The Five Giants [New Edition]: A Biography of the Welfare State. Nicholas Timmins
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of the Scheme’.
But while Beveridge believed that everything that could be insured for should be, he had also come to see that benefits for children could not be run that way. To combat poverty and at the same time provide work incentives, it was essential that children’s benefits be paid at the same rate whether the parent was in or out of work. For if only means-tested help was given for children, then the low-paid with large families would be better off out of work than working – unless benefit rates were to be set dangerously low. Equally, family allowances would also help to prevent poverty among the low-paid. Rowntree’s work had shown that low wages in large families were the primary cause of poverty in 1899 and even his 1936 study showed they still played a significant role. Thus, Beveridge concluded, children’s allowances had to be tax funded, not insurance based. He had additional motives for backing family allowances. The war had seen the cancellation of the 1941 census, and on the information available Beveridge believed erroneously that the birth-rate was still declining, as it had been in the 1930s. It was a trend he believed required to be reversed in the national interest.
‘Once this memorandum had been circulated,’ Beveridge declared blithely in his autobiography, ‘the committee had their objectives settled for them and discussion was reduced to consideration of the means of attaining that objective.’26
They had indeed, and there was to be no little annoyance among the committee members at Beveridge’s general unwillingness thereafter to listen to their views, other than on technical matters. But point one of the memo had another instant effect: it alerted the government to the scale of what he had in mind. Alarm bells started to ring. Beveridge was asked to withdraw his three assumptions, and refused. On 17 January 1942, Greenwood wrote to him after talking to the Chancellor, Sir Kingsley Wood, declaring that ‘in view of the issues of high policy which will arise’ the departmental representatives should in future be regarded merely as ‘advisers and assessors’. The report would be signed by Beveridge alone and ‘be your own report’. The civil servants ‘will not be associated in any way with the views and recommendations on questions of policy which it contains’.27 In other words, the government was damned if it was going to let itself be committed.
Work on the committee speeded up through 1942 as witnesses were called and evidence taken. But the credit (or reproach: some see the report and its aftermath as a key cause of Britain’s post-war decline) for the report’s popular impact may need to go as much to Janet Mair as to Beveridge himself.
Jessy, as Janet Mair was known, was the wife of David Mair, a somewhat austere mathematician and civil servant who was Beveridge’s cousin. She and Sir William had become close before the First World War, Mrs Mair sharing, in Jose Harris’s words, Beveridge’s ‘dreams and ambitions’. A powerful personality in her own right, she and Beveridge were to marry a fortnight after the report was published. They had, however, already scandalised the ‘lady censors of the University world’ when Mrs Mair moved into the Master’s lodgings at University College at the outbreak of war.28 Jessy also had, in Peter Baldwin’s words, ‘a knack of putting in the baldest terms the ideas that lay more implicitly in her husband’s writings’.29
During the crucial stages of the report’s compilation in the spring and summer of 1942, Jessy was staying with relatives in Scotland. But it was she, according to Jose Harris, who ‘greatly encouraged’ Beveridge not just to rationalise the existing insurance system but to lay down long-term goals in many areas of social policy.
There is no evidence to suggest that Mrs Mair was responsible for any of Beveridge’s substantive proposals. But much of his report was drafted after weekends with her in Edinburgh, and it was she who urged him to imbue his proposals with a ‘Cromwellian spirit’ and messianic tone. ‘How I hope you are going to be able to preach against all gangsters,’ she wrote, ‘who for their mutual gain support one another in upholding all the rest. For that is really what is happening in England … the whole object of their spider web of interlocked big banks and big businessmen [is] a frantic effort to maintain their own caste’. And she urged Beveridge to concentrate on three main policy objectives – ‘prevention rather than cure’, ‘education of those not yet accustomed to clean careful ways of life’, and ‘plotting the future as a gradual millennium taking step after step, but not flinching on ultimate goals.’30
Beveridge of course had a track record as journalist and broadcaster, not just as an academic and administrator, and could express ideas clearly. He was fond of lists: ‘ten lions on the path’, ‘six principles’, ‘three assumptions’, as well as his ‘five giants’. But nothing else he wrote – certainly not his Full Employment in a Free Society whose preparation two years later was to worry both Churchill and his Chancellor – has the same rich blend of Cromwellian and Bunyanesque prose to be found in the drably titled Social Insurance and Allied Services.
When the report was published on 1 December 1942 its reception was ecstatic. On the night before there were queues to buy it outside HMSO’s London headquarters in Kingsway. The first 60,000 copies of the full report at 2S. od. (lop) a time were rapidly sold out. Sales topped 100,000 within a month and more than 200,000 by the end of 1944.31 It is hard to believe that most of those who bought it made it through to the end. Much of this 200,000-word excursion through technical exposition and complex appendices is heavy going. Even Beveridge’s own section is hard work, and the report may well rank alongside Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time as one of the most bought but least read books ever published in Britain. What made its reputation and provided its impact was the twenty-page introduction and the concluding twenty-page summary, separately published in a cut-down version at 3d. Combined with the full report this took sales above 600,000:32 in HMSO folklore, nothing is said to have outsold it until the Denning report on the Profumo scandal twenty years later.
And that introduction and summary were couched in terms unlike those of any government report before or since. Beveridge declared that he had used three guiding principles. First that ‘a revolutionary moment in the world’s history is a time for revolutions, not patching’. When the war was ‘abolishing landmarks of every kind’, he declared, now was the time to use ‘experience in a clear field’.33 Second, his plan for security of income – social security – was principally an attack upon Want. ‘But,’ he went on, hammering the point home with mighty capital letters, ‘Want is only one of five giants on the road of reconstruction, and in some ways the easiest to attack. The others are Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness.’ Third, he stressed that social security must be achieved by co-operation between the state and the individual. ‘The State should offer security for service and contribution. The State in organising security should not stifle incentive, opportunity, responsibility; in establishing a national minimum, it should leave room and encouragement for voluntary action by each individual to provide more than the minimum for himself and his family.’ But that minimum should be given ‘as of right and without means test, so that individuals may build freely upon it’.
Taking social insurance as the base, he wrote in boldly the three assumptions needed to make it work: family allowances, a national health service, and ‘maintenance of employment’. In the conclusion of the main report, he expanded the themes in Bunyanesque terms. The plan, he said, ‘is not one for giving to everybody something for nothing and without trouble’. It involved ‘contributions in return for benefits’. War offered the chance of real change, for ‘the purpose of victory is to live in a better world than the old world’. And, most importantly, he stated that in itself social security was ‘a wholly inadequate aim’; it could only be part of a general programme.
It is one part only of an attack upon five giant evils: upon the physical Want with which it is directly concerned, upon Disease which often causes that Want and brings many other troubles in its train, upon Ignorance which no democracy can afford among its citizens, upon Squalor … and upon the Idleness which destroys wealth and corrupts men.34
In that one ringing paragraph Beveridge encapsulated much of post-war aspiration. By seeking not only freedom from want, but a national health service, improved education, full employment and an attack upon Squalor (which Beveridge saw as being as much about town