In common with the majority, for once; I always thought that the welfare state came about just after the second world war and was one of socialism’s greatest accomplishments. We are all wrong, and even before the war Britain had one of the most sophisticated welfare states in the world, by the standards of the day of course. Furthermore, it did not come about by socialist activism from below but by the efforts of elite public school and Oxbridge educated Conservative and Liberal politicians. In the 1920’s and 30’s, the Conservatives expanded welfare provision by offering more generous pensions, building thousands of homes and making 15 million people eligible for unemployment benefit. Even the famous “Beveridge report” of 1942, the blueprint for Attlee’s reforms a few years later, reflected decades of Liberal debate, indeed Beveridge himself was a Liberal. So, although we tend to associate the welfare state with Labour in the 1940’s it started much earlier, around the beginning of the 20th century. This was the high point of the so called “new Liberalism” which sought to use state power to redress the social injustices of the Victorian era and make Britain healthier, stronger and more efficient to face the challenges of the new century. In 1908 the Asquith government passed the Old Age Pensions Act, which saw a million people drawing state pensions within 2 years. And in 1911 Asquith’s chancellor Lloyd George introduced national insurance which has underpinned the welfare state ever since.
As one might expect these interventions were not entirely altruistic. If there is a welfare state it reduces the need for employers to pay decent wages, and this is still true today. Also, welfare and warfare were always closely connected and it was Britain’s poor performance in the Boer War that sparked interest in “national efficiency”. Thousands of young working-class men from the cities were deemed utterly unfit for military service; I suspect we may be heading in that direction again, but now it’s because they are porkers, couch potatoes and lacking in grit, rather than undernourished. Even more interesting is the intellectual background to the welfare state, and one of the main influences was the Victorian polymath Francis Galton, often called the father of eugenics. He was a voice for many late-Victorians who were obsessed that the British population was sinking into degeneration and decline. Galton even proposed that the government should issue health and intelligence certificates to encourage the fittest and most able to marry and breed. Eugenics may be discredited now, thanks to Mr. A. Hitler, who was a great admirer of eugenics as practiced in the United States, but at the time it was the outstanding progressive cause of the day, embraced by liberals and socialists alike. As the Lancet put it, degeneration was eating into Britain’s town bred populations, hence the importance of welfare to drive up standards and halt the decline of the Anglo-Saxon race. The first Minister of Health was appointed in 1919, but it was Neville Chamberlain who used the office in the late 1920’s to introduce contributory pensions, abolish the Poor Law Boards and give local government responsibility for welfare. Chamberlain, the man, has been quite badly treated by historians over the years and his reputation is presently undergoing transformation, please see Robert Harris’s new novel “Munich”. In fact, if you wanted to annoy a leftie you could argue that it was Chamberlain and not Atlee who was the real father of the welfare state. The implementation of Beveridge’s ideas by the postwar Atlee government should be seen as the final act in a long process and actually quite conservative; the product of compromise with private and local interests. It was built on the legacy of the past and designed to improve capitalism, rather than replace it.
There are similarities between the welfare state and the EU. Both started out as good ideas, and both came about following the second world war. Wartime rationing was found to have actually improved the diets of many city dwellers and was one of the factors that led to the expansion of the welfare state. Later came the idea of a united Europe. Both were hi-jacked by vested interests and empire building managers and bureaucrats. Wherever there is a big pot of public money these people are not far away. The welfare state including the NHS, thanks to the above and political correctness, has become grossly cumbersome and inefficient. Welfare is no longer a safety net and has become a dumping ground for those who our masters deem not to be worthy of the help or coercion they need to improve their lives. It is a system that encourages the very people who should not be breeding to have a lot of children and those who are not so feckless have to pay for it. Perhaps we could revive the eugenics movement referred to earlier? Someone I know who is a junior doctor in London often finds that her fat, foreign, patients with eight children living off benefits have better accommodation than she does. The NHS needs to become leaner, fitter and more efficient as do the people who use it. Then we have the EU, and the spectacular arrogance, incompetence and lack of insight of the leaders, especially the un-elected ones. Again, the EU has been hi-jacked by self-serving empire builders. They move about Europe from luxury hotel to luxury office in bullet-proof limousines, completely unaware or uncaring of the way their policies are ruining the lives of ordinary people. I have and will continue to speak at length about all this in my book and elsewhere and offer some solutions, watch out for my next blog post which will be my manifesto.
Just a final thought in view of the title of this piece. I am reading “Antifragile” by Nassim Nicolas Taleb, one of my favorite authors and according to him 10 times more vicars and clergy have left recorded traces for posterity than scientists, physicists, economists and inventers, and this is in relation to discoveries and inventions. That’s all for now.
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