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The battle for Beveridge’s welfare state

Enthusiastic crowds queued to buy Beveridge's plan for a welfare state. How would a modern-day Beveridge restore the standing of his creaking creation?

by Nicholas Timmins / October 10, 2017 / Leave a comment
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Published in November 2017 issue of Prospect Magazine

William Beveridge discusses his report at the Ministry of Information. Photo: AP/Rex/Shutterstocks

On 30th November, 75 years ago, in the middle of the Second World War, an anticipatory queue formed on London’s Kingsway, the then headquarters of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office.

Barely a fortnight earlier, Winston Churchill had ordered that the church bells be rung in recognition of Montgomery’s victory at El Alamein. It was the first domestic cause for rejoicing after three years of a war where there had been nothing to celebrate aside from the retreat from Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, and stoic defiance of the Blitz. It was El Alamein—the first victory—that brought forth Churchill’s famous declaration that “Now is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is perhaps the end of the beginning.”

The lengthening queue on Kingsway, however, was not focused on the end of anything; they were after a new beginning. They were there for the somewhat unlikely purpose of buying an often-immensely technical 300-page government-commissioned report, written by a retired civil servant, with the uninspiring title “Social Insurance and Allied Services.”

Much of the report was as hard going as the title suggests. But its 20-page introduction and 20-page summary, which were sold as a cheaper cut-down version, punchily dug the foundations on which the post-war welfare state would rest. These parts of the report were stuffed with inspirational rhetoric—“five giants on the road to reconstruction,” “a revolutionary moment in the world’s history is a time for revolutions, not for patching”: language that no government report, on any subject, has rivalled since.

In the context of the welfare state tod…

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Comments

  1. jimmymack
    October 15, 2017 at 10:34
    Beveridge, and the people in the queue in Kingsway, would be astonished by the modern 'welfare state' - a term used as much in criticism as praise by contemporaries. First to astonish would be its cost, followed immediately by astonishment that what you can take out has been completely uncoupled from what you have put in. It would seem absurd to Beveridge that a person who had contributed nothing - perhaps a recent arrival to the UK - would be entitled to the same as a person contributing for 50 years, or that the former may actually do better from the state since more 'in need'. It would make no sense that a person employed for 30 years would receive exactly the same rate of the unemployment benefit as a person who has never worked. Beveridge and, I would suggest, most of the people in the 1942 queue, would find it incredible that any sensible person would oppose capping combined benefits at the level of the average wage, and they would certainly not flinch from suggesting that a household whose only income is from the state has no 'right' to live in the most expensive parts of the country and should exercise some control over the number of children they have. It would further amaze Beveridge that so many people in work also need to claim - the consequence of the low-wage, high immigration economy all political parties have supported for the past 20 years. Other welfare states have taken a different path to the to the UK, with far more conditionality and time-limitation and, not coincidentally, much more generous benefit levels. I feel this is the path Beveridge would have gone down today.

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About this author

Nicholas Timmins
Nicholas Timmins is a senior fellow at the Institute for Government and the King’s Fund. “The Five Giants: A Biography of the Welfare State,” his final, fully-updated, and award-winning edition of the welfare state’s history, from Beveridge to the modern day, is published by William Collins
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