteen fifties and sixties.
And which of course massively benefited the party in power.
The general feeling was that
affluence was, for good or for bad,
here to stay and that Keynesianism had provided the method and the means
of governance whereby to avoid the extremes of poverty and inequality that
Britain had experienced before the War (essentially through demand-management
of the economy and highly progressive redistributive taxation combined, of
course, with welfare provision for those in need).
If, in political terms, it was a time of self-confidence for the
Conservatives, it was a period of doubt for Labour traditionalists, indeed for
the Labour party more generally, and of calls for “revision” of Labour
doctrine, by which the major theorists in favour of the revision argued that
class differences were being eroded by the advance of consumerism and that the
glaring social inequalities that had characterised Britain since the Industrial
Revolution were in the process of disappearing. As Crosland argued in 1956 :
“The worst forms of
economic abuses and inefficiencies of modern society have been corrected; and
this is no longer the sphere, as it has been for the greater part of the life
of modern socialism, in which reforms are most urgently required.”[14]
Not for the first (nor the
last ) time in British history the class struggle was being declared obsolete
and the emergence of “one nation” (cf. Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil) being
noisily signalled.
According to this view, the
times of mass unemployment and mass poverty, and the political attitudes that
they had generated, were definitely anchored in the past. This, it was argued,
called for a major cultural revolution : Labour had to break with its
“cloth-cap” image of being the party of the poor and the working classes (which
in any case were no longer historically significant) and open its ranks to the new white-collar middle classes, not
only as a new and rapidly growing
electoral constituency, but also in terms of its official doctrine which
had long been dominated by the sort of “class” issues that were presently in
the process of being resolved, once and for all. This preoccupation with the
middle classes and the “declassing” of British society suggests that poverty
and the poor still remained invisible, and no doubt understandably so, for many of these Labour revisionists of the
nineteen fifties.
But then MacMillan, very much himself a key actor of the Keynesian
consensus (which he had heralded in his book The Middle Way written in
1938, in which he argued for a synthesis of the conservative and socialist
traditions), did say “most of our people”. Here, perhaps is the implicit
admission of what by the early sixties was to become a major concern, first of
academics working in the field of social policy and later of politicians : some
people, despite the new institutions of the Welfare State, and despite growing
prosperity, were continuing “not to have it so good”. The relative complacency
that had surrounded the last of Rowntree’s surveys, published in 1951, began to
dissipate by the early sixties, not so much because of a deterioration in the
economic situation (this was to happen later) but because of intellectual
dissent (which was to lead to poltical
dissent) within the cosy welfare consensus.
Increasingly, and especially
on the Left, there was a concern for those who continued to fall through the
safety net, despite national insurance and
national assistance. Poverty remained a blight on the British social
landscape, despite post-war Labour promises of the “new Jerusalem”.
Increasingly it was being argued that the level of provision granted by some
essential flat-rate benefits was insufficient to guarantee protection from
poverty. Beveridge, aware of the long-term costs of raising pensions, for
example, had rather cynically warned that “It is dangerous to be lavish to
old-age”[15]. However,
as a result, the introduction of state-guaranteed old-age pensions had failed
to keep a substantial minority of
pensioners out of poverty. In
its 1959 election manifesto, the Labour party estimated that one million pensioners were obliged to
apply for national assistance and another 500,000 were entitled to it. Thus,
although it may be true, as Deacon annd Bradshaw have argued that “poverty was
rediscovered only after it had been redefined” – here they are referring to the
emergence of new conceptualisations of poverty in the sixties – it was also the
case that some basic problems of
subsistence (i.e. of “absolute” poverty) had still not been
resolved by the late fifties, and that
certain categories of the population were still in need (the old, the disabled,
the unemployed, single, widowed or divorced women, and, as a result of
immigration policy in the late forties and early fifties, increasingly the
non-white population ). It was also to be “discovered” during this period that
the new public services provided by post-war Welfare – in particular access to
free health care and relatively cheap higher education – were above all
benefiting… the well-off.
The dissenting voices
to the new (and, as we have seen,
relatively complacent) welfare consensus were at first to come from one of the
most prestigious of Britain’s higher education institutions, the London School of Economics. It was there
that Richard Titmuss and a group of
Left-leaning sociologists and social administration specialists had begun their
radical critique of the inadequacies of
the Beveridgean settlement, and of what they saw as inaccurate and old-fashioned visions of poverty. It was
also their belief that the Conservative
administrations of the Fifties were trailing their feet on the issues of social
welfare, paying lip-serice to the Welfare State but doing little or nothing to
improve its functioning. Titmuss had had some influence on the elaboration of
Labour policy in the Fifties and had been arguing for improvements to the
welfare network (the introduction of a earnings-related superannuation scheme
to top up basic pensions, for example).
Titmuss argued also for the more deliberate targetting of certain very
under-privileged groups, for a sort of positive discrimination in favour of the
poor.
He also took very seriously the arguments already being advanced
by researchers and politicians associated with the right-wing think-tank, the Institute
of Economic Affairs (founded in 1955 and run by Ralph Harris and Arthur
Seldon) and who argued that the Welfare
State was not only overburdening public expenditure but also weakening traditional British values of thrift,
self-reliance and self-help. Titmuss was right to take these arguments
seriously (and many of his colleagues would have done well to follow his
example) as they were to re-emerge some years later, during the crisis years of
the seventies, at the very forefront of the Thatcherite ideological offensive
against British social democracy.
It was two of Titmuss’s
colleagues, Peter Townsend and Brian Abel-Smith who were to launch a major
intellectual offensive against the complacencies of the “welfare consensus”
with the publication of The Poor and the Poorest in 1965.
Townsend and Abel-Smith argued that not only
had poverty not disappeared as a result of the social legislation of the post-war
Labour government, but that it had actually increased. Basing their survey on
the findings of the Family Expenditure
Surveys for the years 1953-1954 and 1960, the two researchers showed that in
1960 7.5 million people were living below a poverty level that they set at 140%
of the National Assistance benefit. Two
million were actually living on or below National Assistance level. Moreover,
they pointed out that, despite popular misconceptions, the fact that people
were in paid work was not necessarily an antedote to poverty. Thus not only was
poverty “rediscovered” admittedly in new guises, as we shall see, but also the
notion of the “working poor” once again surfaced in the debate on poverty. As
for the major causes of this “new” poverty, it was due essentally to old age,
large families or illness (at the time unemployment only accounted for 7% of
the poor, but then this was to change radically in the years to come).
To make their point, Townsend and Abel-Smith rejected traditional definitions of poverty,
and most particularly the sort of “absolute” definitions associated with the
work of Rowntree, as abstract, arbitrary and subjective. “Scientific” “nutritional” definitions of
poverty and subsistence levels are abstract in the sense that they are based on
hypotheses of purely rational uses of
available resources, on what people should do to survive on low incomes
rather than what people actually do.
They also tend not to take into account the special needs and circumstances of
certain categories of the poor and the “working poor”, in manual occupations for instance (high
calorie consumption). More generally, Townsend and Abel Smith argue for more
behaviourist approaches to poverty, in which researchers look at the real
living (and consuming) conditions and behaviour of the poor in order to draw
their conclusions about minimum resources.
The two researchers of the sixties also
rejected what they saw as the arbitrariness of Rowntree’s definitions of poverty, i.e. the fact that
he was obliged to include what he called “sundries”, or miscellaneous items of
consumption, which changed with time and therefore undermined any claim to
absolute accuracy. But the most telling, but also perhaps self-defeating
(because it could and would be turned against their own work), of the
criticisms of absolute poverty developed by Townsend and Abel-Smith was their
charge of “subjectivity” against the works of their prestigious
predecessor. They argued that the precise definition of “secondary poverty”
(when people have sufficient ressources but don’t use them properly) was left
very much up to the subjective judgement of the researcher.
It should perhaps be kept in mind that this
notion of relative poverty, that was to be forcefully introduced into British
debates in the sixties by Townsend and Abel-Smith, was not a particularly new
one, although it did go against the grain of much of what had been argued by
the influential Rowntree. As Alcock points out, there was even within the
classical liberal tradition in economics some recognition of the relative
nature of poverty and deprivation. Thus the founding father of economic
liberalism (whose work was to be extravagantly instrumentalised by the
neo-liberals of the Thatcher period), Adam Smith, argued in his treatise on The
Wealth of Nations (1776) that :
“By necessaries, I understand not only the
commodities which are indispensibly necessary for the support of life but
whatever the custom of the country renders it indecent for creditable people,
even of the lowest order to be without. A linen shirt, for example, is strictly
speaking not a necessity of life… But in the present time… a creditable day
labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt.”[16]
As we
have already seen, critics of this more relativist “behaviourist” approach to
poverty were quick to point out that the issue at stake here was not poverty
but inequality and that in order to eradicate the sort of poverty that Townsend
et al had “rediscovered” would mean embracing a radical egalitarianism
(this is, by the way, a non sequitur).
If the work of Townsend and Abel-Smith did much to put the discussion of poverty, and therefore more generally of welfare policy, in Britain on a new footing, the work of Titmuss also brought academic legitimacy to the demand for reform. Titmuss was intent on undermining some of the received ideas about welfare (received in elite as well as popular opinion). Although he was a supporter of the “universalist” cause (i.e. that benefits should be provided without means tests, that is to say “without loss of self-respect by the users and their families”), he nonetheless argued that universalism could usefully be combined with “targetting” or selectivity in order to help those most in need :
“The real challenge resides in the question
: what particular infrastructure of universalist services is needed in order to
provide a framework of values and opportunity bases within and around which can
be developed socially acceptable selective services aiming at discriminating positively,
with the minimum risk of stigma, in favour of those whose needs are greatest” [17]
Titmuss also introduced, in the debate on
welfare in the sixties, the important
notions of “disservices” and “diswelfare” inflicted on individuals by society and which should be
compensated by welfare. What he was attempting to do here was to reverse the
widespread idea that welfare recipients were getting “something for nothing” or
in some way or another were personally responsible for their plight (an idea
that we have already discussed). He was also, of course, stressing the
structural causes of poverty and other difficulties of welfare recipients :
“The emphasis (…) on ‘welfare’ and the
‘benefits of welfare’ often tends to obscure the fundamental fact that for many
consumers the services used are not essentially benefits or increments to
welfare at all; they represent partial compensations for disservices, for
social costs and social insecurities which are the product of a rapidly
changing industrial-urban society. They are part of the price we pay to some
people for bearing part of the costs of other people’s progress; the
obsolescence of skill, redundancies, premature retirements, accidents, many
categories of disease and handicap, urban blight and slum clearance, smoke
pollution, and a hundred-and-one other socially generated disservices. They are
the socially caused diswelfares; the losses involved in aggregate welfare gains.”[18]
Titmuss was also one of the first researchers
in the field to point to the advantages that the relatively wealthy also
obtained from the welfare settlement, not only in terms of the social peace
and discipline that the Keynesian consensus had provided but also in terms of
their own disproportionate access to services ( education and health, in
particular) that were provided on a universalist basis, or the fact that they
were the major recipients of
certain indirect state-provided
“benefits” usually left out of the discussion on welfare, i.e. state subsidies
to owner-occupiers in terms of tax deductions, for instance.
The result of these new debates launched by
Titmuss, Townsend et al on the questions of welfare, poverty and
inequality was twofold. At a governmental level this helped to set in motion a
series of government enquiries into different aspects of the welfare settlement
(cf Supplementary Benefits Commission presided by Lord Collison but
whose vice-chairman was Richard Titmuss, set up in 1966; the Plowden Report on Children and
their Primary Schools (1967), the Seebohm Report on Local
Authority and Personal Social Services (1968) ), resulting in a series of
proposals for reform. Thus in the late sixties, the Wilson government attempted
to tackle some of the problems raised by the earlier work of the researchers :
an Urban Aid Programme was launched in 1968 as were the Educational Priority
Areas and the Community Development Projects; the Race Relations Board was
established in order to monitor and
combat discriminatory practices against coloured citizens of the U.K. The research work also led to the emergence
of pressure groups (charities)
focussing specifically in the issue of poverty and its eradication. This
was the case of the Child Poverty Action Group founded in 1965 by
a close collaborator of Titmuss, Tony Lynes, and of a host of other “single
issue” pressure groups like Shelter (a group campaigning for the
homeless that was set up in 1966) or the National Federation of Claimants
Unions (set up in 1968 to advance the cause of the unemployed). It was of
course no coincidence that some of the key researchers who had initiated the discussion on welfare also
played a leading role within the anti-poverty pressure groups (Townsend, for
example, was a regular contributor to publications by the CPAG and set up his
own campaigning group for the disabled, the Disability Alliance, in
1974). It was also in the sixties, and as a direct result of the work
undertaken by Titmuss et al that the new profession of state-funded social
workers began to develop.
All these developments were to take place as
the social and economic situation of the United Kingdom began to rapidly
deteriorate. The whole of the Wilson period of government (from 1964 to 1970)
was dogged by recurrent balance of payments crises, thus handicapping any
desire it might have had to tackle the problems of poverty and social
inequality. It finally plunged into difficulty in 1967 with the devaluation of
the pound. By this time the new phenomenon of “stagflation” (the combination of
rising inflation and unemployment, or economic stagnation plus inflation) was
beginning to emerge and to undermine the very feasability of the Keynesian
demand management policies that had been the hallmark of post-war British modes
of governance. The British crisis had begun.
Rodney Lowe in his book on
the history of the British welfare state suggests that the history of what he calls the “classic”
Welfare State (which itself entered into crisis with the economic and social
crisis of the seventies) can be divided into four phases :
1.
from 1945 until 1957 there was general satisfaction with the new
welfare settlement not to say a certain complacency about its capacity to
resolve, in particular, the problem of poverty. It was during this period that
Rowntree (and Lavers) published his last survey on York, entitled Poverty
and the Welfare State (1951), which contributed to this general perception
that the issues of poverty and mass deprivation were anchored in Britain’s
past.
2.
from 1957 until 1965 an “opportunity” rather than a “welfare” state was
promoted by the Conservatives. This was a period during which concerns about
the rising levels of public expenditure began to be expressed at government
level, leading, for example, to the capping of the Treasury’s contribution to
the National Insurance Fund. Earnings-related contributions to old-age pensions
were introduced in the National
Insurance Act of 1959 (thus undermining the Beveridgean principle of
flat-rate contributions).
3.
from 1965 to 1970 was a period during which the earnings-related
principle was extended by Labour in power to unemployment benefit, sickness
benefit, industrial injury and widow’s benefit (cf. National Insurance Act
of 1966).
4.
the period from 1970 until 1975 saw the further and quite deliberate extension
of means-testing (already present in the form of national
assistance/supplementary benefit).
Lowe therefore argues that
by the end of this particular period (which corresponds quite closely to my own
periodization provided earlier) the principles that underlay the Beveridge
proposals (universalism and comprehensiveness) had been “either rejected
outright or surreptitiously jettisoned”. Britain undoubtedly continued to be a
Welfare State in the sense that the extent of state intervention in the social
field to provide protection for those who suffered from the “loss or
interruption of earning power” and a certain number of basic public services was maintained, but
the form of that intervention was substantially modified, in particular with
the return and generalization of the once-rejected method of means-testing to
select those who were to be assisted. There was some attempt to reverse this
trend during the unhappy Labour administration of 1974-1979, in particular with
the three pieces of legislation introduced in 1975 (Social Security Act;
Social Security Pensions Act and the Child Benefit Act), but this,
as we shall see, was to be short-lived.
Lowe nonetheless also argues
that the “classic welfare state” did
play a significant role in ensuring redistribution, but his conception
of redistribution is a particular one :
“ (…) it is undeniable
that the classic welfare state achieved a significant redistribution of both social status and power. Freedom
from fear of absolute poverty and universal access to services such as the NHS
and secondary education dramatically improved the lives of many. So too did the
comparative job security and, above all,
the sustained rise in living standards that emanated from full
employment” [19]
Lowe therefore is referring
essentially to the distribution of status and power. Income and wealth were
another thing. If certain forms
of “absolute” poverty were on the wane,
even during the post-war boom and the period of substantial state intervention
in the economy, the gap between the
rich and the poor, i.e. the extent of social inequality, although slightly
lessening, continued to be significant. Britain remained a highly unequal,
divided and socially segregated society : this was the case not only in terms
of the effects of social protection, but alos in education and health, the
flagships of the welfare settlement. In his own low key way, Lowe recognizes
this when he refers to “the persistence of inequality throughout the period”[20].
This, of course, had been at
the root of the critique of the welfare state developed by Titmuss, Townsend
and Abel-Smith from the late fifties on. Their analysis, in stark contrast to
what was to become the “common sense” of the eighties and nineties, was that the
welfare state was not doing enough to alleviate poverty and that in certain
ways it was in fact contributing to bolstering the social inequalities
inherited from the previous period. It was Titmuss who pointed out, in his his
lecture on “The Social Division of Welfare”[21],
that there were various forms of
state-funded welfare and not all benefited the poor : whereas it was
true to say that cash benefits disproportionately benefited the poor, this was
not the case for benefits “in kind”, i.e. education or health care. Moreover,
there had been growing pressure throughout the post-war period to cater for the
middle classes (we have seen how important they were in Crosland’s analysis,
and they were considered by the Conservatives to be their “natural
constituency”). Thus, certain forms of
“fiscal and occupational welfare” directly benefited the well-off, e.g. tax exemption on mortgage payments.
Abel-Smith, as early as 1958, had claimed that “the major beneficiaries of
post-war changes in the social services have been the middle classes “ (quoted
by Lowe, op. cit. p. 289) and this was an idea that was to be taken up
again (but for different reasons) by Julien Le Grand (The Strategy of
Equality, 1982). The welfare state had therefore not lived up to the
expectations of those Lowe calls the “democratic socialists” to enact real
changes in the distribution of wealth and income in Britain.
Despite the more optimistic
promises of the coming of a new classlessness as a result of shared prosperity
during the post-war boom (which we find in the writings of the Labour
“revisionists” among others) , it does not seem either that in terms of social
mores and attitudes the old had been entirely replaced by the (brave) new. The
gulf of incomprehension at a factory level, for instance, between management and workers came under
scrutiny in the sixties and for some sociologists it was just another indicator
of the deeply divisive and class-ridden system of education that continued to
form the basis of British schooling. The distinction between “them” and “us”
which is so strongly echoed in Alan Sillitoe’s The Loneliness of a
Long-Distance Runner (1959) continued to haunt British social relations
even before the extraordinary downturn of the British economy sharpened class
conflict in the late sixties and early seventies.
Heath in power
By that time an altogether
more ideological Conservative government had come into power (in 1970)
promising, in its “Selsdon programme”, radical reforms of the postwar
settlement with a major withdrawal of the state from the economic sphere (the
so-called “no lame duck” policy) and a new legal framework of courts and
tribunals in industrial relations to curb the power of the unions (Industrial
Relations Act of 1971). Accompanying these political changes, the British
crisis (the “British disease”, “Englanditis” – medical metaphors abound
during the period) had become the
object of much academic, media and political debate. The explicit objective
of Heath’s two-pronged strategy of withdrawal/reinforcement
of the state was to resolve that crisis, whose major ingredients were :
stagflation, falling competitiveness on the international market, conflictual
industrial relations, not to mention the first signs of the “break-up” of
Britain with the emergence of neo-nationalism in Scotland and Wales and the
armed conflict – what has to be called
the emerging civil war - in
Northern Ireland.
There is no time here to go
into the details of Heath’s humiliating defeat(s) essentially inflicted by a
trade union movement whose numerical strength and defensive capacities had
never been greater. Suffice to say that he was defeated and indeed that
the failure of his radical policies was made patently clear well before his
party was finally ousted in the general elections of 1974. The defeat of Heath,
in the midst of a paralyzing miners’ strike only served to underline what had
become patently obvious to most observers : that Britain had entered into a
major crisis which had its ramifications throughout British social life. It was
an economic and a social crisis, a crisis of a mode of governance, a crisis of
the constitutional set-up and also a crisis of identity.
It was in the midst of that
multi-faceted crisis, and no doubt largely facilitated by it, that the new
visions of Britain and of its future began to gain some credence in public
opinion. The so-called crisis of governability of Britain gave rise to
new radical alternatives to the Keynesian, social-democratic, interventionist
consensus of the post-war years. On the right of the political spectrum that
radical alternative was to be called Thatcherism. It was not the only
alternative on offer (cf the Left’s Alternative Economic Strategy) but
historically it turned out to be of crucial importance for the future of
Britain as the Thatcherites won all the main arguments, with a little help from
their friends in the national press;
during the (relatively accident-prone) Labour administration of 1974 to 1979.
The party’s over
Although we may well
spontaneously associate the new economic “common sense” of the eighties and
nineties with Thatcher and her group in and around the British Conservative
Party (and we do well to do so) it should be remembered that probably the most
significant initial event in the introduction of “monetarist” economics into
Britain took place under a Labour government. It was indeed the Callaghan government of 1976 which
sought a loan from the IMF and accepted the draconian conditions on which that
loan was given . As Crosland pointed out in 1975 “the party (was) over” -
that is if there ever had been a party
for some in post-war Britain – and it became the new orthodoxy, before it was
driven home, with vivid pugnacity in the eighties that you “could not spend
your way out of a recession”. This latter phrase is as straightforward a way as
any to concede that Keynesian demand-management (and deficit spending) no
longer worked.
The seventies then not only saw the return of
economic stagnation and all the social ills that accompany it, but also the
emergence of new interpretations and radical new visions of what do about that
stagnation and those who were directly affected by it. These radical new
visions, and certainly the Thatcherite version of the new radicalism
fundamentally called into question the main elements of the post-war consensus.
The state was no longer seen, as it had been by politicians as different as
Clement Attlee and Harold Macmillan (it was under Macmillan that indicative
planning was introduced into British economic management), as the solution to some
(or most) of society’s ills but rather as part of the problem. The market was
no longer seen, as it had been by both “reluctant collectivists” and
“democratic socialists” as an imperfect mechanism, always in danger of
provoking its own destruction because of the uncontrolled nature of its operations (the basic argument of Keynes
and of those who followed his teaching) but rather as a “finely –tuned
mechanism” alone able to resolve the myriads of problems posed by the
simultaneous operation of supply and demand, a mechanism which could only
function properly without external interference. (Here, of course, I am
simply paraphrasing Hayek who by 1974 – the year he won the Nobel prize for
Economics – had made a quite spectactular comeback onto the world stage and was
influencing a substantial group within two of the major political parties in
the western World – the American Republicans and the British Tories).
Where the Welfare State had once been
consensually considered as a major progress for British society as a whole, and
for the poorer members of that society in particular, it was coming
increasingly under criticism from the Right as the major source of government
over-spending (considered by the monetarists to be the cause of
inflation[22]), as an
expression of the so-called “nanny state” responsible for the lack of
initiative and self-help (the beginnings of the “dependency culture”) that had
spread through the British population, rendering them incapable of dealing with
economic or social difficulty. Thus the calls for a “return” to the Victorian
values of “self-help” and “self-reliance”. The tide of opinion amongst the
political elite (this is true for the Thatcherites, but the reaction was weak,
to say the least, across the whole political spectrum), if not (yet) in the
more general public, had truly turned . The “big state” was being held
responsible for the full panoply of Britain’s ills ; everything from economic
under-performance and trade union militancy to street demonstrations and
juvenile delinquency were held up for scrutiny and found to be the loathful
consequence of a state run amok.
These were the key ideas of the new
conservatism that Margaret Thatcher was to promote and epitomize in the
eighties as her governments – after some initial difficulties due to the brutal
recession of the period 1979-1981- went from strength to strength. Deregulation
of the economy, mass privatization not only of the major industries but also of
public and municipal services, a whole
new framework for the relations between employer and employed, enshrined in
legislation that spanned the decade (not only the Trade Union and Employment
Acts, that effectively put a straitjacket on trade union action, but also
the ending of the Fair Wages Resolution in 1982 and, in 1986, the ending
of the Wages Council protection for young workers). There was also a new
“climate of opinion” which prevailed throughout the media (most of whom were in
any case very favourable towards the “Thatcher experiment” in free market
economics) and most of the institutions of Britain, which insisted on “rolling
back the frontiers of the state” (although the actual behaviour of the Thatcher
administrations in this particular field was very complex – rolling back in
some cases but strongly reinforcing the state in others), creating “real jobs”
(i.e. not state-subsidized ones)
through private initiative and a return to “entrepreneurship”, “putting
Britain back on the map”.
Neo-liberal in the economic field (inspired by
the theories of von Hayek and Friedman) and neo-conservative in the social
field (inspired by the American conservative thinkers of the Reagan era, but
also by her own “intuitive” Victorianism) Thatcher was anything but a
“conservative” in the middle-of-the road, defending the status quo, sense of
the term. Given her attitude towards most of the institutions that she
considered to be conservative in their vision
(that is, hanging on to the old-fashioned,”socialistic” views of the post-war
consensus) - the Church, the BBC, the Monarchy, to mention but a few - Thatcher
was intent on revolutionizing the old Britain.
Indeed, by the end of her stay in office (the
official end of our period – 1990) Britain had been transformed. The economy
had been largely privatized, to the extent that the Croslandite phrase, “the
mixed economy”, seemed no longer applicable to Britain; the unions had been
more than “tamed”, given that the series of laws passed during the period
removed their legal protection and put them in the same position as they had
been in before the Liberal legislation of 1906; work practices had been
“revolutionized”, with the re-establishment of the “management’s right to
manage” and the forced introduction of new forms of labour flexibility.
Employment protection, which had been the hallmark of the British post-war
settlement had been reduced to a strict minimum.
The result was higher productivity (as
industrial firms in difficulty went to the wall, and “surplus” workers onto the
dole), an inflow of foreign investment into Britain, in particular in the
so-called green-field sites without any tradition of industrial strife, and a
booming financial sector as the deregulation of the money market drew financial
institutions from across the world to London (and Edinburgh). For the “winners”
of the new Britain (those forty percent that Will Hutton estimated to have
drawn major advantages from the restructuring of British society) it was a time
of unprecedented prosperity and wealth.
No doubt for this reason (and because of Thatcher’s apparent political
invincibility in those middle years of the eighties) the Thatcher experiment
also began to attract attention from overseas, as a growing number of political
elites fell under the spell of the “market evangelists”.
The result was also, however, as the
ex-Thatcherite philosopher, John Gray, was to recognize, an altogether more
unstable and insecure society. Mass unemployment had become a structural
feature of British society (and with it old and new forms of poverty), in
particular after the brutal recession of
1979-1981, from which several industrial regions simply never recovered.
Those who did have jobs lived in fear of losing them and in any case the
full-time secure job was proclaimed to be a thing of the past. Casualization
(the proliferation of short-term contracts and part-time jobs, especially but
not exclusively for women and young people)
permeated British society, starting at the bottom of the wage scale and
the social hierarchy, but working its way up to affect the middle classes by
the late eighties.
The new insecurity could be felt on the labour
market but also in the housing market as privatization produced its inevitable
effects. The Housing Act of 1980 had put the stock of council houses up
for sale, and tenants were offered sometimes huge reductions on the market
price (up to 70%) in order to encourage them to buy their own homes. The overt
objective was to “spread wealth and ownership” throughout British society
(although there was also no doubt a political agenda – as the Conservatives
well knew there was a strong correlation between living in council housing and
… voting Labour). The “up” side of this was that many less well-off families
became home-owners (84,897 sales completed in 1981; 202,558 in 1982 and between
90,000 and 180,000 per year for the rest of the decade); the “down” side was
that by the end of the eighties many of the families that had bought into the
housing market at the height of the boom had been caught by their own financial
insecurity and the collapse of housing
prices, sometimes owing much more than the real value of their houses
(negative equity). Job insecurity and the fall in house prices combined to
drive thousands onto the streets as their houses were re-possessed by banks and
housing societies. And since the stock of
low-rent public accommodation had been vastly reduced, there was nowhere
(cheap) for these new homeless to go.
* *
*
We have argued here that the classic welfare
state, consolidated by the Attlee government after the war did little to efface
the inequalities of British society (although as Atkinson and others have shown
that there was some narrowing of the gap between the wealthy and the poor in
British society during the post-war consensus). It should perhaps be remembered
that for some at least of its supporters (among whom Keynes and Beveridge) this
in any case was not its prime objective. For them it was necessary to introduce
a set of compensatory mechanisms, piloted by the state, which would eliminate
the insecurities and instabilities inherent in the “free play of market
forces”. In short, poverty was not only bad in itself (for humanitarian
reasons) but like job insecurity or, worse, unemployment, it was always a potential threat to social
peace and therefore to the effective overall functioning of the economic
system. A “welfare state” was the price that it was worth paying to have a
strong and stable framework for the market to get on with its job. This was the
basis of what some historians have described as the “post-war compromise”
between capital and labour : whereas the former was ensured social stability
and the guarantee that business would continue without violent interruption,
the latter was given the tempting offer of rising living standards, relative
job security and a network of social protection, not to mention the
institutionalized recognition of its trade union representatives. The
compromise foundered on the crisis, as social stability broke down and
unemployment hit the workforce.
With the return of mass unemployment from the
early seventies on and the emergence of the “British diease” this conventional
wisdom of Keynes and Beveridge was fundamentally challenged as prominent
politicians called into question the
“good intentions” that had led Britain astray :
“Our industry, our economic life and society
have been so debilitated by thirty years of socialistic fashions that their
very weakness tempts further inroads. The path to bennery is paved with thirty
years of intervention, thirty years of good intentions, thirty years of
disappointments” (Keith Joseph, 1974.).
Not only did there emerge a new vision of
Britain’s economic present and future based on the basic notion of “freeing the
market”, but also a new set of attitudes towards both the “losers” and the
“winners” in the new Britain that the free marketeers wished to construct. The seventies and eighties saw a major
ideological offensive against the “egalitarianism” of the post-war years
(although there was little that was effectively egalitarian in the functioning
of British society at that time). What this meant in effect when the free
marketeers came into power after 1979 was two things :
“In
Britain, I have no doubt that improved social benefits have increased the incentive
for the people to make some kind of
living out of being poor”
In terms of poverty and social inequality there
were several major changes during the period. Despite the rhetoric of radical
reform and the recurrent criticisms of the deleterious effects of welfare on
the spirit of the people, it was not in fact until well on in the period that
any systematic attempt was made to overturn the status quo in welfare (this
began effectively with the Fowler social security reforms of 1986). There were
probably two main reasons for this :
1.
there were other more important tasks to be
carried out, such as the taming of the unions or the
re-structuring/privatization of industry, and it was not really until the
mid-eighties that the Thtacherites could feel confident in obtaining support,
even from their own party, to push through what might well be
unpopular reforms.
2.
just
so, the Welfare State continued paradoxically (given its difficulties) to be
extremely popular and its dismantling would be no easy matter.
However, although the reforms were to tarry,
there were significant changes under way well before the Fowler review.
As Lowe points out, the Conservatives came into power with three objectives in
view: 1. to reduce the real value of benefits (as part of a more general
strategy of getting the poor back onto the labour market) ; 2. to restrict the number of claimants
(becaiuse it was believed by the Conservative administration that a substantial
minority of claimants were not genuinely in need), and 3. to simplify and
reduce the cost of the welfare bureaucracy (here again as part of a more
general strategy of “rolling back the frontiers of the state” and cutting
public expenditure which wa seen as being one of the determining causes of
inflation).
The first
objective (of reducing real benefits)
was not reached across the board but certain significant categories of
recipients of state welfare did see their benefits stagnate or worse (cf. the
decision in 1980 to abandon the indexation of old-age pensions on earnings
and to relate these to prices was to
represent a significant relative loss of resources, in the years to come, for the old, and particularly for those who
were solely dependent on the state pension).
The second objective (of reducing the number of claimants) was never
fulfilled as it came into direct conflict with the effects of the government’s
overall economic strategy : mass and rising unemployment, and creeping
casualization, could only give rise to
growing numbers of welfare claimants, no matter what efforts were made to
impose restrictive definitions on the “unemployed” (between 1979 and 1988,
seventeen changes were made in unemployment insurance, most of which reduced
the level or coverage of benefit). On
the contrary, the eighties was to be a boom period in terms of numbers of
welfare claimants, as whole sectors of British society were plunged into
poverty. Thus as Hills points out (cf. J. Hills, The Future of Welfare,
1993 and J. Hills (Ed.) New Inequalities, 1996), the number of those living on supplementary benefit/income
support rose by two thirds between 1979 and 1990, and the number of people
living with less than 40% of the average national income (what many consider to
be a conservative definition of relative poverty) increased five-fold to 7.7
million. It will be remembered that one of the ways that was used to decrease
the cost of administering the welfare state was the promotion of “care in the
community” as opposed to “community care” : families were thus encouraged if not
obliged to take on the obligation of care of the old and mentally handicapped
as the state withdrew from these sectors.
There can be no doubt that the nineteen
eighties was a period of both growing inequality and growing relative poverty
in British society. As many studies have pointed out it was also a period of
growing stigmatization of the poor,
increasingly held responsible in government discourse but also in the
so-called popular press for their own plight. As Will Hutton points out in The
State We’re In (1995), his influential critique of the Thatcher period,
quoting research carried out by the Rowntree Trust:
“after adjusting for housing costs and
inflation the bottom sixth of the population actually saw their real income
fall between 1979 and 1991 while the
income of the top ten per cent rose by more than half”. (W. Hutton, p. 172)
The
chronology of Welfare reform : 1942 – 1979
1942
: Social Insurance and Allied Services (Beveridge Report). Proposals for a major overhaul of British system of social protection
“from the cradle to the grave”.
1944
: Full Employment in a Free Society.
Beveridge proposes pursuit of war-time planning in order to remedy the
underlying structural difficulties of the British economy.
1944
: (Butler) Education Act. Re-organisation of
primary, secondary and higher education around a free state education system.
Grammar, technical and secondary modern schools. Selection through 11-plus
exam. School leaving age at 15. Private sector left untouched.
1946
: National Insurance Act. Establishes a
comprehensive system of welfare protection along the lines advocated by
Beveridge in 1942. Comprehensive and universal. A contributory scheme with a
central National Insurnace Fund providing unemploment, sickness and maternity
benefits, old-age and widows’ pensions and funeral grants. N.b. flat-rate benefits and flat-rate
contributions.
1946
: National Health Service Act. Enacted
in 1948 after considerable resistance from the medical profession. Free health
care for all, including free hospital treatment, dental care and opticians’
services. Small private sector maintained.
1948
: National Assistance Act. Means-tested benefit
for those “falling through the safety net”.
1951
: introduction of prescription charges (by Labour). Resignation of Aneurin Bevan.
1957
: Rent Act. Staged deregulation of rents.
1959
: National Insurance Act. Introduction of a
voluntary scheme of earnings-related pensions. Graduated pensions.
1963
: Robbins Report on Higher Education.
Advocates substantial expansion of
higher education.
1965
: Founding of Child Poverty Action Group,
after “rediscovery of poverty” despite the provisions of the
Welfare State.
1966
: Supplementary Benefit Act,
replaces stigmatising “national assistance”. National Insurance Act
introduces earnings-related supplements for unemploment and
sickness benefits. Founding of Shelter, pressure group for the homeless.
1967
: Abortion Act which legalises the termination of pregnancy if risk for mental or
physical health of pregnant woman or substantial risk of abnormality. Family Planning Act : free
advice on family planning provided by local authorities.
1972
: abolition of free milk for schoolchildren.
1974
: circular 4/74 makes comprehensive
schooling compulsory.
1975
: Employment Protection Act
The
Chronology of Welfare reform : 1979-2001
1979
Education Act : cuts in school meals and
transport
1980
Housing Act : codifies the “right to buy”
and initiates a major privatization of council housing. Massive transfer of
council houses to the private sector and increase in “home-ownership”.
1980
: Social Security Acts (1 and 2). Reform of
suplementary benefit. End of earnings related rule. 5 per cent cuts and freeze
in child benefit.
1985
: Fowler Review of Social Security leading
to legislation in 1986.
1986
Wages Act reduced the power and
scope of the wages councils, thus restricting the application of minimum wage
rates.
1986
Social Security Act transforms supplementary
benefit into income support and sets up a social fund. Shift towards
generalized means-testing.
1988
Education Act introduces a national
curriculum and enables individual schools to “opt out” of local authority
control. Encouragement of “parental choice” and competition between schools.
1989
Employment Act removed restrictions on
hours and other employment terms for 16 and 17 year olds. Removed some
restrictions on women’s employment.
1990 (Major) : NHS and Community Care Act introduces the
“internal market” into the National Health Service.
1992
Education Act incorporates further education colleges and polytechnics.
1997
National Health Service Act empowers health
trusts to enter into Private Finance Initiative agreements, thus confirming the
“creeping privatisation” begun under John Major
1998
National Minimum Wage Act introduces a national
minimum wage with a regulatory and enforcement framework. The minimum wage
excludes workers under the age of 18, and 18 to 21 year olds have a different
(lower) minimum.
1998
Teaching and Higher Education Act establishes
a General Teaching Council, re-organizes teacher training and allows substntial
increaeses in student fees.
1999
Employment Relations Act gives unions the statutory right to be recognized.
1999
Tax Credits Act introduces the “means tested” Working
Families Tax Credit.
[1] Quoted by Jones and Novak, in
Poverty, Welfare and the Disciplinary State, 1999
[2] Margaret Thatcher, The Downing
Street Years, Harper Collins, 1993, p. 627.
[3] William Beveridge, 1879 –1963.
Liberal politician, director of the LSE from 1919 till 1937 and Master of
University College, Oxford from 1937 to 1945. Although Beveridge’s name is
often associated with the reforms of the immediate post-war government of
Attlee, it should be kept in mind that Beveridge was far from being a
socialist. He was, to borrow, a phrase from Rodney Lowe a “reluctant collectivist” whose major preoccupation was
how to introduce a degree of social stability into the workings of a
capitalist system of which he thoroughly approved.
[4]
There is no consensual definition (and by the way no consensual French
translation) of the term the “Welfare State”. It is derived from the
“wohlfahrstaat”, but this was first used as a term of abuse against the Weimar
Republic. It was also used as an antonym to “warfare state” , i.e. as an
alternative vision of state intervention to that advocated by the right-wing
totalitarianisms of the Thirties. Once the reforming Labour government of
1945-1951 had launched its programme of social and economic reform, it became a
term on common usage, and in the main a favorable rather than a pejorative
term.
[5]
The Labour Representation Committee founded in 1900 and was to become
the Labour party in 1906. Thus the hegemony of the Liberal party in the
representation of working people was broken and new, more radical visions of
poverty, its causes and its consequences began to emerge into political
discourse.
[6] Alcock (1997) provides the
following definition of social security : “The idea behind social security
policy is the use of support, collected in the form of contributions or taxes
from those in employment, to provide an income for those who cannot secure an
adequate income for themselves and thus are at risk of poverty. Social security
is therefore a form of redistribution
of resources from those who have more
than sufficient to provide for themselves to those who do not have enough.”
[7] Keith Joseph, “Stranded in the Middle Ground”, 1976
[8]
R. Lowe, p. 130
[9] Chris Pierson in D. Marquand
and A. Seldon (Eds.) The Ideas that Shaped Post-War Britain,
Fontana, 1996, p.143
[10] W. Beveridge, Social Insurance
and Allied Services, p.7
[11] Clement Attlee, The Labour Party
in Perspective, London, Left Book Club, 1937, pp.192-195
[12] This was undoubtedly the centre-pin
of the Labour government's social legislation. The National Health Service was
set up in order to provide both general medical services and maternity and
child welfare services. Hospital and specialist services were to be
administered by regional hospital boards. General dental and ophthalmic
services were also included in the scheme. Above all, the NHS was intended to
put an end to inequality before ill health by providing these services free of charge, for those who chose a
NHS doctor or General Practioner (G.P.) and were registered on his/her list.
[13] In recent years the very notion of
a post-war consensus has come under criticism from researchers. Thus Ben
Pimlott has referred to the “myth” of consensus in the post-war years, arguing
that there were some very real ideological differences between the two major
parties and the two sides of industry throughout the period. This, of course,
is quite true, but it does little to refute the argument that from the
immediate post-war years until the mid-seventies the party leaderships were
agreed on fundamentals, i.e. that Britain was and should be a Welfare State
with a mixed economy, using Keynesian methods of demand management and fiscal
redistribution to stabilize the operation of the market, and integrating the
representatives of capital and labour in the overall management of the economy. All these various elements of
the post-war settlement were called into question from the mid-seventies on.
[14] A. Crosland, The Future of
Socialism, 1956
[15]Cmd 6404, para. 236.
[16] A. Smith, An inquiry into the
nature and the causes of the wealth of nations, 1892edn (Routledge) p.691
[17] Richard Titmuss, Commitment to
Welfare, 1968 (taken from a lecture elivered to the British National
Conference on Social Welfare, April 1967)
[18] op.cit.
[19] R. Lowe, op.cit. p. 294
[20] R. Lowe, op.cit. p. 285
[21] R.M. Titmuss (1958) « The
Social Division of Welfare » in Essays on the Welfare State,
London, 1958.
[22]
The monetarists, foremost of whom was Milton Friedman, based in the
University of Chicago, argued that inflation was primarily caused by
governments spending more than they were able to raise in taxation and then
proceeding to create “artificial”
money. Controlling the money supply was the order of the day, and the
single most important cause of the increase in the money supply was the
pressure from public spending. The political conclusion was not hard to see :
in order to brin,g down inflation it was necessary to put a check on the money
supply (and therefore on public spending)