The Five Giants [New Edition]: A Biography of the Welfare State. Nicholas Timmins
![The Five Giants [New Edition]: A Biography of the Welfare State - Nicholas Timmins](limg_read341088.jpg "The Five Giants [New Edition]: A Biography of the Welfare State - Nicholas Timmins")
have been forced.’10
While Churchill’s advisers argued, the government began desperately playing for time. The report was promptly referred to a committee of officials chaired by Sir Thomas Phillips, an old adversary of Beveridge who had originally worked for him in the Board of Trade. The committee accepted the principles of universality and a comprehensive health service, but still challenged key aspects of the social security side of Beveridge’s scheme.11 It fell to Sir William Jowitt, who had replaced Greenwood as the Minister for Reconstruction, to tell the Commons on publication day that the government would merely ‘formulate its conclusions’.12 The government, however, had a real problem. As a coalition it was almost bound to be divided between its Labour and Tory parts on such issues; moreover, the Labour and Tory parts were themselves divided internally. Some Conservative ministers supported the plan: Leo Amery, for instance, described it as ‘essentially Conservative’;13 others like Kingsley Wood damned it; yet others believed simply that no commitment could yet be made. Labour ministers, unsurprisingly, were in favour. But Bevin, his old distrust of Beveridge surfacing, took strongly against it, declaring – inaccurately – that many parts were unacceptable to the unions. Attlee and Dalton were in favour but remained lukewarm in pressing for implementation. Dalton in particular had noted a minute from Churchill in which the Prime Minister said he could not commit himself without a general election to test popular support.14 Dalton feared Churchill would win such an election by a landslide, taking Labour off the map.
It was left to Herbert Morrison, newly in the War Cabinet, to argue vigorously and in some financial detail the case for a firm immediate commitment.15 To accept the Treasury’s pessimism, ‘would be a surrender to idiocy in advance,’ he declared. The social benefits of the plan were ‘very great’ and it represented ‘a financial burden which we should be able to bear, except on a number of very gloomy assumptions’.16 He lost, but Churchill shifted his ground. The government would undertake to prepare the necessary legislation, but it would require a new House of Commons to commit the expenditure.17
Two months after the report’s publication, parliamentary pressure finally forced a debate. Sir John Anderson, Lord President of the Council, ‘a dry old civil servant-turned-minister’,18 led for the government with so little enthusiasm for Beveridge’s plan that he inflamed not only the Labour benches but a significant minority on his own side. MPs heard him declare ‘there can at present be no binding commitment. Subject only to that… I have made it clear that the Government adopt the scheme in principle.’19 The following day Kingsley Wood, the Chancellor, ‘lingered with apparent satisfaction over the financial perils of the plan’.20
Since the start of the war, however, the Conservative Party had ceased to be a coherent body of opinion. The thirty-five-year-old Quintin Hogg (the future Lord Hailsham), neatly characterised by Angus Calder as ‘a frothing, bubbling, mockable but curiously clever young man’,21 had returned from the front to join a dining group of other youngish Tory MPs which met at ‘a little restaurant in the Charing Cross Road’22 (Conservatives having always had a penchant for plotting in supper clubs). The MPs were much attracted by Macmillan’s Middle Way view of a mixed economy steering a course between socialism and old-style laissez-faire capitalism, and were busy forming themselves into the Tory Reform Committee which was to receive tacit encouragement from Conservative ministers such as Butler, Eden and Macmillan himself. ‘What brought us together,’ Lord Hailsham recalled almost fifty years later, ‘was our feeling that the attitude of our leaders in the corridors of power as exemplified by their pussy-footing over the Beveridge Report was unduly unconstructive and unimaginative.’23 Taking as his formula ‘publicly organized social services, privately owned industry’,24 Hogg saw Beveridge as ‘a relatively Conservative document’ and tabled a motion seeking the immediate creation of a Ministry of Social Security. More than forty other Conservative MPs signed it.
Jim Griffiths, to whom would finally fall the implementation of Beveridge, capped that from the Labour benches with an even stronger call for immediate implementation. In the cruel but clever way of politics Herbert Morrison – possibly as a punishment precisely because he had been the most overt supporter of Beveridge in the War Cabinet – had been given the task of winding up for the government at the end of the third day. Faced with defending a negative policy that he had tried to make more positive, he produced what Jim Griffiths was to call ‘the best debating speech Morrison ever made’, underlining those parts (sixteen of the twenty-three recommendations) that the government did accept even if it did not yet intend to act.25 The speech did enough to stop the Conservatives from rebelling. But 121 MPs from the Labour, Liberal and Communist parties together with 11 independents voted with Jim Griffiths. Among them was David Lloyd George casting his last ever Commons vote. It proved one of the biggest revolts of the war against the government. More than one historian has seen it as a defining moment in Labour’s 1945 election victory.26
The debate finished on 18 February and in the course of that month six by-elections, ‘a general election in miniature’,27 were held. The Beveridge report featured strongly in each campaign. In four of the six seats the Conservative vote dropped by 8 per cent even though Labour and the Liberals did not stand. The Home Intelligence department of the Ministry of Information was reporting ‘a disappointed majority’, adding ‘the Government is thought to be trying to kill or shelve the report.’28
Churchill reacted. On 21 March 1943, in a broadcast entitled ‘After the War’ – his first wartime broadcast to concentrate on the home front – he continued to warn against imposing ‘great new expenditures on the State without any relation to the circumstances which might prevail at the time’.29 But recognising ‘a duty to peer through the mists of the future to the end of the war’ he promised a four-year plan ‘to cover five or six large measures of a practical character’. These would be put to the electorate after the war and implemented by an incoming government.
He did not mention the Beveridge report by name, an omission that can only have been deliberate. But he promised ‘national compulsory insurance for all classes for all purposes from the cradle to the grave’. It was, he said, ‘a real opportunity for what I once called “bringing the magic of averages to the rescue of the millions”.’ To that he added the abolition of unemployment. ‘We cannot have a band of drones in our midst, whether they come from the ancient aristocracy or the modern plutocracy or the ordinary type of pub-crawler’, and the voice of Keynes could be heard in Churchill stating that government action could be ‘turned on or off as circumstances require’ to control unemployment. There was, he accepted, ‘a broadening field for State ownership and enterprise’ and his vision included a housing drive, educational reform, and much expanded health and welfare services. ‘Here let me say there is no finer investment for any community than putting milk into babies.’30
Thus it was Churchill, rather than Beveridge, who defined social security as running ‘from the cradle to the grave’ – a phrase used by both the Daily Mirror and the Daily Telegraph on publication day – as he signed the wartime coalition up to it. What Lord Woolton, the future Tory party chairman, was to call ‘the shandy gaff’ of Conservatism and Socialism, which was to dominate post-war politics for thirty years, was beginning to emerge.31
Churchill’s initial opposition to Beveridge needs explaining. First and foremost his attention was fixed firmly on winning the war, without worrying much about what was to come afterwards beyond hazy notions of some continuation of the coalition with himself at the head. This was, after all, still only ‘the end of the beginning’. D-day remained eighteen months away. Second, he had to hold together a coalition which contained Labour but also a Tory party that was itself divided on the plan. Third, his doubts over the affordability of the proposals can be seen as genuine. And fourth, despite the fact that Beveridge had constructed something that Churchill would recognise and had himself implemented thirty years earlier – social insurance – the new plan was very different in character.
The social insurance Churchill had helped introduce had been designed, broadly, for the working classes, with the Poor Law in reserve as the ultimate safety net. The