The Five Giants [New Edition]: A Biography of the Welfare State. Nicholas Timmins
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1951, and had been re-reading the Beveridge report. ‘Someone,’ he said, ‘needs to write a good modern history of the welfare state, and you ought to do it. You can call it The Five Giants. You just start with Beveridge with tears in his eyes and work forwards.’
The idea seemed frankly farcical. I was covering the government’s NHS review and John Moore’s attempt to recast the language of welfare. I had just acquired two more small children. There seemed not enough hours in the day. I was a journalist, not a historian. And there were large parts of the welfare state about which I knew nothing. The idea, however, would not go away. If there was much about which I was ignorant, there were bits of the subject about which I did know something. On and off, I’d spent more than fifteen years reporting them. For some of the more exciting events related here from the mid-1970s on, as Max Boyce would put it, ‘I was there.’ Other motivations piled in. When, in Keith Joseph’s final days as Secretary of State for Social Services, I first started reporting what the academics would call social policy, I had wished for a single volume which simply told the story of how we had got there – the events, ideas, personalities, issues and pressures which had taken the post-1945 welfare state to that point. One that had the best quotes and some of the best jokes all in one place and referenced, and which provided at least a background from which some of the more technical issues could be tackled. Something between Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and 1066 and All That — only for the welfare state and all in one volume. There were single-subject accounts, but none which covered the waterfront or provided quite that mix.
Other motives included bemusement at how the Portillos, Redwoods and the other younger Thatcherites of this world – all of them broadly my age, the generation of whom Ian Kennedy, Professor of Medical Law and Ethics at King’s College, London, once said, ‘if you say soixante-huit to them, they don’t think you’ve got a digit wrong’ – could have such heartfelt hostility to an idea for which I had an instinctive sympathy. To me, and for all its myriad faults, some form of collective provision had always seemed, to put it at its lowest, the least bad way of organising education, health care and social security – things we all need, and which not all of us can guarantee to provide for ourselves either all the time or at the time they are needed. The challenge had always seemed how to improve the workings of the welfare state, not how to dismantle it.
Furthermore, as someone who had grown up with the swings and roundabouts of alternating Labour and Conservative governments, I became increasingly aware that most people under forty have only limited adult memories of life before Thatcher. The period before that, despite the way Kenneth Clarke would have it, is now history, not current affairs. Yet a little history can improve understanding of the current debates about the welfare state, and limit the chances of getting carried away by them.
It is quite important to know that virtually every day since 1948 the NHS has been said to be in crisis, and that for the last seventy-five years morale within it has invariably never been lower. It is worth understanding that every time unemployment rises significantly, there is, like a bad dog that has its day, a spell when the unemployed are blamed as work-shy scroungers before unemployment settles at a new plateau. It is worth knowing that in education, yesterday has almost always been better than today, despite rising numbers passing ever more advanced levels of examinations and reaching higher education in ever greater numbers in every year (with two exceptions) since 1945. It can help to put the Conservatives’ stewardship of the NHS into perspective to know that the first Secretary of State to be sued by a patient for failing to provide an operation was a Labour minister, not a Conservative. Such knowledge matters because it can ward off false despair – the sort which in 1987 afflicted the Tories over the NHS, when they felt they would never gain any credit for it and came the closest they ever have to dismantling it.
Then again, there is the need to attack a few myths. For example that before Margaret Thatcher’s arrival in 1979 all was sweetness and light, and that all was well with the welfare state. It wasn’t. Or that there have been no advances to go alongside the reverses in the past fifteen years. There have.
But if the view that there was a Golden Age in which a lavishly funded welfare system operated in a rosy glow of consensus needs challenging, so does the obverse view which has begun to gain currency – that there never was any real agreement about ends and means, and that the Conservatives always did have a blueprint for breaking the thing up. It is an interpretation advanced in triumph by some on the right who believe their schema for the world is about to come to fruition. It is subscribed to on the left by those who want to believe in a conspiracy theory, and by some who now want to blame themselves for not seeing it coming. It is constructed by trawling through past pamphlets, essays and speeches for the source of ideas now in play such as grant maintained schools, or vouchers for training. Such a view misrepresents history. It is the equivalent of arguing that because in today’s Labour Party there are still people who believe in nationalising the top 200 companies, then if a future Labour government did nationalise them, it would prove that always to have been the Labour Party’s secret aim. Such a view is plainly tosh. Its equivalent is to argue that because there were Conservatives in the 1950s and 1960s who pressed for cash-limited vouchers, for privatisation of both supply and demand, and for a drastic rolling back of the welfare state, then that was always the secret Tory agenda. The ideas did exist, but they were not then in the plans of any political party, any more than nationalising the top 200 companies is in Labour’s in 1995.
Equally, attempts to portray repeated Treasury proposals for new NHS charges or the raising of the school starting age as part of the Conservatives’ desire to undermine the welfare state misunderstands the Treasury’s function. It propounds such ideas to governments of all colours because part of the Treasury’s job is to stop governments spending money. The proposals Gaitskell backed in 1951 to scrap the NHS dental service and introduce ‘hotel’ charges for NHS beds were almost as draconian as anything proposed by his Conservative successors. But they were not introduced, any more than a Cabinet majority was ever assembled for the more extreme pieces of surgery proposed for health and education by the Treasury, by Chancellors and even at times by Prime Ministers under the Conservatives between 1951 and 1964. Equally, the Treasury and Treasury ministers proposed loans in place of student grants, and significant benefit cuts, to Labour as well as Conservative governments.1 In judging how far there was a consensus about the welfare state, one must look at what actually happened, not just at the naughty thoughts each side harboured.
The counter-myth to the conspiracy of the right is that before 1979 satanic socialists set out to control the nation by placing it in some universalist cradle-to-grave feather bed aimed at sapping its moral fibre and taking the Great out of Britain. This doesn’t wash. For a start, from 1945 up to 1979 the Conservatives controlled the welfare state for almost exactly the same period as Labour, and were responsible for some of its most expansionary phases. If the Conservatives at times moved to make services more universal – launching the first great explosion in higher education, for example – Labour, equally, joined Conservative governments in extending means-testing. The welfare state (the phrase has its own problems which we’ll come to in a moment) is after all a living, moving, breathing being, bits of whose boundaries have moved back and forth under both parties in the past fifty years. It is not some fixed nirvana which we either draw nearer to or retreat from.
A further motivation to write this book was anger – anger that it is impossible now to travel on the London underground or walk the streets of our big cities without finding beggars, or, more often, without beggars finding us. That, in my lifetime, did not happen before the late 1980s. There were the down-and-outs on the Embankment. There were the spikes, the left-over remnants of the Poor Law workhouses, which housed the alcoholics and schizophrenics who avoided all the ropes in the safety net. But there were no young people, their lives blighted, sleeping in doorways in the Strand.
Then – and despite that anger – there was the perverse need to declare that, even after well over a decade of ideological assault, the welfare state still exists. Almost everyone to whom the idea of the book was mentioned instantly cracked a joke about the need to be quick about it before the thing disappeared. Most publishers wanted to call it From Cradle to Grave. Yet when welfare state services still take two-thirds of an annual government expenditure totalling £262 billion, the animal, whatever