Between 1899 and 1902, Britain had to fight in Africa to defend their territory. Whilst recruiting men they came across a problem which was, in some areas, as much as 69% of the men who volunteered to fight were too unfit. This was shocking for the government as they needed a strong army to call upon and it also didn’t look very good to the other countries. The government set up the Committee on Physical Deterioration to investigate the problem and took their suggestions when making the reforms, trying to correct the situation they were in.
In 1889, Charles Booth published a book, Labour and Life of the People, holding his studies on poverty in London. He wrote that 35% of the people in London were suffering from poverty. In his books Booth suggested ways to fix the problems such as the introduction of the Old Age Pensions Act. He thought that if the government didn’t do anything then Britain could suffer from a socialist revolution. In 1901, Seebohm Rowntree published Poverty, A Study of Town Life. It gave details of the studies he had done in York on poverty, the reasons for it and the results he obtained. He split families suffering from poverty into two different groups, primary and secondary. Families suffering from primary poverty didn’t earn enough wages to supply themselves with simple necessities whereas families suffering from secondary poverty earned enough wages to live on but instead wasted them on things like alcohol or cigarettes. Other factors causing poverty were things such as the death of a wage earner, large families and old age and illness, as they couldn’t work. These studies showed that poverty in Britain wasn’t due to idleness and a lack of education as previously thought, a majority of the people in poverty hadn’t reached it though any fault of their own.
The situation involving the rise of socialism brought up by Booth was a concern. The Liberals thought that a way of preventing it would be to keep the public healthy and happy, giving them no cause to rebel. The new Labour party was promising pensions, unemployment benefits and a better education and the Liberals thought they could compete with the new Labour party by introducing even more reforms than Labour wanted, they had been out of power for a long time and wanted to make the some significant changes to increase support for them and lose some for the new Labour party.
Industrial decline was another factor for the introduction of the reforms. Britain was being pushed aside by other countries such as the USA and the government needed to do something to resurrect this. David Lloyd George looked at the situation in Germany noted that their workers were much healthier than the workers in Britain and in particular they were more efficient which was helping their prosperity. Lloyd George thought this could be the main contributor to their recent industrial rises and went about bringing in reforms to create a similar workforce in Britain and in the hope that they would again be a leading industrial power.
As I have said there were many reasons for the Liberal reforms but one of the main reasons was both competition with and how they were viewed by other countries. Things like the workforce in Britain and the situation they found themselves in during the Boer War don’t put out a good message to other countries around the world and, being a leading power, they needed to be healthy, happy and efficient. The results from the studies of Rowntree and Booth showed that poverty was a huge problem and the government had to do something to change this, not neglect it or blame the people themselves as they had previously done. The way to achieve these changes was introduce reforms that would deal with a wide span of the British population. Reforms such as the Old Age Pensions Act and the Children and Young Persons Act were introduced in the years leading up to the First World War.
Jess Wills
