The Five Giants [New Edition]: A Biography of the Welfare State. Nicholas Timmins
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debt to José Harris’s wonderful, multi-faceted biography of him. David Donnison’s works, but particularly his Politics of Poverty, are inspirational: object lessons in how to write about social policy. I doubt I could have managed to cover education without Brian Simon’s mighty and passionate Education and the Social Order, or Harry Judge’s illuminating A Generation of Schooling, or the sharp analysis and easy writing of Stuart Maclure and Maurice Kogan. Brian Ellis’s official history of pensions from 1955 to 1975 is a starred first example of how to make a horrendously complex subject seem simple and interesting. Nobody should write about the NHS without reading Enoch Powell, Rudolf Klein, and Charles Webster. And anything written by Nicholas Deakin is always stimulating, particularly his 1987 version of The Politics of Welfare. On a broader front, the 1940s are brilliantly served by Peter Hennessy’s Never Again, Paul Addison’s The Road to 1945 and Now the War is Over, and Angus Calder’s The People’s War, while Kenneth O. Morgan’s works, and particularly The People’s Peace, his history of Britain 1945–90, are indispensable – as is Hugo Young’s study of Margaret Thatcher, One of Us.
When I started work on this book in 1993, there was really no substantial modern post-war history available to match Derek Fraser’s fine work The Evolution of the British Welfare State, which takes the story up to Beveridge. Shortly after I started, Rodney Lowe’s The Welfare State in Britain since 1945 appeared. It is completely different in character from this work, much more academic and analytical, concentrating on what he dubs the ‘classic’ welfare state up to 1976 and then moving on to 1990 in less depth. It is an excellent book. But it is not this one. I hope in some small way this will complement that.
Finally there are more personal cheques to sign. Three people – Tony Bevins, David Walker and Julian Le Grand, the Richard Titmuss Professor of Health Policy at the London School of Economics – suffered the whole book in draft. David Willetts read chapters sixteen to nineteen. David Donnison read the housing sections, Dr Gordon Macpherson those on health, Sir George Godber the NHS material up to 1974, and Stuart Maclure the education sections. Frank Field, Sir Patrick Nairne, Sir Geoffrey Otton, Norman Warner, Robin Wendt and (as a prelude to an interview) Shirley Williams all read chapters, or parts of chapters, within their competence, as did two, by convention anonymous, civil servants. All saved me from errors of both fact and judgement, large, small and downright embarrassing. All made it a better book. Some provided criticisms I have not been able to answer. If there is credit, they deserve much of it. The undoubted remaining errors of fact, judgement and tone remain all mine.
Much is due also to John Pawsey, my agent, to Betty Palmer, my copy editor, and to Philip Gwyn Jones, Caroline Hotblack and Kate Harris at HarperCollins for various forms of faith and aid, some beyond the call of duty.
The most personal cheques of all go to Tony for his energising encouragement and superbly pedantic reading of texts and to Jerry, both of whom at times had more faith in this project than I did; to Audrey Maxwell for organisation and memories; to Zoe, Jonathan and Robert for their wonderful forbearance; but most of all and for all of those to Elaine, sans qui…
This fills in the missing sixteen years since the second edition of The Five Giants ended. It is probably the last edition. If not, it probably should be.
Not because, however battered parts of it feel at the time of writing, and now at age seventy, the welfare state is at death’s door. That seems less than likely any time soon, given that it is still consuming £500bn of government expenditure, or very roughly a quarter of the country’s income.
Rather, it will probably be the last edition because if this book has any value, some of it lies in the fact that for a fraction over half of its life since 1948 I was lucky enough to report not on all of it, but on key parts of it, as they happened, while working for the Press Association, The Times, the Independent and finally for the Financial Times.
I was never in the room, but I was often outside, eavesdropping, or pressing my nose up against the window. I had a ringside seat. And when I did not, I was working with journalist colleagues who did, including a whole string of excellent political, economic, education, employment, and even housing correspondents, when they existed, over the years.
So not only did I – and I hope the readers – gain hugely from the unending education provided by practitioners, recipients, civil servants, politicians, lobbyists, academics, think-tankers, special advisers and journalistic colleagues, but those relationships allowed me to go back later to query, improve, reshape and, sometimes by anecdote, illuminate parts of the account.
Since 2012 – and the reason this edition should probably be the last – I have still had a seat at the circus. But it has been a few rows further back, as I’ve turned from a journalist into a chronicler – though not a proper historian. And, as time goes by, it will be from a few rows further back, in the cheaper seats. I will know well fewer of the people, inside and outside government, who shape it.
This edition seeks again to find that fine balance between 1066 and All That and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, with enough space in there for readers to stand at least a chance of making up their own minds. Among my favourite moments since the first edition have been when I’ve been approached by foam-flecked young Tory researchers and profoundly over-earnest young Labour ones who have both told me how wonderful it is. The former because ‘it tells you everything that is wrong with the welfare state’ and the latter because ‘it shows exactly why we must defend it’.
As the third edition was being written, some of the same motivations that drove the first edition piled back in. Not least the return to the streets of the homeless who had largely been absent, and largely to at least some level cared for, for the previous decade and more. If we are all in this together, for them at least, it does not show. And because if the first edition was written in part for those who did not know life before Margaret Thatcher, this one is in part written for those who, if they remember him at all, believe only that Tony Blair was a war criminal.
It comes at a most opportune time, and a most inopportune one. It is opportune because it is just ahead of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Beveridge report and of the seventieth anniversary of two of the key pillars of Britain’s modern welfare state: its social security system and its National Health Service. A good time to bring the story up to date, and thus to reflect.
It is inopportune because on 23 June 2016 Britain voted to leave the European Union. The impact of Brexit on the welfare state, for good or ill, may well be profound, though in ways we can only guess. For that and other reasons this edition ends full of question marks. But there have been plenty of other occasions over the years when the welfare state has been called into question – as I hope its biography shows.
This edition, like the first, remains the work of many more people than me.
In addition to all those who gave up time for interviews and who – where they can be – are acknowledged in the endnotes, there remain many additional IOUs. A completely comprehensive list would run to many more than these pages.
For the second edition, my primary debts include my professorial Peters, Peter Kemp at Glasgow University, and Peter Scott, then vice-chancellor of Kingston University, who rescued me with references and lessons on housing and higher education, as did Richard Layard of the London School of Economics on the labour market and employment policy. John Perry of the Chartered Institute for Housing and Stuart Maclure, along with John Carvel and David Brindle of the Guardian, also provided important compasses. Andrew Dilnot, at the time director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, bullied me into giving a lunchtime seminar on where I had got to, even before I had: an excellent discipline. Along with Richard Layard, John McTernan, Alan Langlands, John Perry and Julian Le Grand, he read drafts of the additional text for the second edition, as did two civil servants who, even now, I cannot thank, much as I would like to.
Between the second and third editions I also owe thanks to an emeritus professor of classics at Durham, whose name