Reinventing the Welfare State. Ursula Huws

      CHAPTER ONE

       Introduction

      Since 2016, worrying fissures have opened within the British working class and among the political parties that purport to represent its interests. Many have responded to this situation by retreating into polarised positions or succumbing to deep and paralysing forms of depression that render them despairing or inactive. This book is written to try to counter such reactions, in the belief that, despite these painful divisions, there is much more that unites people than divides them. Above all, and against some of the evidence from the 2019 general election, it seems to me that among the British people there is a deep hunger, across a wide political spectrum, for a welfare state that genuinely cares for its citizens, in all their diversity, from cradle to grave. New evidence for this hunger has emerged during the coronavirus crisis, although as I write it is still too early to tell where this will lead. Despite the many temptations to scapegoat others for the deficiencies of the existing welfare state, or to give in to defeatism, I believe that there are large numbers of principled people out there with the courage and fundamental decency to set aside their differences and campaign to bring a better welfare state into being. I write, therefore, from a position of optimism, offering this book as a constructive contribution to the development of a manifesto for hope and a collaborative form of politics that can build an alternative future. We owe it to our children and grandchildren to provide them with an economic and social environment in which they do not have to pour their energies into scrabbling to survive but can live decent and fulfilling lives and focus their energies on tackling the huge challenges facing the planet. Let’s give it our best shot.

      It is clear that the welfare state we have in the UK is no longer fit for purpose. But what can be done about this? This is one of the greatest challenges facing us as we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century. Do we try to recreate the cosy world of the mid twentieth century, or do we need to design something new, for a digital, global era?

      The mid twentieth-century welfare state plays a powerful role in the socialist imaginary. It not only provides the ancestry of many of our present institutions, creaking though some of them may be, but also represents an aspirational model. In Europe, especially, it is still regarded by many as the norm by which decency is measured, promising security, social solidarity, cradle-to-grave protection against penury, equality of opportunity and a vision of progress.

      When asked what a ‘proper job’ looks like, most people would still point to the model, established after the Second World War, at least for a privileged minority, of full-time, permanent employment with regular working hours, with the risks of illness, disability or unemployment covered by national insurance, and a pension waiting at the end to provide for a happy retirement. Similarly, there is still widespread support for the idea that a decent society is one that provides enough shelter to ensure that nobody has to sleep on the street, and a welfare safety net that prevents starvation.

      Many would still agree with Beveridge’s memorable aim of eliminating the five ‘giant evils’ of squalor, ignorance, want, idleness, and disease. It was in this spirit that the post-war Attlee government gave us several of the foundational features of what most British people still regard as normative social rights: universal healthcare, universal secondary education and a national insurance system providing universal pensions, child benefit and freedom from destitution via a social safety net.

      The generations brought up in the embrace of this welfare state, or at least the socialists among them, have watched its slow unravelling over the last four decades with horror, putting their political energies into trying to preserve what they can of it – demanding the renationalisation of what has been privatised, the re-regulation of what has been deregulated and the reinstatement of budgets that have been cut. They demand, in other words, a solution that appears to many to be a turning back of the clock. Existing government institutions are often such a taken-for-granted feature of the social landscape that it can be difficult for people of this baby-boomer generation to separate the specific features of those institutions from the social goals that inspired their design. Their experience of trying to defend these twentieth-century bodies during the long hard years between the rise of neoliberalism at the end of the 1970s and the financial crisis of 2008 has made them deeply suspicious of reform. But this may also have made it difficult for them to comprehend the extent to which a gap has grown up between those original social goals and the way these institutions now function. And perhaps these very experiences may have desensitised them to the views of younger generations, who have only ever seen the welfare state through the prism of neoliberalism.

      For anybody who entered the labour market after 1990, the post-war world of work – dominated by male breadwinners in full-time permanent employment supporting dependent families – is almost inconceivable. The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the symbolic establishment of a new international division of labour in which the protected workforces of developed Western economies were increasingly challenged by the existence of a global reserve army of labour, accessed by transnational employers either by offshoring the work to low-wage economies or by making use of a precarious migrant workforce in their home countries. This created a scattered though interdependent workforce, organised in global value chains, often outside the scope of national citizenship and therefore excluded from welfare coverage or employment protection.

      In this context, strategies to try to restore the post-war employment and welfare model might seem like trying to reassemble a Humpty Dumpty that was specific to its time and place, a Humpty Dumpty that, moreover, while viewed romantically through rose-tinted glasses by those whose lives were formed by it, might actually not even be seen as desirable by younger generations. In proposing to restore it, proponents of this strategy run the risk of being seen as old-fashioned and irrelevant, aligned with rigidity and bureaucracy, and positioned, like King Canute, as trying fruitlessly to stem the inevitable tide of progress and innovation.

      Indeed, most ‘woke’ young people who have grown up in the early twenty-first century would, if transported back to the 1950s, probably feel themselves to be in a restrictive, class-bound, sexist, racist and homophobic hell, as well as lacking in any scope to pursue an interesting or creative career or exercise choice as a consumer. It is hard to imagine anything they would hate more in practice than a return to many of the features of everyday life in the mid twentieth century.

      This book pleads for