The ‘myth’ of Beveridge

The Beveridge Report of 1942 is still seen, not just in Britain, but throughout the world, as the ‘Magna Carta’ of the welfare state. Modern commentators usually portray it in one of three lights:

• 1. The Beveridge Plan was grossly extravagant, demoralised the British people with free hand-outs, and swallowed up scarce resources that should have been used for post-war investment and industrial reconstruction. (Beveridge himself is often portrayed by this school of thought as a sinister, sentimental, socialist idealist.)

• 2. The Plan was excessively spartan and mean, obsessed with the work-ethic, geared to propping-up private property and the free market, and adopted a rock-bottom definition of ‘poverty’ that reformers have been striving to get rid of ever since. (Beveridge on this view is a cat’s-paw of liberal capitalism.)

• 3. The Plan’s support for full employment, a national health service, subsistence-level family allowances, and an equal benefit system for all, laid down clear-cut benchmarks of equality and justice that have long been lost sight of – hence the muddle, inadequacy and demoralisation of the current welfare state, which can only be cured by a strategy of ‘back-to-Beveridge’. (Beveridge himself here seen as a great humanitarian social reformer on a par with Florence Nightingale.)

The man and his career

Who and what lay behind these extraordinarily conflicting reputations? William Beveridge had pursued a single-minded personal mission to understand and abolish poverty ever since 1903, when he left Oxford (with a triple-first-class degree in mathematics and classics) to work in the East End settlement, Toynbee Hall. He there wrote his seminal book on Unemployment (1909), which ascribed it mainly to the failure of employers and public authorities to ‘organise’ the labour market and to encourage mobility, information, work incentives and occupational training. His ideas were taken up by the Fabian socialists, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and in 1908 he was recruited at their recommendation by the new Liberal minister, Winston Churchill, onto the Board of Trade. There Beveridge was largely responsible for preparing the Labour Exchanges and National Insurance Acts that were to be of seminal importance in the evolution of state welfare.