British Social Welfare

David Gladstone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781135369057
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

First published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

CHAPTER 1
The welfare state and the state of welfare

David Gladstone

Fifty years on, the essential features of the classic welfare state as created in Britain in the 1940s are still visible. But that period has also been marked by challenge, crisis and change:

1. -
2. challenge from the political left and right to the principles and practices of the welfare state;
3. -
4. crisis created principally by changing economic circumstances from the early 1970s that undermined the precarious political legitimacy of the post-war welfare consensus;
5. -
6. change in the management and organization of welfare state services as well as in social and economic priorities.

A recent vision of the future contends that “The pressures of continuing economic difficulty, the demand for more flexible services and the widespread dissatisfaction with state bureaucracies suggest[s] that the process of restructuring will continue into the next millennium, whichever party is in power” (Taylor-Gooby & Lawson 1993).

Against that background, the purpose of this chapter is to provide a narrative of change in the welfare state over the past 50 years. This it does by reference to three historical debates concerning the relationship between war and welfare, the existence and nature of the post-war consensus and the impact of Thatcherism on the welfare state. Interspersed between each of these narrative sections is a discussion of the relationship between the welfare state and the social relationships of class, race and gender. But underlying both the narrative and analysis is the view that the development of welfare over the past 50 years is “a story of the complexity of political, economic and social forces, of pressures both internal and international, all subject to conflict and change” (Williams 1993).

War and welfare

The debate

Richard Titmuss (1950) argued that the specific experiences of the Second World War created the conditions conducive to the implementation of a range of more solidaristic and statist welfare policies. Subsequent writers have challenged aspects of the Titmuss thesis and Corelli Barnett has attributed much of Britain’s declining fortunes to the “New Jerusalemitis” represented by the welfare state.

There is general agreement that Britain’s classic welfare state was established between 1944 and 1948: a period spanned politically by the Churchill-led coalition government and the Labour government with Clement Attlee as Prime Minister that was returned to power with an overwhelming majority at the General Election in 1945. Between those years “to a greater or lesser extent, liberal opinion converged upon the belief that the welfare of the people is ultimately a collective responsibility of the state” (Morgan & Evans 1993). For such a society a new designation became appropriate: that of a welfare state, a society in which “organized power [is] deliberately used to modify the play of market forces” (Briggs 1961).

This welfare state had two dimensions, full employment and an extensive range of public services. The coalition government’s commitment to “a high and stable level of employment after the war” (Cmd 6527) provides the economic underpinning for the welfare state in general and for its system of social security in particular. There was little political agreement on the means by which this objective would be attained. Keynesian demand management was favoured by the centre and the centre left, while the right wing of the Conservative party looked to a recovery of markets and foreign trade. In spite of such differences, “the maintenance of full employment was both a direct contribution to individual welfare and an essential support for other welfare services, because it simultaneously maximised revenue and minimised demand for them” (Lowe 1993).

A range of social legislation passed between 1944 and 1948 constitutes the second dimension of the welfare state and forms the starting point for several chapters in this book. It, too, divides into two parts. The first is legislation concerning cash benefits: the introduction of a series of financial benefits available “from the cradle to the grave” for those who were members of the National Insurance scheme, and below it the “safety net” of National Assistance. The final measure offering a “new deal” in financial security was the introduction of a system of family allowances: a cash benefit paid to mothers in respect of second and subsequent children. The second form of social legislation concerned services in kind and includes the 1944 Education Act and the National Health Service which, like the major social security reforms, came into effect on 5 July 1948.

As a result both of its economic objective of full employment and its raft of social legislation, “the government…had assumed and developed a measure of direct concern for the health and well-being of the population which, by contrast with the role of government in the 1930s, was little short of remarkable” (Stevenson 1984). It appeared to be Britain’s “new deal” in welfare; and its achievement was that “for over a decade it delivered a remarkable combination of full employment, low inflation and economic growth” (Morgan & Evans 1993).

But would such a “new deal” have occurred without the catalyst of the Second World War? Beveridge, whose report—Social insurance and allied services (Cmd 6404)—was the basis for much wartime optimism about what could be achieved by social planning was in no doubt. In the conditions of national unity created by war it was much easier to achieve recognition of the fact that “the prevention of Want and the diminution of disease are…a common interest of all citizens” (Cmd 6404).

The sense of solidarity created by wartime conditions and experiences was also central to Titmuss’s analysis (1950) in his volume on social policy for the official History of the Second World War.“Titmuss believed that public attitudes became more egalitarian during the Second World War and maintained that this led directly to dramatic changes in social policy” (Smith 1986).

More recent historical research has developed a significant critique of the Titmuss thesis. It has questioned, first, his interpretation of wartime solidarity. Wartime experiences such as the rationing of food and clothing and indiscriminate bombing, “may have democratised hardship, fostering a greater sense of social cohesion…but the strength of class attitudes and the existence of social divisions should not be under estimated” (Digby 1989). There was a world of difference between those dining in well-known London hotels and the population seeking refuge in its underground stations. Similarly the existence of a vigorous wartime black market also calls into question the solidarity that Titmuss identified. Nor it seems did the process of evacuation of women and children from urban to rural areas, which was central to Titmuss’s thesis, provide an unequivocal shock to public consciousness and a new commitment to right the inter-war experiences of children reared amid conditions of financial poverty, ill health and unemployment. A more recent assessment has concluded that “heightened social awareness among some sections of the middle classes clearly did not exclude the sharpening of prejudice in others” (Calder 1991).

Secondly, more recent writing has emphasized the continuities between the welfare state legislation and earlier developments.

Almost all the ideas and proposals for reform in social security and education, for example, had been long discussed in the 1920s and 1930s. The new structures built on or simplified many of the systems that preceded them. In many cases they extended to a national scale experiments which had been introduced by some local authorities. (Glennerster 1990a)

Health care provides another example. During the 1930s both the British Medical Association and the Socialist Medical Association set out proposals designed to extend the health care coverage of the population, the former advocating an extension of the insurance scheme introduced in 1911, the latter local authority control.

But, thirdly, in their attempt to explain the increased role of government in welfare and the development of more comprehensive universal services, recent writers have suggested both the variety and the interrelationship of several other factors than those that Titmuss identified. “…by inviting the Labour and Liberal parties to join the coalition, Churchill broke the Conservative political hegemony of the inter war years” (Kavanagh & Morris 1989). It is generally agreed that while Churchill devoted himself to war objectives, matters of domestic policy were left in the hands of Labour members of the coalition, with Attlee as Deputy Prime Minister. That, and their perceived warmer welcome for the Beveridge proposals, may help to explain Labour’s election victory in 1945. But Churchill, although apparently less interested in domestic affairs, unwittingly gave shape to the ideology of reform. In nationalistic terms, Churchill’s rhetoric emphasized “a ‘common people’ united in a common cause”: their shared determination to win the war. “No longer were British workers seen as the idle, intractable troublemakers of pre-war years”, as soldiers and civilians they were “called to the centre of the national stage…in a patriotic struggle for justice, liberty, equality against oppression” (Morgan & Evans 1993) and in the process performed many acts of courage and heroism in their daily struggle. The people’s war in a sense necessitated the people’s peace.

In many of its features that peacetime world had been presaged in the inter-war planning movement that had commanded some measure of support across the political spectrum and with progressive opinion. In early 1941 a celebrated issue of the popular magazine Picture Post “produced a forty page prospectus for ‘a new Britain’”. Well known writers and thinkers set out “proposals for a fresh employment strategy, social security, town planning, architecture, the countryside, education, health, the medical services and leisure” (Stevenson 1986). Wartime conditions were to prove propitious for developing the legitimacy of its programme. Wartime controls, increased taxation and the necessity of a more interventionist state had already created a changed relationship between the state and the citizen. But the exigencies of war had also brought into government a cadre of “reforming liberal academics from the universities”, such as Keynes and Beveridge, who had espoused the principles of the inter-war planning movement. As a result, the nature of political discourse changed: “promises, programmes and planning had become the norm; those who questioned their validity now occupied the eccentric minority position” (Harris 1990).

The consequence of that process has been controversially discussed by Corelli Barnett (1986) who argues that the British victory in the Second World War was lost to social rather than to economic and industrial change. In the light of knowledge available to ministers and civil servants that Britain would face an economic emergency once the war was over, Barnett argues that the principal priority of the coalition government should have been the reconstruction of British industry. Instead, it planned for a New Jerusalem with the creation of the welfare state; a movement Barnett identifies as “inspired by soggy liberal idealism, a lofty disdain for industry and the means by which wealth was created” (Addison 1987). Barnett’s interpretation has itself been subject to critical review (Addison 1987, Harris 1991) but it serves to remind us how much the development of social citizenship was inextricably linked to Britain’s economic performance.

Class and the welfare state

At the end of the 1940s, T.H.Marshall, Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics, delivered a series of lectures at Cambridge. Although his analysis has been criticized (Ferris 1985, Held 1989, Turner 1986) as “Anglocentric, evolutionary and historicist” (Pierson 1991), his social democratic perspective has remained an important point of departure for any assessment of the relationship between the welfare state and the system of social stratification. For Marshall, the creation of the welfare state in the 1940s was the latest stage in Britain’s evolving history of expanding citizenship. Progressively through the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, he argued, British citizenship was extended, first of all, to incorporate legal rights—equality before the law; then political rights, achieved by means of the extension of the franchise and the introduction of the secret ballot; and finally social rights specifically as a result of the welfare state legislation. In general the extension and establishment of citizenship rights “reduces the authority and power of previously dominant groups in society” (King 1987). Specifically, the social rights embodied in the welfare state legislation promote “an equality of status helping counterweigh disparities of income and class” (Baldwin 1990). As one recent commentator has observed

Marshall’s formulation caught the aspirations embodied in the Welfare [State] better than any other. The rich man and the poor man would collect the same pensions from the post office counter, and sit next to each other in the same doctor’s waiting room. They would be no less rich or poor for doing so, but they would be that much more citizens of one community. (Marquand 1988)

Entitlement would thus create an equality of status which, in its turn, would be the means of securing social cohesion, integration and solidarity. In these terms, the welfare state was the fulfilment of fraternity, the creation of community.

But in those terms, it had its immediate critics. Some on the political right saw the welfare state as a threat to the existing system of social differentiation, especially to the position of the middle class, and as a harbinger of a totalitarian state regime.

Education, other than that provided in State aided schools becomes more and more costly, while some politicians would abolish it altogether. Medical attention is being “equalized” and those who wish to obtain it outside the NHS must pay twice… Finally, not only are legacies taxed, but keen socialists broadcast their longing to abolish completely the transmission of wealth in any form. (Lewis & Maude 1949)

Nor was there unanimity on the political left that what had been accomplished in the welfare state legislation represented the establishment of socialism. This issue was central to the second phase of Labour’s post-war period in power. After 1948, there was increasing recognition that Labour needed a new vision. But opinion differed as to what form such a vision should take. Tribune called for “a socialist philosophy based on a fresh and unprejudiced analysis of the difficulties that confront us”, while Michael Young and others, critical of the statist tendencies in the post-war economic and social settlement, sought “to set socialism in the context of freedom and democracy” (Brooke 1992). Morgan’s (1984) judicious conclusion at the end of his study of Labour in power 1945–1951 is that while the Attlee Government “brought the British Labour movement to the zenith of its achievement as a political instrument for humanitarian reform…it did so by evading, rather than resolving, those dilemmas inherent in the potent, beguiling vision of socialism in our time”.

Much subsequent analysis has called into question the central features of Marshall’s paradigm. In place of the integrating force of the “hyphenated society” of social-democratic welfare capitalism, much more attention has been paid to their incompatibility.

If capitalism entails a system of allocating power and resources according to the ownership of private property, welfare services entail a system of allocating society’s resources according to the right of all citizens to share in the common wealth of the society according to their needs. (Dearlove & Saunders 1991)

There is, in this sense, a “fundamental logical contradiction” between capitalism and welfare that calls into question the more optimistic assumptions of Marshall’s analysis.

That conclusion is attested by a whole genre of writing and research in social policy. Three elements of it will briefly be considered here: the distribution of payments and benefits; the middle class welfare state and the experience of public welfare. Any assessment of the distributional impact of the welfare state involves not only an assessment of who consumes its services and the duration of their consumption but how, and by whom, the services are paid for. Changes in the nature and level of taxation (such as the switch from direct taxes on income to indirect taxes such as VAT on fuel) need to feature alongside changing entitlements to financial benefits as well as the use of services in kind such as education. Le Grand’s (1982) conclusion “that the strategy of promoting equality through public expenditure on the social services has failed” was refined by Hindess (1987). Emphasizing the centrality of incremental change in governments’ programmes, he concluded, “far from showing that ‘the strategy of equality’ has been tried and failed, the record shows that it has played at most a limited role in the development of British social services”. Hills (1993) has recently concluded that for most people in the income maintenance sector the welfare state acts as a savings bank; far less does it undertake or achieve redistribution between social classes.

Considering distributional aspects in relation only to the public sector of welfare, however, is misplaced. One of Titmuss’s perceptive observations directed attention, in addition, to the contribution to welfare produced by occupational schemes (the “perks” of the job) and the fiscal benefits that accrued through the tax system. Had he been writing in the 1980s it is likely that he would have extended his analysis of the divisions of welfare to include the more recent issues of the “hidden costs” of personal tending care and the public subsidy of private welfare that occurred in that period. When it was originally presented in the mid 1950s, however, his analysis challenged the stereotypical image of an all pervasive welfare state for the working classes. In addition to the welfare state-established universal benefits (such as health care and education) the middle classes were also the beneficiaries of other states of welfare, with each sector operating independently of the others. In that respect, they reinforced the pattern of class based inequalities rather than promoted the cohesion of social-democratic welfare capitalism.

This aspect became more established in subsequent discussions of the welfare state. Not only as consumers of its universal services but also as employees in the expanding welfare sector the middle classes appeared disproportionately to be the beneficiaries of its existence (Abel-Smith 1958). Meanwhile the greater reliance on means tested National Assistance benefits in social security created a situation in which the receipt of welfare was a ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Contributors
• Introduction: change,continuity and welfare
• Chapter 1 The welfare state and the state of welfare
• Chapter 2 Education: the changing balance of power
• Chapter 3 Employment policy: a chronicle of decline?
• Chapter 4 Spending more to achieve less? Social security since 1945
• Chapter 5 Health: from seamless service to patchwork quilt
• Chapter 6 Housing: on the edge of the welfare state
• Chapter 7 Urban policy in post-war Britain
• Chapter 8 Individual welfare: locating care in the mixed economy
• Chapter 9 Voluntary action and the state
• Chapter 10 Markets and the future of welfare
• Chapter 11 Social policy and the active society
• Chapter 12 Accountability and empowerment in welfare services
• Chapter 13 Quality in welfare services
• Bibliography