Nicholas Timmins - The Five Giants [New Edition] - A Biography of the Welfare State

Two months after the report’s publication, parliamentary pressure finally forced a debate. Sir John Anderson, Lord President of the Council, ‘a dry old civil servant-turned-minister’, 18led for the government with so little enthusiasm for Beveridge’s plan that he inflamed not only the Labour benches but a significant minority on his own side. MPs heard him declare ‘there can at present be no binding commitment. Subject only to that… I have made it clear that the Government adopt the scheme in principle.’ 19The following day Kingsley Wood, the Chancellor, ‘lingered with apparent satisfaction over the financial perils of the plan’. 20

Since the start of the war, however, the Conservative Party had ceased to be a coherent body of opinion. The thirty-five-year-old Quintin Hogg (the future Lord Hailsham), neatly characterised by Angus Calder as ‘a frothing, bubbling, mockable but curiously clever young man’, 21had returned from the front to join a dining group of other youngish Tory MPs which met at ‘a little restaurant in the Charing Cross Road’ 22(Conservatives having always had a penchant for plotting in supper clubs). The MPs were much attracted by Macmillan’s Middle Way view of a mixed economy steering a course between socialism and old-style laissez-faire capitalism, and were busy forming themselves into the Tory Reform Committee which was to receive tacit encouragement from Conservative ministers such as Butler, Eden and Macmillan himself. ‘What brought us together,’ Lord Hailsham recalled almost fifty years later, ‘was our feeling that the attitude of our leaders in the corridors of power as exemplified by their pussy-footing over the Beveridge Report was unduly unconstructive and unimaginative.’ 23Taking as his formula ‘publicly organized social services, privately owned industry’, 24Hogg saw Beveridge as ‘a relatively Conservative document’ and tabled a motion seeking the immediate creation of a Ministry of Social Security. More than forty other Conservative MPs signed it.

Jim Griffiths, to whom would finally fall the implementation of Beveridge, capped that from the Labour benches with an even stronger call for immediate implementation. In the cruel but clever way of politics Herbert Morrison – possibly as a punishment precisely because he had been the most overt supporter of Beveridge in the War Cabinet – had been given the task of winding up for the government at the end of the third day. Faced with defending a negative policy that he had tried to make more positive, he produced what Jim Griffiths was to call ‘the best debating speech Morrison ever made’, underlining those parts (sixteen of the twenty-three recommendations) that the government did accept even if it did not yet intend to act. 25The speech did enough to stop the Conservatives from rebelling. But 121 MPs from the Labour, Liberal and Communist parties together with 11 independents voted with Jim Griffiths. Among them was David Lloyd George casting his last ever Commons vote. It proved one of the biggest revolts of the war against the government. More than one historian has seen it as a defining moment in Labour’s 1945 election victory. 26

The debate finished on 18 February and in the course of that month six by-elections, ‘a general election in miniature’, 27were held. The Beveridge report featured strongly in each campaign. In four of the six seats the Conservative vote dropped by 8 per cent even though Labour and the Liberals did not stand. The Home Intelligence department of the Ministry of Information was reporting ‘a disappointed majority’, adding ‘the Government is thought to be trying to kill or shelve the report.’ 28

Churchill reacted. On 21 March 1943, in a broadcast entitled ‘After the War’ – his first wartime broadcast to concentrate on the home front – he continued to warn against imposing ‘great new expenditures on the State without any relation to the circumstances which might prevail at the time’. 29But recognising ‘a duty to peer through the mists of the future to the end of the war’ he promised a four-year plan ‘to cover five or six large measures of a practical character’. These would be put to the electorate after the war and implemented by an incoming government.

He did not mention the Beveridge report by name, an omission that can only have been deliberate. But he promised ‘national compulsory insurance for all classes for all purposes from the cradle to the grave’. It was, he said, ‘a real opportunity for what I once called “bringing the magic of averages to the rescue of the millions”.’ To that he added the abolition of unemployment. ‘We cannot have a band of drones in our midst, whether they come from the ancient aristocracy or the modern plutocracy or the ordinary type of pub-crawler’, and the voice of Keynes could be heard in Churchill stating that government action could be ‘turned on or off as circumstances require’ to control unemployment. There was, he accepted, ‘a broadening field for State ownership and enterprise’ and his vision included a housing drive, educational reform, and much expanded health and welfare services. ‘Here let me say there is no finer investment for any community than putting milk into babies.’ 30

Thus it was Churchill, rather than Beveridge, who defined social security as running ‘from the cradle to the grave’ – a phrase used by both the Daily Mirror and the Daily Telegraph on publication day – as he signed the wartime coalition up to it. What Lord Woolton, the future Tory party chairman, was to call ‘the shandy gaff’ of Conservatism and Socialism, which was to dominate post-war politics for thirty years, was beginning to emerge. 31

Churchill’s initial opposition to Beveridge needs explaining. First and foremost his attention was fixed firmly on winning the war, without worrying much about what was to come afterwards beyond hazy notions of some continuation of the coalition with himself at the head. This was, after all, still only ‘the end of the beginning’. D-day remained eighteen months away. Second, he had to hold together a coalition which contained Labour but also a Tory party that was itself divided on the plan. Third, his doubts over the affordability of the proposals can be seen as genuine. And fourth, despite the fact that Beveridge had constructed something that Churchill would recognise and had himself implemented thirty years earlier – social insurance – the new plan was very different in character.

The social insurance Churchill had helped introduce had been designed, broadly, for the working classes, with the Poor Law in reserve as the ultimate safety net. The better off had been excluded from the state-organised unemployment and health schemes. Beveridge’s plan was thus not ‘the cause of the left out millions’ which Churchill had espoused as young man, but the cause of all the millions.

And finally Churchill had been infuriated by Beveridge’s determination to get the government to act immediately, as revealed both in the repeated pleas in the text of the report and in the pre- and post-publication publicity that he had sought. The Prime Minister was reported ‘to have taken strong exception to the report, to have refused to see the author and forbidden any government department to allow him inside its doors’. 32Churchill proved, however, on one level as good as his broadcast word, while on another getting his way. A month after the broadcast a Whitehall committee chaired by Thomas Sheepshanks was set up to consider implementation of Beveridge’s report, eventually producing a White Paper on Social Security in 1944. 33The same year the government published White Papers on a National Health Service and on Employment Policy, set up a Ministry of National Insurance, and delivered the 1944 Education Act. A housing White Paper followed in March 1945 and on 11 June, as virtually the final act of the coalition government, the Family Allowances Act became law. It provided five shillings (25P) a week for the second and all subsequent children to every family in the land – real money at a time when the average male manual wage was £6. The first universalist benefit of the modern welfare state had been created, even if its actual payment fell due under a Labour government. Yet only to that, and to the Education Act whose financial impact in mid-1945 was yet to be fully felt, did Churchill commit significant sums of the taxpayers’ money ahead of a general election.