“If there is to be less government and …less nationalized welfare, health and education, there has to be a policy for their reduction. That means a thoughtful respect for the content and customers of welfare, education and health services. It also means thinking about the types of criticism that will be effective and those, which could be ignored or neutralized. If the welfare state is a source of employment and remuneration to millions of teachers, social workers, academics et al, then it will not be amused by incisive criticism. It will respond to it by argument and evidence but also by abuse, appeal to sentiment, obstruction and professional manoeuvring. A criticism that is going to be more than hot air will have to anticipate these responses and be ready to answer and expose them …no criticism will achieve actual and effective service reductions unless it makes its priority the exposure of the defensive manoeuvres of the welfare state, unless it breaks the spell of the welfare state, (Anderson et al 1981:8).
But those who are concerned with, as Anderson put it, ‘break the spell of the welfare state,’ they need to firstly recognise that many people depend greatly on the welfare state, whether it be for care, support or employment.
By 1948 the modern welfare state had been fully established in Britain. According to Dearlove and Saunders, the welfare state stood on two pillars:
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National Insurance guaranteed a minimum income in the event of sickness, accident, unemployment and old age. All this was financed out of individual contributions.
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General Taxation provided a system of assistance and services, including free and universal health and school systems, income assistance through family allowances and doles, and specific provisions such as rented housing and child welfare clinics.
(Dearlove and Saunders 2000:568)
In the 1970s the welfare state was becoming more expensive at a time when the British economy was going through a period of rapid failing profitability. According to Dearlove and Saunders, the government spending on social security, personal social services, health care, education and housing increased from 16 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) in 1951, to 24 per cent in 1971, and to 29 per cent in 1975, when it was accounting for half of all public expenditure. By the 1977, 14 million people were in receipt of benefits (nearly double the figure of 1951), while the public sector services had grown much faster than any other sector of the workforce. Gradually the New Right of the Conservative Party began to ask whether the country could afford this constantly rising bill, and some began to question why spending on welfare was going up even though people had been getting better off, (Dearlove and Saunders 2000:576).
The more the state takes upon itself to relieve a social problem, the greater the size of the problem becomes, with the increasing number of people become dependent on state delivery system. In the view of the New Right, state welfare actually creates the widespread dependency, which it is intended to eradicate, (Dearlove and Saunders 2000:577).
According to Sullivan, the post war Labour government introduced and developed major social policies, which we have come to see in the welfare state. Introduced by a government programmatically committed to social reform, these policies can be seen both as a radical break with the past and as a manifestation of contemporary political and social conservatism, (Sullivan, M. 1996:54).
Some of the Social Policies passed after the Second World War is:
- The National Insurance Act, 1946, introduced ‘an extended scheme of national insurance providing pecuniary payments by ways of unemployment benefits, sickness benefits, maternity benefit, retirement pension, widow’s benefit, guardian’s allowance and death grant,’ (Jones, K. 1991:136).
- The National Assistance Act 1948, introduced complementary provisions for people who, for one reason or another, were not adequately covered by the insurance scheme. It was subtitled ‘An Act to terminate the existing Poor Law’ and section one began, ‘The existing Poor Law shall cease to have affect,’ (Jones, K. 1991:138).
- The National Health Service Act 1946 came in to use in 1948. The underlying principle of the NHS was that the State guaranteed free health services of a high standard for everyone who needed them, (Thompson, H. et al 2001:309). The National Health Service Act 1946, laid down a commitment to the health of the nation in the following terms:
“It shall be the duty of the Minister of Health…to promote the establishment…of a comprehensive Health Service designed to secure improvement in the physical and mental health of the people…and the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of illness…the services so provided shall be free of charge, except where any provision of this Act expressly provides for the making and recovery of charges (section one).”
(Jones, K.1991: 140).
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The Education Act, 1944. The Act usually bears the name of R. A Butler, the Conservative Minister who presided over its passage through Parliament. Butler's 1944 Education Act was an attempt to create the structure for the post-war British education system. The act raised the school-leaving age to 15 and provided universal free schooling in three different types of schools; grammar, secondary modern and technical. Butler hoped that these schools would cater for the different academic levels and other aptitudes of children. Entry to these schools was based on the 11+ examinations, ().
It was not until its third term in office (1987-1992) that the Conservative government made and radical moves to reconstruct the welfare state, and when it did so its reforms fell some way short of the ambitious blueprints that had been circulating around the New Right think tanks.
Rather than privatising the welfare state, the government chose instead to marketise it. Major reforms of Education, health and personal social services all involved an attempt to introduce the discipline of the market in to the public sector, as opposed to transferring public sector services in to the private market place. The exception of this pattern was housing, for here the government launched an all-out privatisation strategy very early on, and it succeeded in selling off a substantial chunk of the housing stock, (Dearlove and Saunders 2000:584).
In 1979, Britain had the largest public rental housing system in the whole of Western Europe. This was a red rag to the Thatcherite bull, and the Conservatives swiftly introduced the 1980 Housing Act, which gave council tenants the right to buy their homes from their local authority landlords, (Dearlove and Saunders 2000:584).
Although the New Right has strongly supported reform of the state education system, its central strands do not indicate a ‘unitary; model and it would be misleading to say that its spokesmen speak with a single voice, (Denham, 1996:105). As Knight (1985:228) argues, there has often been considerable disagreement over ‘how the currency of education, in the sense of curriculum and school-leaving certification, is to be restored’. The principal items on the educational agenda of the New Right, Knight argues, have been as follows:
- The restoration of the currency of educational credentials (the New Right has been keen to stem the inflationary tide of credentials/qualifications).
- The return of traditional values in education by the removal of curriculum ‘clutter’.
- The raising of education from its ‘capture’ by Local Education Authority (LEA) bureaucracies, schools and teacher unions.
- The creation of real parental choice and participation in education; the creation of a ‘market’ in education to allow parents to choose the schools they want and escape from those they don’t (FEVER’s campaign for a school voucher).
- The reform of the school curriculum to give more emphasis to the requirements of industry.
(Knight cited by Denham 1996:105-106).
The most fundamental changes to the NHS, introduced by the 1990 National Health and Community Care Act, was the introduction of an internal market. Consumers (in this case, patients) did not themselves have to pay for treatment, but their District Health Authority or their GP acting on their behalf would contract with a hospital to provide the necessary treatment at a given cost.
Central to this change was the right of hospitals and general practitioners to opt out of control by their District Health Authority and to take responsibility for their won budgets, (Dearlove and Saunders 2000:587).
A key issue for radical form is treating the whole societal welfare system – public and private – as an integrated package, and not just seeing the welfare state as the problem. The priority is to find effective governance mechanisms that confront the reality of and organisational society and fit the complex of provision that now span the public-private divide. For a start that means enhancing the protection of consumers in the private sector and extending consumer choice in the public sector. Indeed the ideal would be to fuse the two systems – allowing people to top up a publicly funded minimum level of service if they could afford it, whilst still receiving their basic public entitlement. Only if this can be achieved will citizens be willing to spend more on welfare, receiving benefits proportional to their spending, and being willing to use the same institutions as poorer citizens, (Hirst, P. 1998:87).
Bibliography
Anderson, D. et al (1981) Breaking the spell of the welfare state London: SAU
Axford, B. et al (1997) Politics – an introduction London: Routledge
Collard, D. (1968) The new right – a critique London: Fabians Society
Dearlove, J. and Saunders, P. (2000) Introduction to British politics USA: Blackwell
Denham, A. (1996) Think-tank of the new right Aldershot: Dartmouth
Eatwell, R. and O’Sullivan (1989) The nature of the right London: Pinter
Green, D. (1987) The new right Brighton: Wheatsheaf
Heywood, A. (1997) Politics Hampshire: Palgrave
Hirst, P. (1998) ‘Social welfare and associative democracy’ in Ellison, N. and Pierson, C. Developments in British social policy London: Macmillan pp.87
Johnson, N. (1990) Reconstructing the welfare state Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf
Jones, K. (1991) The making of social policy in Britain 1830-1990 London: Athlone
Marshall, TH (1981) The right to welfare and other essays London: Heinemann
Sullivan, M. (1996) The development of the British welfare state Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Thompson, H (2001) Health and Social Care London: Hodder and Stoughton
BBC (2001) ‘William Beveridge’ [02/03/02]
Mereside Primary School (2002) ‘Britain Post War’ [02/03/02]
Spartacus educational (2001) ‘1944 Education Act’ [02/03/02]
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