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

But there are many more. Once again I owe thanks over and above the call of duty to Kate Harris, who got me to the incredibly helpful wizards of the Oxford English Dictionary, allowing me to illustrate rather than assert how the language around ‘the welfare state’ has changed. In no particular order, Nick Hillman of the Higher Education Policy Institute was immensely helpful, both in conversation and with sources, and then in reading the drafts on higher education, while Roderick Floud expounded on his Gresham College lecture for me. Ken Jones gave me an early sight of his latest edition of Education in Britain, and Richard Garner, the Independent’s long-standing education editor, did the same with The Thirty Years War, his account of thirty years of education reporting. Richard, along with Conor Ryan, now at the Sutton Trust, found time to read the schools sections. Chris Ham and Richard Humphries at the King’s Fund read health and social care. Adair Turner, Joanne Segars and Steve Webb read the pensions material. John Hills checked references to his and his colleagues’ work. Matthew Whittaker at the Resolution Foundation read and corrected key passages. Gus O’Donnell pointed out a key omission. Chris Giles at the Financial Times put right my account of the financial crash. Gavin Kelly and Dan Corry were extremely helpful. Alistair Darling and John McTernan read the Labour years and David Willetts the account of the succeeding ones. Parts were also read by civil servants, or retired civil servants who either have to, or chose to, remain anonymous. All of these helped immensely. They corrected errors of fact, tone and judgement. And where, despite their best endeavours, undoubted errors remain in all three categories, the responsibility is mine.

For the third edition and at HarperCollins my thanks are due to Arabella Pike, now William Collins publishing director, who happily, from my point of view, remembered the first edition from her most junior days at HarperCollins; to Joe Zigmond and Tom Killingbeck, my editors; to Steve Cox who produced a fine copy edit; and to Iain Hunt, senior project editor, who with good grace and no little wit undertook the heavy lifting.

Immense thanks are once again due to Elaine, Zoe, Jonathan and Robert, and to Arthur, Violet and Effra, along with Audrey, Rick, Frann and Jerry and his family, all of whom made me laugh, and who put up for endless months with a deeply distracted man.

Finally there are remarkably few new ideas in here. Rather, as with the first edition, I have largely been a weaver of other people’s ideas, analysis, dreams and actions into a tapestry: the welfare state’s story.

NICHOLAS TIMMINS

May 2017

Introduction

Theory is so much clearer than history.

E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory (1978), p. 237

Freedom from Want cannot be forced on a democracy or given to a democracy. It must be won by them.

Sir William Beveridge, 20 November 1942

This book started life one September Sunday in 1989 when Peter Hennessy, in one of his more Tigger-ish moods, bounced into the Independent to deliver his ‘Whitehall Watch’ column. He had been working on Never Again, his history of Britain from 1945 to 1951, and had been re-reading the Beveridge report. ‘Someone,’ he said, ‘needs to write a good modern history of the welfare state, and you ought to do it. You can call it The Five Giants. You just start with Beveridge with tears in his eyes and work forwards.’

The idea seemed frankly farcical. I was covering the government’s NHS review and John Moore’s attempt to recast the language of welfare. I had just acquired two more small children. There seemed not enough hours in the day. I was a journalist, not a historian. And there were large parts of the welfare state about which I knew nothing. The idea, however, would not go away. If there was much about which I was ignorant, there were bits of the subject about which I did know something. On and off, I’d spent more than fifteen years reporting them. For some of the more exciting events related here from the mid-1970s on, as Max Boyce would put it, ‘I was there.’ Other motivations piled in. When, in Keith Joseph’s final days as Secretary of State for Social Services, I first started reporting what the academics would call social policy, I had wished for a single volume which simply told the story of how we had got there – the events, ideas, personalities, issues and pressures which had taken the post-1945 welfare state to that point. One that had the best quotes and some of the best jokes all in one place and referenced, and which provided at least a background from which some of the more technical issues could be tackled. Something between Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and 1066 and All That — only for the welfare state and all in one volume. There were single-subject accounts, but none which covered the waterfront or provided quite that mix.

Other motives included bemusement at how the Portillos, Redwoods and the other younger Thatcherites of this world – all of them broadly my age, the generation of whom Ian Kennedy, Professor of Medical Law and Ethics at King’s College, London, once said, ‘if you say soixante-huit to them, they don’t think you’ve got a digit wrong’ – could have such heartfelt hostility to an idea for which I had an instinctive sympathy. To me, and for all its myriad faults, some form of collective provision had always seemed, to put it at its lowest, the least bad way of organising education, health care and social security – things we all need, and which not all of us can guarantee to provide for ourselves either all the time or at the time they are needed. The challenge had always seemed how to improve the workings of the welfare state, not how to dismantle it.

Furthermore, as someone who had grown up with the swings and roundabouts of alternating Labour and Conservative governments, I became increasingly aware that most people under forty have only limited adult memories of life before Thatcher. The period before that, despite the way Kenneth Clarke would have it, is now history, not current affairs. Yet a little history can improve understanding of the current debates about the welfare state, and limit the chances of getting carried away by them.

It is quite important to know that virtually every day since 1948 the NHS has been said to be in crisis, and that for the last seventy-five years morale within it has invariably never been lower. It is worth understanding that every time unemployment rises significantly, there is, like a bad dog that has its day, a spell when the unemployed are blamed as work-shy scroungers before unemployment settles at a new plateau. It is worth knowing that in education, yesterday has almost always been better than today, despite rising numbers passing ever more advanced levels of examinations and reaching higher education in ever greater numbers in every year (with two exceptions) since 1945. It can help to put the Conservatives’ stewardship of the NHS into perspective to know that the first Secretary of State to be sued by a patient for failing to provide an operation was a Labour minister, not a Conservative. Such knowledge matters because it can ward off false despair – the sort which in 1987 afflicted the Tories over the NHS, when they felt they would never gain any credit for it and came the closest they ever have to dismantling it.

Then again, there is the need to attack a few myths. For example that before Margaret Thatcher’s arrival in 1979 all was sweetness and light, and that all was well with the welfare state. It wasn’t. Or that there have been no advances to go alongside the reverses in the past fifteen years. There have.