The Politics of the Welfare State

Ann Oakley, Susan Williams

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138609648
• eBook ISBN: 9780429880537
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Originally published in 1994 The Politics of the Welfare State looks at how the privatization and marketization of education, health and welfare services in the past decade have produced a concept of welfare that is markedly different from that envisaged when the welfare state was initially created. Issues of class, gender and ethnicity are explored in chapters that are wide ranging but closely linked. The contributors are renowned academics and policy-makers, including feminist and welfare historians, highly regarded figures in social policy, influential critics of recent educational reforms and key analysts of current reform in the health sector.

1

Interpretations of welfare and approaches to the state, 1870–1920

Sheila Rowbotham

Introduction

Today in Britain, as many of the welfare gains of the late 19th and early 20th centuries are being whittled away, new questions need to emerge about the origins and early forms of welfare. In particular, a critical assessment is required of the ways in which policies on reproduction and economic production have converged in the context of the development of state intervention. Such an assessment requires an examination of attitudes towards the rôle of the state and of earlier interpretations of the meaning of welfare.

Attitudes towards the rôle of the state have changed over time, and have caused conflict not only between those on the political right wing, and those on the left, but also within both political camps. This is partly because the intervention of the state in people’s affairs and individual liberty are difficult to balance; and partly because an unresolved dilemma of democracy is to what extent should the powers of a government accord with the interests of a majority, or give protection to specific groups of underprivileged citizens? Currently, there is considerable scepticism about the state’s contribution in democratizing society. It is true that in modern welfare states class, gender and race have all created obstacles preventing equal access to policy-making and resources. It is also the case that there have been differing interpretations of the welfare needs of various groups, within which are implicit class and gender prejudices. Racism and imperialism have similarly structured the way that welfare policies have developed. On the other hand, the power of the state has been a significant means of checking the influence of the short-term goals and narrow aspirations of a market-oriented capitalism; as a result, subordinated groups have benefited from the state’s authority, as well as from the resources it controls.

This chapter offers a critical assessment of attitudes towards the rôle of the state between 1870 and 1920 in the UK, when various intellectual and social factors combined to present a new approach to economic and social welfare. A set of ideological attitudes took shape, which were to have a significant impact on the social organization of both production and reproduction. In this period there was a shift in emphasis away from the freedom of the individual, towards the collective responsibility of the state for the “welfare” of its citizens. A view developed of society as organic, supplanting the image of society as a collection of freely competing atoms that had prevailed in the middle of the 19th century. The impetus for this shift came partly from the economic and social problems that had accumulated in the process of industrialization, and partly from the new reality of a limited working-class franchise from the late 1860s. It was a shift that had wide-ranging implications for economic theory, for approaches to industrial relations, and for social policies.

The new economics

In the 1870s, a crisis arose in the authority of the laissez-faire free-market economic concepts, which had coasted along through the middle years of the century. The liberal author of Principles of political economy, John Stuart Mill, had recanted on the wages fund – the economic “law” which held that a fixed amount could go to wage earners, making futile any efforts to raise wages. There was uncertainty about the laws of supply and demand, and there seemed to be no authoritative reply available to give to workers who demanded a larger share of the wealth of the nation. At the same time, schemes involving nationalization of land, which were being proposed by an American called Henry George, became increasingly popular with British workers. In addition, the economic writings of John Ruskin, the art critic with a social message, now seemed important rather than quaint: they were finding a resonance among many thoughtful workers and anxious, upper-middle-class intellectuals.

Ruskin was never a radical. He was an autocratic and conservative thinker who did not accept the concept of individual liberty and was anxious to promote a harmony among the classes that was based on duties, rather than rights. In the process of advocating such a society, however, he overturned the prevailing consensus about the proper relations of state and economy, and state and society. In the Preface to The political economy of art, first published in 1857, he wrote:

Political economy means, in plain English, nothing more than citizens’ economy; and its first principles ought therefore to be understood by all those who mean to take the responsibility of citizens, as those of household economy, economy by all who take the responsibility of householders (Ruskin 1857, xvii).

Economy, he argued, should not be assumed to mean the saving, but rather the administration or “stewardship”, of money or time (Ruskin 1857, 4–5). He suggested that human capacity was a form of wealth, and that the consummation and outcome of economic wealth should result in the production “of as many as possible, full-breathed, bright-eyed and happy hearted human creatures”; in this way, he said, “multitudes of human creatures” would not have to remain in a “dim-eyed and narrow chested state of being” (Ruskin 1862, 152). Ruskin’s criticism of laissez-faire was to be important in the development of the view that the state was responsible for welfare: it inspired liberal men and women reformers in the 1870s and also influenced the socialist movement emerging in Britain from the 1880s. Several separate strands of collectivism thus developed simultaneously, and were often confused by contemporaries.

As a response to these ideas, attempts were made from the 1870s to revise economic theory in order to establish the old orthodoxies as hegemonic imperatives. Alfred Marshall, an economist in Cambridge, advocated that economics should be reinstated as a science, capable of explaining the economic mechanisms at work in capitalist society as an ethical and just distribution of wealth. One of the originators of the “marginal utility” school, which refuted theories of value based on labour, emphasizing individual consumer choices and advocating increased productivity rather than redistribution, Marshall believed economists should leave the ivory tower. Only by becoming evangelical could they combat arguments for land nationalization and socialist ideas. Economists had “to go out into the market place”, he said, “to slay the old fallacies again and again before their [the people’s] eyes” (Pigou 1925, 361); by “old fallacies”, he meant ideas such as those put forward in the popular writings against the political economists by the socialist Robert Blatchford, whose campaigning pamphlets and newspaper, The Clarion, were reaching a mass audience from the 1890s.

Convinced that economic principles were objective and transcended class interests, Marshall was intent on showing that working-class needs could be met within capitalism. His new theory for the distribution of wealth was influenced by F. A. Walker, a forgotten American economist whose writings were influential in the 1870s and 1880s. Walker regretted the unfortunate tendency of the worker, “the residual claimant”, who got what was left over after profit had been secured, to go against his own best interests through “excessive reproduction sexually” and “weak, spasmodic or unintelligent competition with the employing class” (Walker 1886, 220–4). Marshall maintained it was in the interest of the working class to support continuing economic progress and increased productivity, rather than to contest the division of wealth. He advocated a new social model, with small families and industrial harmony. In this way, his approach to economics connected efficiency in reproduction with efficiency in economic production, and allowed for a mixture of private enterprise and state intervention. The role of the state, he said, was to prod the market, in order to maximize utility. This could be interpreted to mean either a limited development of welfare, or the more extensive intervention as proposed by Fabian socialists such as Philip H. Wicksteed. Influenced by Ruskin and the Italian poet Dante, Wicksteed convinced Fabians such as George Bernard Shaw and Sidney Webb that “marginal utility” was the ideal basis for welfare economics (Hobsbawm 1964).

Walker’s preference for long-term planning and the creation of large firms influenced Arnold Toynbee, another Ruskinite and an economic historian with a social mission; it was Toynbee who inspired the University Settlement movement which brought young intellectuals to live and work in working-class slums, doing community service. He argued in the 1870s for the legalization of trade unions, on the grounds that the integration of official structures was greatly preferable to the anarchy of wildcat eruptions, which made it impossible for business to make plans for the future.

Changing approaches to the state

The attempt to reconstitute economic theory thus fed into a new social liberalism which accepted the idea of a strong state, a conservative populism based on organic social theories, and also Fabian socialism, which from the late 19th century presented social reform from above as an alternative to class struggle from below. All these were to become a powerful ideological lobby for a new kind of state. The extension of the power of the state into industrial disputes, the recognition of trade unions, and large-scale production, along with high wages, were presented as a modernization project that would make industry more efficient and reduce labour unrest. Investments in social welfare were therefore advocated not simply on humanitarian grounds, but also in order to serve the long-term interests of the economy. By the early 20th century, advocates for this kind of wider role of the state were having a profound influence on policy, and they had supporters within the state machinery. This support was particularly evident at the Board of Trade – where Winston Churchill, at that time still a Liberal Party politician, was ready to back limited intervention in both industry and society, and where a junior post was occupied by the young William Beveridge, who was later to shape the welfare state after the Second World War.

From a differing perspective, some working-class radicals during the 1870s came to accept the idea of state intervention in education and training. From the 1880s, this idea was strengthened by the growth of new unionism, which demanded legislation for the eight-hour day, and also by the rise of socialism, although socialists were to divide by the early 1890s over the question of using the state. A similar split can be observed among feminists: whereas the traditional liberal wing led by Millicent Fawcett was anti-statist, Lady Dilke and the Women’s Trade Union League argued for protective legislation for women workers, and socialist women concurred with social liberals on the need for state intervention.

Another element in the arguments for welfare, and against laissez-faire, was the social imperialist concern about a supposed decline in the physical stock of the white races. It was feared that without social reform at home in Britain, the empire would lose its vigour. In the early 20th century this fear informed the thinking not only of those on the political right wing, but also of some of the Fabian socialists. It was also taken on board by some feminists, in so far as it was seen to contribute to concern about the conditions of motherhood.

The state and “sweated” women workers

From the 1870s onwards, concern was growing about the concentration of male casual workers in big cities, especially London, on the grounds that they constituted a threat to public order. There were even proposals to control them in camps and to prevent them from breeding any more of the “feckless poor”. There was anxiety, too, about the conditions of “sweated” women workers who, poorly paid and subcontracted, toiled in small workshops or slum dwellings. By the end of the 19th century, “sweated” women workers were the subject of many reports, journalistic exposures and earnest debates among middle-class social investigators; in 1906, their conditions were dramatically brought to the public’s attention in the Sweated Industries Exhibition, which was extensively publicized. Again, the need to extend state control over reproduction and production converged: the low-paid married woman worker was regarded as bringing down wage rates and as neglecting her rôle as a mother. Reformers disagreed, however, on whether improved pay for women, or a better family wage paid to the man, combined with welfare benefits to the mother, might be the solution.

Although subcontracted homework in poor areas of the inner cities – especially London, where the flexible demand of the fashion market and low rents caused it to proliferate – became the focus of the campaign against “sweating” in the 1900s, contemporaries had been well aware from the 1880s that the problem of “sweated” work was not confined to homeworkers. Beatrice Potter (later Webb) said in 1888 that it was: “all labour employed in manufacture which has escaped the regulation of the Factory Acts and the trade unions” (House of Lords Select Committee 1888, 20). A leaflet published in about 1907 by the National Anti-Sweating League, a campaigning organization, linked “sweating” to health and housing, as well as to moral decline. It led, they said, to “acute under-payment. It entails overwork, under-feeding, bad housing conditions, and a poverty and debasement which lie at the roots of many other social evils” (National Anti-Sweating League n. d.).

Weavers at work in the early 20th century (Local Studies Collection, Rochdale Library).

In practice, it was hard to develop and to push policies which challenged low pay, poor nutrition and inadequate housing as a whole. Anti-sweating campaigners therefore isolated what they saw as infected spots within the social structure and recommended that the regulation of homework – and preferably its abolition – was the solution. This ignored the evidence available, which showed that homework was only one aspect of women’s working situation, which in turn was part of a submerged economic sector. For example, in 1894 Ada Nield Chew, who worked in a clothing factory in Crewe that took in contract work from the government (the lowest grade of clothing), pointed out that because her pay was so low, she had to do homework as well. In a letter to the Crewe Chronicle in May 1894, she described homework as: “the only resource of the poor slave who has the misfortune to adopt ‘finishing’ as a means of earning a livelihood. I have myself, repeatedly, five nights a week besides Saturday afternoon for weeks at a time, regularly taken four hours, at least, work home with me and have done it” (Chew 1982, 80). She asked in a subsequent letter:

Now I wonder if the Government of this country know (or care) that those on whom the real business of executing their orders fall are “sweated” thereby. And is the Government so frightfully poor that it cannot afford to pay a living wage to those who made the clothing of our soldiers and policemen? (Chew 1982, 104)

Low pay was not the only grievance which led Chew to describe this kind of factory work as “sweated”. Just like homeworkers, the women had to pay for materials. They also had to scrabble and fight for work: there was no fair allocation of tasks, but a system of favouritism which decided who got the best jobs. When work was slack they had to wait around and lost money. Unlike the homeworker, though, they were subject to direct control, and there were fines if they were late. A final resentment was that tea money was automatically extracted from a woman’s wages, even if she had not drunk any tea (Chew 1982, 75–134).

“Sweating”, then, could be a feature of large factories – Messrs Compton of Crewe, after all, employed 400 workers. It could also draw on workers with a high degree of skill, as Clementina Black, a social investigator concerned about women’s conditions, discovered in the course of her survey into Married Women’s Work, which was conducted during 1908–10. She interviewed a waistcoat maker from London, who had worked on high-quality waistcoats in a West End firm, earning 18 shillings (80p) a week. Thirteen pregnancies and five children later, with her husband unemployed and helping her with the housework, she had to support th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction: Ann Oakley
• 1 Interpretations of welfare and approaches to the state, 1870–1920: Sheila Rowbotham
• 2 Lessons from the past: the rise and fall of the classic welfare state in Britain, 1945–76: Rodney Lowe
• 3 Conservatives and consensus: the politics of the National Health Service, 1951–64: Charles Webster
• 4 Local voices in the National Health Service: needs, effectiveness and sufficiency: Jennie Popay and Gareth Williams
• 5 Priority setting for health gain: Chris Ham, Frank Honigsbaum and David Thompson
• 6 Obstacles to medical audit: British doctors speak: Nick Black and Elizabeth Thompson
• 7 Choice, needs and enabling: the new community care: Jane Lewis
• 8 Making sense of the new politics of education: Geoff Whitty, Sharon Gewirtz and Tony Edwards
• 9 The relationship between research and policy: the case of unemployment and health: Mel Bartley
• Index