The Evolution of the British Welfare State

A History of Social Policy since the Industrial Revolution

Derek Fraser

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781350307056
• Edition: 5
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

An established introductory textbook that provides students with a full overview of British social policy and social ideas since the late 18th century. Derek Fraser's authoritative account is the essential starting point for anyone learning about how and why Britain created the first Welfare State, and its development into the 21st century. This is an ideal core text for dedicated modules on the history of British social policy or the British welfare state - or a supplementary text for broader modules on modern British history or British political history - which may be offered at all levels of an undergraduate history, politics or sociology degree. In addition it is a crucial resource for students who may be studying the history of the British welfare state for the first time as part of a taught postgraduate degree in British history, politics or social policy. New to this Edition:
- Revised and updated throughout in light of the latest research and historiographical debates
- Brings the story right up to the present day, now including discussion of the Coalition and Theresa May's early Prime Ministership
- Features a new overview conclusion, identifying key issues in modern British social history

© Derek Fraser 2017

Derek FraserThe Evolution of the British Welfare Statehttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-60589-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Perspectives on the history of welfare

Derek Fraser¹

(1)

Leeds, United Kingdom

Derek Fraser

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

The Welfare State is a concept which historians and sociologists alike have found difficult to define. Like socialism, it has meant different things to different people. As the distinguished social scientist W. A. Robson has remarked, it is not easy ‘to discover what is the nature of the Welfare State … there is no positive or comprehensive philosophy, no ideology that underlies the Welfare State … the term … does not designate a definite system.’ Similarly, the welfare historian Rodney Lowe admits, ‘There is no agreement amongst historians and social scientists over when the first welfare states were established or what the term actually means’, or as David Garland expresses it, ‘welfare states are familiar, even mundane, but their true character remains elusive.’¹ Some features of the Welfare State in practice are clear, however. It is a system of social organisation which restricts free market operations in three principal ways: by the designation of certain groups, such as children or factory workers, whose rights are guaranteed and whose welfare is protected by the community; by the delivery of services such as medical care or education, so that no citizen shall be deprived of access to them; and by transfer payments which maintain income in times of exceptional need, such as parenthood, or of interruption of earnings caused by such things as sickness or unemployment. The history of social policy is concerned with these three areas and we shall find that it was not always believed that the protection of vulnerable groups, the provision of social services or the maintenance of income were the responsibility of the state. As Welfare States became features of many modern societies, social scientists have sought to define a typology. Esping-Andersen (1990), for example, identified three ‘worlds of welfare’: a social democratic model, a corporatist model and a liberal model.

What the historian notices most about the place of the Welfare State in the history of social policy is that it is very much a time-bound concept. The term itself did not become commonly used until the 1940s and Lowe asserts, ‘Welfare states were the creation of the 1940s.’ For Britain, it is in this decade that we can, with unusual chronological specificity, pinpoint the beginning of the Welfare State. On 5 July 1948 the connected schemes of insurance, assistance and medical care, outlined in the famous Beveridge Report of 1942, first came into operation in Britain. It was, indeed, a very important day, as the Daily Mirror explained: ‘The great day has arrived. You wanted the State to assume greater responsibility for individual citizens. You wanted social security. From today you have it.’ As a government announcement proclaimed with some justification, ‘This Day Makes History.’²

This stress on a specific beginning does not mean that the Welfare State was, like the conjuror’s rabbit, plucked out of thin air. It was the end product of a very long historical process. The Beveridge Report of 1942 was the nearest thing to a blueprint for a Welfare State which Britain had and that confirmed that though a Welfare State would be a revolution, ‘in more important ways it is a natural development from the past. It is a British revolution.’³ When James Griffiths, a Labour Minister in 1946, introduced the insurance legislation on which the Welfare State is based, he said it was the result of at least 50 years of development of the social services. An American scholar, comparing the emergence of ‘social programs’ in different countries, has concluded that ‘between 50 and 80 years is the likely diffusion time for all such programs.’⁴ This diffusion time, perhaps in the British case a century and a half, is the subject of this study of the history of social policy. The research and writing on welfare history have revealed eight broad perspectives of study. The list is not exhaustive nor the categories exclusive but they cover the main frames of reference which have been employed. For convenience we may call the eight perspectives whig, pragmatic, bureaucratic, ideological, conspiratorial, capitalistic, democratic and mixed economy. Each perspective will be examined in turn.

The whig model of welfare history is so called because of its affinity with the ‘whig interpretation of history’.⁵ This was an English school of historical interpretation, established by certain whig historians such as Macaulay in the mid-nineteenth century. Believing themselves to be the possessors of a near-perfect liberal constitution, these historians wished to demonstrate the historical evolution of that constitution by stressing the forward-looking people and developments which had brought it about. It was a view of history characterised by a belief in progress and by an assessment of the past in terms of its relevance to the present. Similarly, in the whig interpretation of welfare history, developments in social policy are viewed as elements of progress on a path from intellectual darkness to enlightenment. As society became more sensitive to social need, so the harsh excesses of the free market were curbed. Compassion and concern outweighed cruelty and indifference, and progressive reform resulted. As one social work scholar has expressed it, ‘if reform is good then the social welfare policies which have been the elements of reform are also good. Social welfare thus basks in the warm reflection of its own historical rectitude.’⁶ That moral rectitude was imparted by humanitarian reformers who opened people’s eyes to the evils around them and who with untiring zeal pressurised the state to do the just thing by its citizens.

The whig model has many features to commend it. It appeals very much to the popular view of the Welfare State as a boon and, therefore, the product of a benevolent process. Understandably, such a view found widespread acceptance during the years after 1948, reinforced by media accounts of foreigners flocking to Britain to take advantage of the benefits not available elsewhere. The whig view also satisfies a general desire to relate present to past in a clear and simple lineage and this interpretation pictures a strong line of development onward and upward to the Welfare State. The dangers of the model are equally clear. It encourages a mode of analysis which judges past social policy not on its own terms, but by reference to some later, often unanticipated, development. It is a frame of reference which all too easily disseminates a condescending attitude in the present–past dialogue. The past is often judged by the moral standards of the present and usually found wanting. Thus in 1949 one scholar wrote with reference to the children of the ‘perishing classes’, ‘Looking backward at the past from the vantage point of the mid-twentieth century, it is remarkable how slowly obvious needs came to be appreciated and how inadequate in quantity and quality were the services instituted.’⁷ It may be thought more valuable to enquire why ‘obvious needs’ were not so regarded earlier, than to assert present enlightenment by describing the lack of awareness as ‘remarkable’. As one historian warned, we do not study history to score points off the past but to try to understand it.

The pragmatic model perhaps surmounts some of these difficulties by considering present social policy not so much as better but different from that of the past. As the novelist L. P. Hartley put it, ‘the past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.’ The pragmatic view is much closer to the German school of history personified by von Ranke, who wanted to tell history ‘as it really was’, than to Macaulay’s whig story of progress. Social policy is seen as evolving under the practical necessity of solving problems in the wake of industrialisation. In this model, developments tend to be ad hoc and unplanned, producing more incremental and less radical, more erratic and less direct paths than in the whig view. In the 1950s the American political scientist E. M. Burns described this model as typical of the way in which social policy responded to a changing society. Starting from a narrow base, ad hoc and incremental expansion, often responding to immediate pressures, alternated with short-term periodic reviews necessitated by inconsistencies and inadequacies within the system. After each review, in which ideological inputs might be important, ad hoc incrementalism took over again, and so policy developed along disparate routes, covering some terrain yet leaving other areas as virgin territory. As Rodney Lowe explains, the only realistic view is the incrementalist approach comprising ‘a series of small adjustments, often governed by expedience and by limited objectives which have unforeseen consequences’.⁸ British experience can be explained on the Burns model. The practical problems caused by industrial change were so serious that they demanded immediate attention. With little thought for the ideological implications, governments utilised policy expedients to solve these problems which themselves revealed the need for further action. The shortfalls or misdirections of policy led to major reviews which may be identified in the 1830s, the Edwardian years and the 1940s, but there were no obvious or necessary linear connections between them and it is only hindsight which provides such connections. The pragmatic model is the dominant interpretative framework of this present study, though it is not intended to be the only one. Because it seeks to explore social policy within its historical and political context, this model tends to stress the practical against the theoretical, the short-term decision-making process rather than long-term policy evolution, and the significance of policy within its contemporary society in preference to its relevance to subsequent developments. It gives to the humanitarian reformer not the role of saint leading the people to moral truth, but that of propagandist in defining what problems were on the political agenda. When informed opinion was convinced that certain social evils were ‘intolerable’ then governments were required to respond. Social problems were on the agenda by being perceived as such. But the pragmatic model reveals that the agenda was never a complete guide to the worst of the social problems, for some unnoticed disadvantaged groups, such as disabled children, were only belatedly added to it.

In carrying out whatever policy pragmatic political expediency demanded, governments increasingly came to use officials to enforce it and it is their importance which has led to the bureaucratic mode of interpretation. As before, humanitarians were the prime movers but they soon disappeared from the scene, as officials at all levels implemented policy, defined its future goals and became progenitors of further policy initiatives with an almost self-perpetuating momentum. This model requires us to explore in detail the specific legislation introduced, and above all its administration. Social policy changes are here best understood by analysing the role of the institutions of welfare and the officials who staffed them. Whether at local or national level, these officials became professional experts, immune from political pressures and vested interests, and thus endowed with an impartial objectivity which gave their judgements great authority. The bureaucratic impulse naturally reached its high point in the mid-twentieth century when a state monopolist regime prevailed and it was then that a Labour Minister famously asserted, ‘the gentleman in Whitehall really does know better what is good for people than the people know themselves.’ Faith in the omniscience of experts has been weakened more recently, partly from some spectacular scandals and partly from a consumerism in which ‘people were allowed to become experts in their own lives.’⁹

Bureaucrats have been called statesmen in disguise initiating, maturing and implementing new policies, so that the historian must uncover the private manoeuvres deep within the administrative system, as well as narrating the public events such as parliamentary debates or protest meetings. There is a very important historiographical reason why the bureaucratic perspective should have acquired an important hold over scholars. Many of the source materials relevant to the history of social policy originated in official institutions and are preserved in essentially bureaucratic archives. Since they have survived in considerable bulk their study perforce has to be the central thrust of most research in welfare history. This not only means that bureaucratic activities are given a prominent place, it also means that there is a tendency to reconstruct the past through bureaucratic eyes. The problems are the problems as defined by the bureaucratic mentality, and the explanations of policy development may thus be unduly distorted by the workings of the official mind. Despite this the bureaucratic model has, in Roy Hay’s words, ‘been very important in conditioning the way in which the development of social policy has been conceived and interpreted by historians … who … have found it difficult to break out of the framework for the analysis of social policy which has been created’.¹⁰

One of the major criticisms of both the pragmatic and the bureaucratic models is that they undervalue the importance of ideas. How did some issues gain a place on the agenda of reform and how did bureaucrats decide on their policy goals? An understanding of the values, attitudes and mores of a society can place policy within its contemporary intellectual context so that an ideological model may be fruitfully employed. The ideological perspective makes it possible to relate social policy to the prevailing cultural climate. It requires a much broader canvas than other models because the cultural ideology will express itself in a whole gestalt, not merely within the context of social questions. Out of that intellectual milieu a contemporary sense of values will emerge to justify particular policies. As any general historical survey demonstrates, profound ideological changes accompanied the equally profound social, economic and political thrust of that ‘modernisation’ which has characterised recent centuries. We should not underestimate how important these intellectual changes were in influencing the course of a social policy. In the mid-nineteenth century the prevailing philosophy decreed that provision for old age and sickness were the province of the individual: in the mid-twentieth they were reclassified as the responsibility of the state. In the early nineteenth century, British ‘classical economists’ confidently asserted that the state could not possibly determine the level of employment. By the end of the Second World War the socialist writer G. D. H. Cole could record as a commonplace, ‘the view that special measures, for which the Government must make itself responsible, are necessary in times of peace in order to ensure an adequate total demand for labour is now not only held by most economists but officially accepted as the Government’s own policy.’¹¹ Naturally, the proper role of government was perceived differently in different ideologies and it was the prevailing intellectual orthodoxy which to a great degree endowed certain social policy objectives with the necessary ‘legitimacy’ to justify state intervention.¹²

Thus, the history of social policy may be conceived as the history of changes in what Robert Pinker has called the idea of welfare.¹³ Social policy at a particular time was the product of the social ethos of that time, and when in subtle ways and for complex reasons the ethos changed, the policy changed in conformity. So Cole, himself an ideologue, could describe the history of social policy as essentially a conflict between the ideas of laissez-faire and the ideas of state intervention, between the ideology of capitalism and the ideology of socialism.¹⁴ A more recent analysis identified four ideological perspectives wherein social policy contends – the anti-collectivist, the reluctant collectivist, the Fabian socialist and the Marxist.¹⁵ Another suggests that social policy evolves under the impact of changing theoretical ideology of law in relation to social welfare.¹⁶ The labels will differ: the essential point remains the same – social policies reflect the contemporary ideological culture. We shall find much evidence of this truism. Nineteenth-century classical economics underlay the apparently harsh provisions of the 1830s just as twentieth-century collectivism underlay the apparently more generous provisions of the 1940s. Yet it remains obscure just how ideas spread and come to influence policy, and it is at least arguable that social policy influenced ideas as much as the other way round.

A more compelling criticism is that a simple contest of ideas, in which a more rational or appropriate theory succeeds by pure intellectual merit, takes too little account of the social basis of ideology. Class societies produce class ideologies and a prevailing contemporary culture is likely to represent the imposition of the values of a society’s dominant class. Hence, a policy apparently in conformity with a current ideology may in fact be geared to the hegemony of the class whose interests it benefits. An ideology may have a compelling attraction wherein intellectual conviction is buttressed by the rationalisation of self-interest. It is to take account of such possibilities that what is termed here the conspiratorial model has been widely utilised. On this model, social policy is viewed as an aid to further some coercive social or political objective, whose identity is by no means clear from the terms in which the policy may be publicly discussed. The ulterior motive has to be probed. In this perspective, welfare is far from benevolent, for its main attraction to those who espouse it is as an instrument of social control.¹⁷ Welfare is, therefore, characterised as one of the means by which order and authority are preserved, social revolution avoided, and political stability maintained. As one scholar explains, ‘welfare provisions … have been aimed at least as much at controlling the poor as at relieving their poverty.’¹⁸

The conspiratorial model has found favour particularly with radical scholars who have been much impressed by the structuralism of Foucault. Michel Foucault, a French sociologist, identified the growing institutionalisation (‘the great containment’) of treatment for the sick, the mentally ill and the criminal as a sign of a more subtle and disciplined attack upon all sorts of deviant or marginal behaviour. The Foucault approach will seek to identify some class motivation for social policy, such that, for example, public health reform was essentially aimed at protecting the middle classes. A conspiratorial analysis may radically alter the interpretation and assessment of the historical record. During the first half of the nineteenth century much effort and money was e...