The Five Giants [New Edition]: A Biography of the Welfare State. Nicholas Timmins
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initially that the Soviet Union would be smashed. But in July, Stalin announced his horrific but awe-inspiring ‘scorched earth’ policy. By September British ships were on the nightmarish Arctic convoys to Archangel carrying aircraft and other supplies. At the end of that month ‘Tanks for Russia’ week was launched in British factories: they came out with the legends ‘Stalin’, ‘Marx’, ‘Lenin’ and ‘Another for Joe’ chalked on the sides. And as Hitler became bogged down in the Russian winter snows and Moscow held, admiration for Soviet sacrifices grew. A conviction became widespread well outside the ranks of the Communists and Labour’s left that the Soviet system could not be all bad. There can be few more symbolic exemplars of this particular time than the Christian and Conservative T. S. Eliot, then based at Faber & Faber, turning down the manuscript of Animal Farm, the savage and prophetic satire of the Russian revolution and Soviet system written by the atheist and socialist George Orwell. Eliot did so on the grounds that it did not offer ‘the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the present time’.83
The success of Beveridge’s report with its universalist and collectivist themes has to be seen against this complex backdrop. There were three more factors which were to give it the greatest impact of any British social document of the twentieth century.
The first is that Beveridge argued along the grain of current thinking. He may have drafted his report before he saw the evidence, but he already knew what much of its substance would be. Jose Harris writes:
One of the most striking features of the evidence submitted to the Beveridge Committee was the very widespread expectation among witnesses that the inquiry was going to lead to radical, even ‘Utopian’ social change. Quite where this expectation came from is not entirely clear, but it may well have derived from Beveridge himself and from his frequent references in articles and broadcasts to the abolition of poverty and to post-war social reform. A second striking feature was the very wide degree of support among witnesses for the kind of reform that Beveridge already had in mind – a measure of the extent to which Beveridge himself was interpreting rather than creating the spirit of the times. Again and again witnesses pressed spontaneously and independently for measures which afterwards became the main policy proposals of the Beveridge Report – namely, family allowances, full employment, a universal health service, a uniform system of contributory insurance, subsistence-level benefits and the reduction or abolition of public assistance.84
Not everyone believed in planning for a New Jerusalem, let alone a Utopia. Sir John Forbes Watson, Director of the Confederation of British Employers, virtually urged Beveridge to abandon the report:
I want to say here – it will go on the shorthand note, but I do not know that I want to say it publicly – we did not start this war with Germany in order to improve our social services; the war was forced upon us by Germany and we entered it to preserve our freedom and to keep the Gestapo outside our houses, and that is what this war means.85
Others shared that view and believed improvements could not be afforded. J. S. Boyd, vice-president of the Shipbuilding Employers’ Federation told the committee:
I am saying something I would not like printed – there may have been excellent reasons in the last war for talking about homes fit for heroes and there may be excellent reasons today for talking about improving the social services, but at the same time any of us who are trying to think at all do realize and do appreciate that the problems after the war are not problems that the man in the street concerns himself about, and you may be causing a much greater degree of danger by telling him something which in fact even the most optimistic of us may fear will be impossible after the war.86
The industrialists’ desire not to go on the record may be significant; and the employers were not united. In November 1942, when Beveridge’s report was complete but not yet published, 120 senior industrialists including the head of ICI produced ‘A National Policy for Industry’ which called for companies to be responsible for proper housing for their employees, for supplementing the state pension and for subsidies to prevent unemployment. They also sought family allowances and the raising of the school leaving age to sixteen. The report had as much of corporate paternalism as state action about it. But in suggesting that big companies should almost become miniature welfare states the industrialists, if not in the same regiment as Beveridge, were marching to a similar beat.
The route Beveridge took, however, was not preordained. Evidence to the committee threw up alternatives of which he was already aware and which were to be recurring themes in the post-war years. Several witnesses argued for the abolition of contributions. Benefit should be funded either from taxation or from an identifiable surcharge on income tax. That Beveridge opposed, first because of its implied extension of means-testing, and second because of the Treasury’s longstanding opposition to earmarked taxes. Equally, there were arguments for flat-rate benefits paid for by graduated contributions: those who earned more would pay more. Both Political and Economic Planning and the Association of Approved Societies, who ran health insurance, pressed for that measure, which Beveridge dismissed, Jose Harris records, as the epitome of the ‘Santa Claus state’. ‘I believe there is a psychological desire to get something for which you have paid … the tradition of the fixed price is very strong in this country. You do not like having to pay more than your neighbours.’ Others including the International Labour Office praised the kind of ‘earnings-related system commonly found on the Continent’, where benefits were not flat but graduated according to previous earnings.87
All these Beveridge rejected, objecting that earnings-related benefits would damage savings. In so doing he took the British social security system down a road that was both recognisable – the insurance basis already used for both employment and health – and very different from the earnings-related systems adopted over most of the rest of Europe after the war. For all the rhetoric in the early part of the report that ‘a revolutionary moment in the world’s history is a time for revolutions’, Beveridge in many ways was far from revolutionary. He produced something people would recognise. And he recognised himself what he had done. In paragraph 31 he stated that his proposals ‘spring out of what has been accomplished in building up security piece by piece’. In important ways, he added, the plan was ‘a natural development from the past. It is a British revolution.’ Both in its incrementalism – the way in which in large measure it stuck to the old system of flat-rate benefits paid for by flat-rate contributions split three ways between employee, employer and state – and in its choice of a path other countries did not follow, Beveridge’s report was indeed a very British revolution.
The second additional factor in the report’s reception was that Beveridge through broadcasts, articles and half-leaks – he was an occasional member of the massively popular radio ‘Brains Trust’ – had made very certain that the world knew it was coming. He had repeatedly referred publicly to ‘equality of sacrifice’ and the possibility of abolishing poverty. In March 1942, more than six months before the report, Picture Post could write: ‘Everybody has heard of Sir William Beveridge.’88 As early as April 1942, a Home Intelligence report noted: ‘Sir William Beveridge’s proposals for an “all-in” social security scheme are said to be popular’, and by the autumn Home Intelligence was recording that: ‘Three years ago, the term social security was almost unknown to the public as a whole. It now appears to be generally accepted as an urgent post-war need. It is commonly defined as “a decent minimum standard of living for all”.’89
Harold Wilson had turned down the secretaryship of the committee. But Frank Pakenham (the future Lord Longford) was a friend and assistant of Beveridge, sympathetic to his work, and well connected in Fleet Street. He acted as an unofficial public relations officer.90 Brendan Bracken, the Minister of Information, wrote to Churchill in October: ‘I have good reason to believe that some of Beveridge’s friends are playing politics and that when the report appears there will be an immense amount of ballyhoo about the importance of implementing the recommendations without delay.’91 There was indeed. In mid-November the ever-tactful Beveridge unwisely told a Daily Telegraph reporter that his proposals would take the country ‘half-way to Moscow’, a statement he promptly disowned but which only lowered by a few more degrees