The Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Social Insurance and Allied services, more commonly known as the Beveridge Report was published 70 years ago this year in 1942. It saddled the capitalist class and its politicians with a major and increasingly insurmountable problem which they have never resolved; how to continue to pay for the recommended social reforms. This is, of course, a problem for the employers and their political agents not the working class.
Like all reforms the Beveridge recommendations have never worked to solve what they set out to do. The Committee was chaired by Lord Beveridge, an economist and one-time supporter of eugenic policies against the unemployed and the report identified five “Giant Evils” under capitalism: squalor, ignorance, want, idleness and disease. The report went on to propose wide-ranging reforms of “social welfare” to address and resolve these evils. Seventy years later all five social evils remain to blight the lives of the working class.
In the Socialist Party of Great Britain’s pamphlet “Beveridge Re-Organizes Poverty”, published in 1943, the Socialist position on the so-called “Welfare State” was recorded a position that has been vindicated over time. As for the motive of the reforms, the pamphlet quoted this remark from the report:
“…each individual citizen is more likely to concentrate upon his war effort if he feels his government will be ready in time with plans for that better world”.
p. 171 Beveridge Report
Quinton Hogg, MP, when the Beveridge Report was being discussed in Parliament had this to say:
“Some of my friends seem to overlook one or two ultimate facts about social reform. The first is that if you do not give the people social reform they are going to give you social revolution…” (Parliamentary Debates, 17th February, 1943, Col. 1818, quoted in SPGB pamphlet, loc Cit).
Of course, Quinton Hogg did not mean “social revolution” in the way Socialists understand the term. He meant, as he said, “a series of dangerous industrial strikes”, social unrest and riots; the sort of activity supported by The Socialist Party and the SWP. He did not mean the establishment of the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution by all of society. The Beveridge reforms were never Socialist and the Labour Government which implemented them after the war was not Socialist either.
The so-called “Welfare State” was also intended by its advocates to be more
efficient, cost less and be more economical in administration then previous schemes. The reverse has been the case. In 2011 the cost of the “welfare state” to the capitalist class was £202bn about 45% of GDP.
As for the employers, the benefits of the proposed Welfare State were clearly spelt out:
“It is to the interest of employers as such that the employees should have security, should be properly maintained during the inevitable intervals of unemployment or sickness, should have the content which helps to make them efficient producers”.
Beveridge Report p. 109
A leading textile manufacturer, Samuel Courtauld said Welfare Provision would:
“…ultimately lead to higher efficiency among (workers) and a lowering of production costs” (Manchester Guardian Feb. 19th 1943, see SPGB op. cit. p.11).
In contrast to some of the workers euphoria for the “Welfare State” the Socialist Party of Great Britain said at the time:
“We earnestly ask workers to consider whether a system that can offer them nothing better than a miserable pittance in times of ill-health and unemployment should not be changed without delay”.
In another pamphlet: Family Allowances: A Socialist Analysis, (published in the same year) the Socialist Party of Great Britain stated:
“In support of family Allowances advocates claim that the introduction will abolish a major part of poverty, on the ground that the principal cause of poverty is the possession of young families” (p3.).
The Socialist Party of Great Britain went on to say:
“We state immediately that no scheme for social reform can remove this poverty endured by the working class. The poverty of the working class is as constant a condition of Capitalism as the never ending flow of pettifogging schemes for the alleviation of poverty which the workers are asked to support (loc cit p3).
Socialists do not have to invent statistics to show the failure of capitalism’s reforms to meet the needs of all society. Beveridge believed that Keynes had
ended the trade cycle and periodic periods of high unemployment. In the second
quarter of the following century unemployment is now 2.6 million and rising as capitalism passes through yet another trade depression with over 1 million young workers “idle”, to use Beveridge’s patronising terminology.
And as for child poverty, it has continued unabated. End Child Poverty, one of dozens of child poverty charities existing in this country, recently gave a list of official statistics of children living in poverty in the UK as being some 3.5 million (http://endchildpoverty.org.uk/files/child-poverty-map-of-the-uk-part-one.pdf). However, the statistics gave the impression that only a minority of children within the working class were in poverty. This is not the case.
The official definition of poverty does not take into account the fact that all working class children are by definition “living in poverty”. Poverty is in fact something all workers and their families share in relation to the capitalist class whose ownership of the means of production and distribution allows them to live a life of privilege and comfort to the exclusion of everyone else.
And End Child Poverty does not argue that the only solution for the end of child poverty is the establishment of Socialism. Charities exist, so they claim “to do something now” either by raising money or influencing government policy, yet these social problems remain to inflict one generation of workers after another. That Beveridge’s “Five Giants” still exist some seventy years later demonstrates clearly enough the failure of reforms to resolve the debilitating social problems facing the working class under capitalism.
A little thought will show how capitalism, besides ensuring that workers and their families stay poor, need them to be poor. If workers had enough to live decent lives without having to sell their mental and physical energies to employers, then the profit system could not function –for who would seek employment?
Charities, like End Child Poverty, while highlighting the failure of capitalism to meet the need of all society refuse to accept the reality of the profit system they are working in. The solution to poverty, whether child or adult poverty, is not charity any more than it is social reforms. To solve child poverty, along with all the other problems facing the working class requires workers to take conscious political action to establish Socialism and not toss money towards the charities of the world or expect capitalist politicians to improve their lives.
Charities, like social reforms, are an impediment to resolving the issue of poverty because their supporters erroneously believe poverty can be ended by retaining the profit system. It can’t. And politicians and political parties like Labour, the
Tories and the Liberal Democrats exist to serve and further the interest of the working class. In times of an economic depression, like now, when the government is under pressure to reduce its spending, the existing reforms are obvious targets for economy.
Perhaps the single-most loser of the Beveridge reforms has been the Labour Party. Labour always attacks the Conservatives for making cutbacks on social service or the National Health Service but successive Labour governments have had to makes cuts; when in power during the 1960’s they were forced to bring back and increase prescription charges, abolish free milk in schools and reduce planned spending on house and school buildings. The Callaghan government of the 1970’s cut back expenditure on education and the NHS and it was only by losing power in May 2010 which prevented the Labour Government of the day to introduce precisely the cuts to social service expenditure being undertaken today by the Conservative-Liberal Democratic Coalition.
With the escalation of costs to housing benefits, health and unemployment since the late 1960’s there has been a simultaneous growth in the dozens of free market institutes all with their own ideas and policies to “reform” social security and the NHS. Whereas free market economists want to make the so-called “Welfare State” either more competitive and efficient through privitisation or abolish it all together in order to bring down government spending and lower taxation, Socialists take an altogether different view of what needs to be done.
For Socialists, the poverty of the working class is due to the private ownership of the means of production and distribution by a minority employing class. That is where the problem lies for the workers. Thrift, self-reliance and a minimal privately-run “Welfare State” advocated by the free market policy institutes that advise the conservatives are no more relevant to the interest of the working class than the failed “Welfare State” reforms first constructed from the Second-World War consensus of the three main political parties in 1942.
Socialism alone can end the poverty facing the working class through the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution by all of society. In Socialism production will take place solely to meet human need based on the maxim; “from each according to ability to each according to need”. The so-called “Welfare State” cannot solve the social problems afflicting the working class and nor can the free-market alternatives.
As we rightly concluded at the time, and which events have proven correct:
“The Beveridge proposals will not solve the poverty problem of the working class. They will level the workers’ position as a whole… (it) is not a “new world of hope”, but a redistribution of misery” (loc. cit. p20).
And that “redistribution of misery” will continue until the working class consciously and politically replace capitalism with Socialism.
Only the establishment of Socialism can offer a new world of hope.
