To What Extent did the Liberal Party’s Reforms After 1906 Succeed in Addressing Britain’s Social Problems?

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To What Extent did the Liberal Party's Reforms After 1906 Succeed in Addressing Britain's Social Problems?

In 1906, the liberal party's general election manifesto spoke of the previous conservatives government's "failure to deal in a serious spirit with the social questions of which so much was heard at the general election of 1895" (liberal manifesto 1906 at www.politicalstuff.co.uk) . This essay will attempt to answer the question of whether the liberal's were successful in dealing with the social problems of the time, which the conservatives were deemed to have neglected.

In order to effectively answer this question, first one must realise exactly what were the social problems in early Edwardian Britain:- It can be said that there was no single massive problem; more a number of smaller interrelated problems, for example unemployment, poor health and an outdated system of relief. These problems were deemed so serious that they were thought to be effecting both the home economy and the security of the empire, even the traditionally Laissez Faire, non - interventionist Liberal party decided that massive government intervention had become necessary. It is often said that the Bore war of the late 19th / early 20th century woke British politics up to the fact that reform was essential, it was around this time that it was realised the huge extent poverty and poor health in working classes - the army was rejecting recruits at an alarming rate, and performance in battle was often poor. It also became apparent that even the home economy was in danger because of the aforementioned social problems. Indeed as Floyd and McCloskey said in the The Economic History of Britain since 1700 "if the working classes were not strong enough to work hard ...Britain's prospects were bleak." (Floyd and McCloskey, 1997)

The liberals decided to rely on social research as the basis of much of their social policy reform, works by Charles Booth and Seebohm Rowntree, helped the government quantify the scale of the social problems and to a degree how they should target their policies to be most effective.

Rowntree's research had led to his "poverty cycle" theory, where he hypothesised that throughout the average person's lifetime, there were three particular times where he or she was particularly vulnerable to falling below the "poverty line" (which Rowntree depicts as the level of income which one needs to support oneself nutritionally). These periods of want didn't just affect the unemployed or destitute by any means, in fact, the "average" working man with a large family would be expected to experience these periods of poverty. The remarkable extent of poverty is an example of the huge scale of the social problems that the liberals had to tackle, it is worth considering in the context of the question that total success in resolving them would have been neigh on impossible

As seen in the graph above, there were three key periods when a member of working class were more than likely to experience poverty - as a child from the age of around five to age fifteen, when the parent of young children at age thirty till around forty and finally as an elderly person unable to work to support oneself, from around age sixty five onward. The liberal policy's were very specific at targeting groups in order to try and reduce the health effects of this poverty.
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This research had a direct result on Liberal social policy, in 1908, the old age pension bill was introduced, taken through parliament by Lloyd George, then as chancellor. It said that men and women over seventy was eligible for a 5S a week state aid.

The aid was hugely popular, partly because the stigma previously associated with poverty had been removed, largely since one could collect their money from the post office. It is obvious that the elderly who did receive the pension did benefit from a markedly increased quality of life.

The old age ...

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