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

He was connected everywhere. R. H. Tawney, the great Christian socialist thinker, was his brother-in-law and friend. He knew well Sidney and Beatrice Webb, founders of the Fabian Society, who in fact had introduced him to Churchill. (Churchill’s aside,’I refuse to be shut up in a soup kitchen with Mrs Beatrice Webb’, 7appears to have been no barrier to the appointment.) It was in fact Mrs Webb who had first proposed a free health service for all in her minority report of the Poor Law inquiry of 1909. Clement Attlee and Hugh Dalton, two men to whom would fall the job of finding the cash for Beveridge’s plan, had been lecturers on his staff at the LSE. Dalton was to be Attlee’s first Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1945. As well as having worked with Churchill, Beveridge was a friend of John Maynard Keynes, whose new economics were to make the welfare state possible, and he knew Seebohm Rowntree, whose landmark studies of poverty in York in 1899 had first helped drive the 1906 Liberal Government into its reforming zeal and whose follow-up study in 1936 was to influence Beveridge’s own report. In a line to the future, his research assistant at Oxford was a bright young economist called Harold Wilson.

But Beveridge was not an easy man. José Harris, in her biography, is reduced to summing him up as ‘rather baffling’. To some, she says:

he seemed wise and loveable, to others overbearing and vain. To some he was a man of dazzling intellect, to others a tedious bore. To some he was endlessly generous and sympathetic, to others harsh and self-centred to the point of complete insensitivity. By some he was seen as a humane, radical and visionary reformer, by some as a dangerous bureaucrat, by some as a sentimental idealist with his ‘head in the clouds and his feet in the pond’. He has been described to me personally as ‘a man who wouldn’t give a penny to a blind beggar’ and as ‘one of the kindest men who ever walked the earth’. 8

Others have been terser and harsher. Angus Calder in The People’s War describes him as ‘the outstanding combination of public servant and social scientist’, but adds: ‘He was also vain, humourless and tactless.’ 9

He tried to run the LSE as an autocracy, inducing a mutiny by the staff in favour of a constitution. Lionel Robbins, a young lecturer at the school who would later produce the Robbins report of 1963 which initiated the great post-war expansion of British universities, once said: ‘I doubt if it ever occurred to him to regard the great men of those days as his equals, let alone, what some of them certainly were from the academic point of view, his superiors.’ 10

Arrogance, brilliance and a belief in statistical evidence did not prevent him from espousing unlikely ideas. Harold Wilson, when Prime Minister, would recall having to talk him out of a firm belief that fluctuations in unemployment were linked to the price of wheat which was in turn affected by a sun-spot cycle. 11The weather, it seemed for a time, was all that there was to blame. He drove himself and others hard. Wilson, staying with him in his pre-war days at Oxford, recalls him rising at six to take an icy bath, following it with a couple of hours’ work before breakfast. If he was far from easy either to know or to work with, he was also no more consistent than the rest of us. Over his lifetime his views varied from strong support for the free market to a dirigiste view of the advantages of central control and planning during the First and Second World Wars, via a distinct if intermittent sympathy with Fabian socialism. At times he favoured generous social welfare, at others he believed ‘the whip of starvation’ was a necessary precondition for economic advance. 12After his report was published he was to become briefly a Liberal MP, and it is as a liberal and indeed Liberal document that his great work is best read: an attempt to bridge the desire for security and an end to poverty on one bank with encouragement for individuals to stand on their own two feet on the other.

A mere four years before his clarion call for full employment, social security from cradle to grave, a national health service, and a war against ignorance and squalor, he had been for two long walks with Beatrice Webb, then in her eighties, over the downs near her Hampshire home. Her diary records:

His conclusion is that the major if not the only remedy for unemployment is lower wages … if this does not happen the capitalist will take his money and his brains to other countries where labour is cheap … he admitted almost defiantly that he was not personally concerned with the condition of the common people. 13

If his desire for reform appeared to have waned, the war was to change that. But its arrival in 1939 left him bitter and frustrated. His talent and past experience, he felt, demanded a role in government. He bombarded government departments with offers of assistance, stringent criticism and unsolicited advice. He complained bitterly that ‘the present crew have no conception at all of how to plan for war.’ Along with other veterans of First World War administration, he gravitated to Keynes’s Bloomsbury house during the autumn and winter of 1939. The ‘ancient warhorses’, to use José Harris’s phrase, denounced Chamberlain’s incompetence to each other and devised alternative strategies. 14

When Churchill became Prime Minister in May 1940, Beveridge wrote to remind the old bulldog of their ‘old association’ and to offer his talents. He followed up with letters to Attlee, Ernest Bevin and Herbert Morrison, the key Labour ministers in the newly formed coalition government. None wanted the awkward and arrogant ex-Permanent Secretary around. Bevin, whom Beveridge was later to feel had betrayed him, did offer him charge of a new welfare department in the Ministry of Labour. ‘I didn’t feel that welfare was up my street,’ Beveridge said. ‘… organisation of manpower was my goal.’

One by one, Keynes and the others were absorbed into Whitehall as part of the flood of academics whose presence was to do so much to help win the war against Nazi Germany. But Beveridge, who hardly helped his case by the style in which he proffered advice and sought work, remained outside. Finally, in July 1940, Bevin asked him to carry out a brief survey – in a firmly non-executive capacity – of wartime manpower requirements. At last Beveridge was doing the work he wanted to do. The survey done, in December he again became a full-time civil servant as under-secretary for the military service department at the Ministry of Labour. There he drew up the list of reserved occupations exempt from call-up; but he continued to demand from Bevin an ever larger role in running manpower.

The two, however, did not get on. Beveridge, condemned by so many as autocratic, in turn applied the same adjective to Bevin’s mountainous personality. The bull-necked ‘tsar’ of the Transport and General Workers Union, in Kenneth Morgan’s memorable epithet, 15had been brought in from the general secretaryship of the union to provide the sound base for labour relations in wartime that the First World War had so notably lacked. Bevin saw his remit coming firmly from ‘my people’. And while he used a range of Beveridge’s ideas during the months they worked together, it seems plain he did not trust with any executive responsibility a man he almost certainly associated with the coercive and at times damaging manpower policies that Beveridge had helped draw up in 1914–18. 16

At the beginning of June 1941 someone else got the job Beveridge wanted: Godfrey Ince, who went on to become the department’s permanent secretary, was made Director General of Manpower. Beveridge was taken off administrative work and put in charge of a study on the way skilled manpower was being deployed into the forces. Four months before, however, in February, the Trades Union Congress had been to government to lobby about the hopelessly untidy mess of sickness and disability schemes by which workers were then covered. An inter-departmental committee was proposed to Cabinet in April. Bevin, having initially opposed the idea, suddenly saw it as a way of getting rid of someone whom he had clearly come to see as a pain in the neck. 17It was Greenwood who formally made the job offer, but Beveridge recorded twenty years later that it was Bevin who ‘pushed me as chairman of the Social Insurance Committee by way of parting with me … my removal from the Ministry of Labour … was “a kicking upstairs’” 18away from the work he believed he was cut out to do. Hence the tears that started to his eyes.