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

But if the view that there was a Golden Age in which a lavishly funded welfare system operated in a rosy glow of consensus needs challenging, so does the obverse view which has begun to gain currency – that there never was any real agreement about ends and means, and that the Conservatives always did have a blueprint for breaking the thing up. It is an interpretation advanced in triumph by some on the right who believe their schema for the world is about to come to fruition. It is subscribed to on the left by those who want to believe in a conspiracy theory, and by some who now want to blame themselves for not seeing it coming. It is constructed by trawling through past pamphlets, essays and speeches for the source of ideas now in play such as grant maintained schools, or vouchers for training. Such a view misrepresents history. It is the equivalent of arguing that because in today’s Labour Party there are still people who believe in nationalising the top 200 companies, then if a future Labour government did nationalise them, it would prove that always to have been the Labour Party’s secret aim. Such a view is plainly tosh. Its equivalent is to argue that because there were Conservatives in the 1950s and 1960s who pressed for cash-limited vouchers, for privatisation of both supply and demand, and for a drastic rolling back of the welfare state, then that was always the secret Tory agenda. The ideas did exist, but they were not then in the plans of any political party, any more than nationalising the top 200 companies is in Labour’s in 1995.

Equally, attempts to portray repeated Treasury proposals for new NHS charges or the raising of the school starting age as part of the Conservatives’ desire to undermine the welfare state misunderstands the Treasury’s function. It propounds such ideas to governments of all colours because part of the Treasury’s job is to stop governments spending money. The proposals Gaitskell backed in 1951 to scrap the NHS dental service and introduce ‘hotel’ charges for NHS beds were almost as draconian as anything proposed by his Conservative successors. But they were not introduced, any more than a Cabinet majority was ever assembled for the more extreme pieces of surgery proposed for health and education by the Treasury, by Chancellors and even at times by Prime Ministers under the Conservatives between 1951 and 1964. Equally, the Treasury and Treasury ministers proposed loans in place of student grants, and significant benefit cuts, to Labour as well as Conservative governments. 1In judging how far there was a consensus about the welfare state, one must look at what actually happened, not just at the naughty thoughts each side harboured.

The counter-myth to the conspiracy of the right is that before 1979 satanic socialists set out to control the nation by placing it in some universalist cradle-to-grave feather bed aimed at sapping its moral fibre and taking the Great out of Britain. This doesn’t wash. For a start, from 1945 up to 1979 the Conservatives controlled the welfare state for almost exactly the same period as Labour, and were responsible for some of its most expansionary phases. If the Conservatives at times moved to make services more universal – launching the first great explosion in higher education, for example – Labour, equally, joined Conservative governments in extending means-testing. The welfare state (the phrase has its own problems which we’ll come to in a moment) is after all a living, moving, breathing being, bits of whose boundaries have moved back and forth under both parties in the past fifty years. It is not some fixed nirvana which we either draw nearer to or retreat from.

A further motivation to write this book was anger – anger that it is impossible now to travel on the London underground or walk the streets of our big cities without finding beggars, or, more often, without beggars finding us. That, in my lifetime, did not happen before the late 1980s. There were the down-and-outs on the Embankment. There were the spikes, the left-over remnants of the Poor Law workhouses, which housed the alcoholics and schizophrenics who avoided all the ropes in the safety net. But there were no young people, their lives blighted, sleeping in doorways in the Strand.

Then – and despite that anger – there was the perverse need to declare that, even after well over a decade of ideological assault, the welfare state still exists. Almost everyone to whom the idea of the book was mentioned instantly cracked a joke about the need to be quick about it before the thing disappeared. Most publishers wanted to call it From Cradle to Grave. Yet when welfare state services still take two-thirds of an annual government expenditure totalling £262 billion, the animal, whatever strains it may be under, can hardly be said to be dead. Create a strong enough perception that the welfare state is dying, however, and you make it easier to lop off further chunks without anyone asking where they went.

And then it just seemed fun. The story of the welfare state is a great adventure – a story worth telling, particularly when all its fiftieth anniversaries were looming.

And so in the end the book got written. It did so only because Andreas Whittam-Smith was generous enough to provide in 1993 a six-month sabbatical from the Independent. In turn I was lucky enough to be able to spend that time at the Policy Studies Institute as a Distinguished Visiting Fellow, funded by money from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. The PSI’s monastic cells, learned but practical inmates and good library made it an ideal place to be. These, along with what is owed to Peter Hennessy for donating the idea, are my primary debts. There are many other listed in the Preface.

The finished book may not be what any of those who helped so much envisaged. Nor does it answer all the challenges given as motives for writing it. What it does represent is a perhaps over-ambitious stab at twisting the kaleidoscope of the post-war history of Britain. In most versions, the welfare state, certainly after 1945–51, plays only a walk-on part. This one attempts to put the welfare state centre stage while allowing economic, political and even cultural events to play the walk-on roles. They are, however, there and they are crucial to the story, because they do so much to define and limit what can be done. The welfare state, after all, is itself a key cog in the economy. Too much discussion of social policy, too much measurement of its success and failure, appears at times to take place in a vacuum, untainted by the realities of the world at the time.

One theme which repeatedly emerges is the law of unintended consequences: that decisions taken for the best of motives will often go awry. This applies to governments seeking expansion, for example by providing larger subsidies to high-rise flats to produce more housing. But it applies equally to governments trying to draw back: for example, by withholding benefits from sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds because they should be in education, work or training, not on the dole. It is a lesson the right would do as well to remember as the left.

One issue should perhaps be dealt with here because it stands outside the narrative. In the mid-1980s, Correlli Barnett’s brilliant and detailed polemic The Audit of War helped influence Tory hostility to the welfare state. Barnett saw the ‘New Jerusalem’ of the welfare state itself, along with the historic and continuing failure to organise high-grade technical education, as the twin causes of Britain’s relative economic decline. His thesis has been widely debated elsewhere and by others far better informed than I. But while the second half of his argument has force, the first seems overstated. Other Western countries also developed modern and much more extensive welfare states after the Second World War, most ended up spending appreciably higher shares of their income on them than Britain did – and almost all achieved higher growth rates. 2