The Five Giants [New Edition]: A Biography of the Welfare State

If these were the chief issues Beveridge failed to resolve – issues that are with us still – his report also reflects vividly the conflicting goals that ran through the debates about social security both before and after its publication. Throughout, he attempted to balance rights with duties, incentives against security, and individualism against collectivism. Thus he wanted as far as possible to have benefits paid as of right, without the means-tests which he said made help available ‘only on terms which make men unwilling to have recourse to it’.28 But he balanced that with the duty of having to contribute.

Benefit in return for contributions, rather than free allowances from the State, is what the people of Britain desire. This desire is shown both by the established popularity of compulsory insurance and by the phenomenal growth of voluntary insurance against sickness, against death and for endowment, and most recently for hospital treatment. It is shown in another way by the strength of popular objection to any kind of means test. This objection springs not so much from a desire to get something for nothing, as from resentment at a provision which appears to penalise what people have come to regard as the duty and pleasure of thrift, of putting pennies away for a rainy day. Management of one’s income is an essential element of a citizen’s freedom. Payment of a substantial part of the cost of benefit as a contribution irrespective of the means of the contributor is the firm basis of a claim to benefit irrespective of means.29

There was another reason why Beveridge went for an insurance system rather than a tax-based one. In the 1940s liability for income tax started much higher up the income scale than it does now. Many in the working class did not pay. As late as 1949 a single man did not start paying income tax until he was earning 40 per cent of average manual wages, while a married man with two children under eleven had to earn fractionally above average manual earnings to pay any income tax at all. Over most of the next fifty years, under governments of all colours, the income tax threshold fell as government spending – not just on the welfare state – expanded. By 1992, the equivalent percentages were down to below 25 per cent and 29 per cent respectively.30 It is one factor that led lower earners progressively to question the value of the welfare state.

Beveridge was clear that he did not want a ‘Santa Claus’ state which appeared to give something for nothing, and in the 1940s a tax-based social security system would have been chiefly paid for by business, the then much smaller middle class, and those above them. What the less well paid did already have to find, however, were the existing national insurance contributions for the health and unemployment schemes. Unlike income tax, they were used to paying these. Indeed, Beveridge went to some lengths to suggest, with questionable accuracy, that the contributions he proposed amounted to ‘materially’ less in aggregate than the sums already paid out for national insurance contributions, for voluntary policies covering sickness, death and endowment, for hospital treatment policies and for medical fees.31 It was another reason why he wanted ‘Benefit in return for contributions, rather than free contributions from the State’. In suitably Thatcherite terms, he also argued that citizens ‘should have a motive to support measures for economic administration’ and ‘should not be taught to regard the State as the dispenser of gifts for which no one needs pay’.32

Furthermore, Beveridge worried about incentives to work and to save and to encourage people to take responsibility for their own lives. ‘The State in organising security should not stifle incentive, opportunity, responsibility; in establishing a national minimum, it should leave room and encouragement for voluntary action by each individual to provide more than the minimum for himself and his family.’33 Indeed, in harsher words later in the report, he said that ‘to give by compulsory insurance more than is needed for subsistence is an unnecessary interference with individual responsibilities’.34

Thus his whole scheme was built on a minimum income to provide subsistence, not on the model followed in most of Europe of providing earnings-related benefits. What Beveridge built was a platform on which everyone could stand, with a safety net below it in the form of means-tested national assistance for those who lacked the contributions to qualify. It was, however, a platform down to which anybody who was slightly better off fell if they became unemployed or disabled. He did not, as the continental countries did, attempt to build a system which maintained the individual’s economic place in society, if only for a time. It was to be a minimalist, not a maximalist provision, one that left in Beveridge’s word ‘room’ – in practice incentives – for those who could afford it to provide for themselves over and above the state scheme.

In addition, this minimum provision was to be based on flat-rate contributions in return for flat-rate benefits. Critics have since divined in this the basic flaw in Beveridge’s grand design. He wanted to provide something that took people off means-tested benefits. But because he pitched his insurance benefits at subsistence level – a level that would only meet ‘reasonable human needs’ and even then only for ‘normal’ cases – the amount paid was little different from the sums provided by the safety net of means-tested national assistance. That had to be the case, unless those on national assistance were to be given less than enough to live on – too little to prevent Want. As a result, there was little in financial terms to make national insurance benefits more attractive. Their attraction lay in their being paid by right, without a means-test.

On top of that, however, Beveridge wanted not just flat-rate benefits, but flat-rate contributions in which everyone paid the same for the same cover. That meant the contributions had to be pitched low enough to be affordable by the low-paid. Such contributions, however, were simply not able to generate enough cash to pay benefits at well above the national assistance rates without either a large Exchequer subsidy, which did not appear politically achievable, or much heavier contributions from employers, which would simply be passed on in either lower wages or higher prices. In this way, the very solidarity Beveridge sought – everyone paying the same in return for the same benefit – helped undermine his aim of abolishing Want.

Beveridge’s insistence on a minimum also came about because the man who once believed the unemployed needed the ‘whip of starvation’ to ensure economic advance,35 still worried about work incentives. He in fact favoured, without listing it in his recommendations, a minimum wage. But at the same time he believed that ‘the gap between income during earning and during interruption of earning should be as large as possible for every man.’36 Again, this reinforced the argument for a minimum standard of benefit.

In line with his attempt to balance rights with duties, but also to keep people in touch with work, he recommended both a training benefit and arrangements that would be recognised by those who in the 1980s and 1990s called for American-style Workfare for the unemployed. He did so, however, in a context which was not implemented. For Beveridge recommended that unemployment benefit should be paid without time limit, not just for the first six months as was the case before he reported, nor for the twelve months that was actually implemented in 1948. To reduce someone’s income just because they had been out of work for a certain period was ‘wrong in principle’, Beveridge said.37 Most men would rather work than be idle. But the danger of providing adequate benefits indefinitely was that men ‘may settle down to them’, adding that ‘complete idleness, even on an income, demoralises’. Thus he said men and women should be ‘required as a condition of benefit to attend a work or training centre’ after six months, the requirement arriving earlier in times of good employment and later in times of high unemployment. The aim would be twofold: to prevent ‘habituation to idleness’ but also ‘as a means of improving capacity for earning’. There was a dear precursor here for the gradual tightening of entitlement to benefit and the requirement for training and Re-start programmes that Lord Young, Patrick Jenkin and their successors were to introduce in the 1980s and which Labour was to adopt with far greater vigour at the turn of the century. Attaching such conditions to benefit, Beveridge also noted, would unmask malingerers, and those claiming benefit while working.

For young persons, Beveridge said, ‘who have not yet the habit of continuous work the period [before training] should be shorter; for boys and girls there should ideally be no unconditional benefit at all; their enforced abstention from work should be made an occasion for further training’.38 Neither of these work and training requirements was implemented: the full employment (indeed, labour shortages) of the 1940s and 1950s made them seem unnecessary. The recommendation that the young should be denied unconditional benefit would have to wait until the days of John Moore and Lord Young forty-five years later, with disastrous results for some.

In his report Beveridge attempted to reconcile a new universalism that did indeed stretch from the cradle to the grave – from maternity grant to funeral grant by way of all-in insurance – with incentives to work, to save and to take individual responsibility, while at the same time checking abuse. In so doing he redefined the social security debate, but also defined the battleground as it has been fought over ever since. The left would ever after be able to stress the universalism of Beveridge and his desire to end poverty through all standing together to help each other. The right would look at his insistence on leaving room for private initiative; that the state should not provide all, but only a basic minimum, and then in return for clear-cut duties. Each, over time, would issue calls to go ‘Back to Beveridge’: to which bit of Beveridge would depend on who was doing the calling.

The plan was indeed unconsciously eclectic in many of its underlying ideas. It contained bits of Socialism and bits of Conservatism in its liberal mix. The way in which its vision yoked together competing ideas into what appeared to be a coherent whole helps explain why it proved in the end acceptable to all political parties: it contained something for everyone. The flaws in its design, however, ensured there can never, in any pure sense, be a return to Beveridge. That is not just because he failed to design that unattainable goal, an ideal system. The rest of Europe, while taking in the main a different road from Beveridge’s very British revolution, equally failed to design fault-free systems. Their route (generally earnings-related benefits linked to earnings-related contributions, often run locally or independently of central government and often through bodies more like friendly societies than the state) also ran into difficulties. Any social security system must generate conflicts between individual and collective responsibilities, between rights and duties, between incentives and security of income. It may never be got right once and for all; the balance will endlessly shift. And it was on to such shifting sands that Beveridge’s report was launched. Before it came into effect, however, a general election had to be held.

Precisely how and why Labour won its unexpected landslide in 1945, producing the first ever majority Labour Government is outside the scope of this book,39 but three quotations can explain it for present purposes. The first is from Lord Hailsham, recalling a conversation he had with a French officer in the Lebanon as early in the war as 1942, before he even returned for the Beveridge debate. The Frenchman remarked that it would be difficult after the war to avoid socialism.

‘Au contraire,’ said I, ‘il sera impossible.’

‘Pourquoi?’

‘Parce qu’il est déjá arrivé.’ In this I was not far wrong.40

The second source is Churchill to Lord Moran: ‘I am worried about this damn election. I have no message for them now.’41 At Walthamstow, near the end of the campaign, his worries were confirmed as for once he was booed into silence by a 25,000-strong crowd demanding ‘What about jobs?’ and ‘What about houses?’42

The third quotation is also from Hailsham: ‘Again and again during the 1945 elections I was greeted with voters who exclaimed to me absurdly: “We want Winston as Prime Minister, but a Labour government.” When I explained patiently that that was the one thing they could not have, they were wont to reply: “But this is a free country, isn’t it? I thought we could vote for who we want.”‘43

While the electorate might have trusted Winston, they chose, with memories of the 1930s still fresh, not to trust the Tories with the reconstruction of Britain, a project that involved much more than just Beveridge and his five giants. Before Labour took power, however, the foundations of post-war education – that most political of all the arms of the welfare state – had been laid.

PART II

THE AGE OF OPTIMISM

1942–51

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «Литрес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на Литрес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.