It’s difficult in retrospect to have any idea of how catastrophic and chaotic life in Europe was by the end of the war, not least because so few signs of this remain. While the UK had not suffered the material and psychological effects of invasion and occupation, its post-war commitment to radical domestic reform, social change and equality are nonetheless amazing, particularly by today’s standards of political short termism. While Britain set to work to create the welfare state, Europe was the site of an explosion of violence and brutality. This included civil war, ‘ethnic cleansing’ rape and murder, which were rife for years. The breakdown of law and order extended from Poland to Italy and France and Yugoslavia, to Germany and Greece (Lowe, 2013; Buruma, 2013).

With the certainty that comes from hindsight, some modern analysts have argued that: ‘It is unlikely that something along the lines of the Welfare State would have been long delayed had the war not intervened’ (Hylton, 2010, 214).

As Bentley Gilbert wrote in his history of social policy between 1914 and 1939:

Truth to tell though, while some commentators, as we have seen, have also made a linear connection between the 1906–11 Liberal social reforms and the creation of the welfare state, there can be no evidence for such assertions and there were no certainties at the end of the war.