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The history of our
post-war progress is not
all it seems
Jill Stephenson
With the modern welfare state under severe pressure – some would say it is under threat – there is a tendency to assume that welfare provision began after the second world war and that it occurred only because there was a Labour government in power.
It is true that the major legislation giving substance to the modern welfare state was introduced under the first Attlee government of 1945-50. But the origins of the welfare state lie before the first world war, when Asquith’s Liberal government introduced insurance for sickness and unemployment, as well as old-age pensions. At the very least, these reforms, piloted by Lloyd George, were the immediate precursors of the modern welfare state. As the historian C L Mowat, writing in 1968, described the situation of the interwar years: ‘The welfare state was standing, but incomplete and still in scaffolding…By the legislation of 1945-48 the gaps were filled, the walls finished and a roof put over all’.
By the 1930s, a strong tide of opinion was moving in favour of planning for social reforms to address the ills of contemporary society, chief among which was unemployment, the major symptom of the depression. The politicians and others involved in what one might call planning for planning came from all major parties, to the extent that their views were dignified with the name ‘middle opinion’. A ‘young man’s consensus’ evolved on the need for greater state intervention in both social and economic affairs. Among Conservatives associated with this consensus were some who, after the war, did not seem particularly enlightened, such as Julian Amery and Duncan Sandys, but the presence of Harold Macmillan and Robert Boothby in their ranks is not surprising. John Maynard Keynes and William Beveridge, too, were associated with this trend in thinking.
Sir William Beveridge was the architect of the welfare reforms of the 1940s. He was also a Liberal who had been entrusted with the task of (nowadays, in power-speak, managers would say ‘he was tasked with’ – urgh) chairing a committee whose remit was to investigate the existing state of ‘social insurance and allied services and to make recommendations’. He reported to the coalition government headed by the Conservative Winston Churchill. The first major fruit of Beveridge’s report came with the passing in 1944 of the Education Act, commonly known as the ‘Butler Act’ after R A Butler, the Conservative minister responsible for education.
This act raised the school-leaving age to 15 and introduced free state-funded secondary education for all, to be geared to the ‘age, aptitudes and abilities’ of each child. The introduction of an ’11 plus’ exam to determine the ‘aptitudes and abilities’ of each child was regarded at the time as a progressive measure in that it aimed to remove considerations of wealth and class from the selection of children for grammar, secondary modern or technical schools. It was only later that the effects of the ’11 plus’ came to be widely regarded as damaging. A parallel and similar act was passed for Scotland in 1945, with selection at age 12 plus.
Planning for post-war reforms took place during the war, particularly after the Beveridge Report was issued in late 1942. For example, there was a limited Town and Country Planning Act in 1944 which paved the way for the major legislation of 1947. Lord Woolton, minister of reconstruction in the coalition government, presided over the production of a series of white papers in 1944. Thus the groundwork for health reform, whose roots dated back to the great war, resulted in February 1944 in the publication by the coalition government of the white paper ‘A National Health Service’, which proposed a free and comprehensive service.
They were years of fuel shortages, rationing and power cuts. The thick
ice that encrusted the inside of my bedroom window on winter mornings
was indicative of a very different era from the present – and not one that
was more comfortable.
As Daniel P Fox says: ‘the NHS Act of 1946 was the culmination of decades of increasing agreement about how medical care ought to be organised and distributed. A similar service would have been created in 1945 by either the Conservative or Liberal parties’. No doubt there would have been differences of detail and degree had a government other than Attlee’s been returned in 1945. But comprehensive reform there would have been.
There were white papers on other areas during the war, for example, on ‘Employment Policy’, in May 1944, which advocated Keynesian methods for avoiding cyclical unemployment. This was followed in September 1944 by a white paper on ‘Social Insurance’, which accepted most of Beveridge’s proposals and formed the basis of the 1946 Insurance Act. Then in July 1945 Family Allowances were introduced. As John Stevenson says, ‘the chief elements of the "welfare state" were put in place in the last years of the war’. This makes complete sense: think of how long it takes to draw up legislation and have it passed (unless, of course, it is about ‘sectarian chanting’ in Scotland).
With the end of the war, American ‘lend-lease’ funds ceased. But the Attlee government, through the expert and tireless agency of John Maynard Keynes, secured a new loan from the US that would be interest-free for the first six years. This enabled the Attlee government to maintain much of Britain’s global foreign policy burden and to sustain the new social reforms. Finally, after the dreadful winter of 1946-47, the US started pouring huge sums of money into western Europe through the European Recovery Programme that subsequently took its name from its director – Marshall Aid. France, Germany and Italy in particular benefited from this, to rebuild their shattered countries. But the biggest sums of Marshall Aid, by far, were given to Britain.
In these ways, reconstruction – including the nationalisation of coal mines, railways and much else – was funded. Some of the money was spent on housing, but not nearly enough, with housing in Britain in crisis by 1950. When money for a housing project ran out, building stopped, leaving sites with ‘half-built’ houses. I remember happy hours spent playing in and on a ‘half-built’ across the road from the house of family friends at Fairmilehead in Edinburgh. By this time, defence spending was claiming an ever greater share of British funds, especially with the onset of the Korean war.
I have written in an earlier edition of SR (31 March) about the fears and uncertainties of the post-war period. These were years of deprivation, as Britain struggled to support a zone of Germany through to 1949, with bread rationed in Britain only after the war had ended. They were years of fuel shortages, rationing and power cuts. The thick ice that encrusted the inside of my bedroom window on winter mornings was indicative of a very different era from the present – and not one that was more comfortable.
The reforms of the first Attlee government were remarkable and, for the majority, beneficial. But they were made possible by the massive injection of American money that flowed into Britain after the war was over, by the groundwork that had already been laid before the war, and by the remarkable degree of post-war planning undertaken by the coalition government during a long, enervating and ruinously expensive war. Of course there were bitter political rivalries after the war, but there was also a general feeling that the evils of the past should remain in the past. In particular, as Ewen Cameron says in ‘Impaled Upon a Thistle: Scotland since 1880’: ‘Many politicians on either side of the political debates of the post-war period were scarred, and possibly scared, by the spectre of unemployment’. But that is ancient history.
Jill Stephenson is former professor of modern German history at the University of Edinburgh
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