It is characteristic of the British official mind to take things to a certain point, and then, as it were, go blank. If only the worthy destitute should be helped, what should happen to the unworthy? How can a subsistence wage be calculated if workers have dependents? If you pull down a slum, where will the slum dwellers go? If you cut back health care for a poor and aging population, what will the consequences be? If you pump plutonium into the sea, will it return? Things, people, consequences disappear in Britain, into a deep reservoir of denial. They surface frequently, but not for long. The government is not observant or reflective, but invasive and peremptory, improvised, as if distracted from more important business. Yet, like an authentic modern government, it deals in the lives and safety of people, and enjoys the extraordinary powers conferred on governments by high technology. To be able to imagine actions unshadowed by their consequences is a source of enormous confidence, and great savings, but of neither wisdom nor moral seriousness.
The depth of British memory, as it can be seen in the recurrences of highly particular notions and obsessions, is at the same time remarkable. The poll tax exempts real estate from taxation. Similar logic was used at the beginning of the century to exclude landed property from taxation. The impulse to shelter wealth on the grounds that those who burden society should bear the cost of the burden they constitute — the rationale of the poorhouse — has persisted all these years intact. It is a systematic and principled rejection of the idea of community. The Fabians wrote approvingly about “creeping socialism,” meaning institutions such as the post office and public sanitation, to which the mass of people enjoy access. State-supported education, that is, public education, is considered socialist as well. In other words, such inevitable enhancements of general welfare as derive from the evolution of civilized life in the last century and the first half of this one are considered the expression of a moral-political drift now being reversed. The Dartford Tunnel, a major conduit of traffic into London, is being leased to a consortium of banks, to be managed for their profit.
The bedrock British political assumption is that absolutely nothing belongs to the general public inalienably, by the logic of collective interest or by right. To understand why Britain has felt itself a Gulliver tied to the earth by innumerable threads of socialism, one must understand that public ownership of a bridge, a tunnel, or a river is for them a departure from the natural order of things.
William Beveridge went through a little interval of disfavor with the government when he submitted his report to the coalition dominated by Winston Churchill, a tight-fisted fellow even by British standards. The authorities first printed up an abstract of the report as if to distribute it to British troops in the field, then snatched it back at the last moment. Needless to say, the soldiers found ways to pilfer copies despite all, and the report was read avidly, with great excitement. I suspect this may have been no more than very deft marketing. Louis XIV, to make French peasants interested in planting potatoes, is said to have stationed armed guards around fields in which they were planted. The fields were in due course thoroughly plundered.
The British government rumbled and grumbled over Beveridge’s proposals, while he toured an admiring America in triumph with a bride of mature years who wrote a book about the experience and its ironies. Meanwhile, in Britain, pressure in favor of his report grew.
There was apparently impassioned opposition, of exactly the kind the newest Poor Law should inspire. The Reverend W. R. Inge launched a Malthusian attack, calling it “a heavy bribe to the slum dwellers to have large families.” In this view, “artificial dysgenic selection has never been carried so far” as in the Beveridge Report, “the most gigantic effort of blackmail ever made by a frightened government.”12 British soldiers dreaded the misery which they had left and into which they expected to return. Inge alludes darkly to the fact that slum dwellers have been discovered to be “a deadly danger in time of war.” One comes across such remarks fairly often. Whether they refer to disorder at home or among the soldiers I have not discovered.
At any rate, in the midst of war, the dawn of a new order began to appear in the sky. In due course legislation based on Beveridge’s plan was passed, supplemented with provisions for the National Health Service, education reforms, and industrial nationalizations. Interestingly, Beveridge himself lost election to Parliament. A Labour government was selected to preside over the novus ordo seclorum, on the strength of an overwhelming majority of the votes of the returning servicemen.
And the standard of living fell. The government used its new powers to lower wages, and continued to impose wartime rationing, in severer forms. Poor Law institutions were rechristened, hospitals and pensioners’ homes purged of their bitter histories by a change of name. The National Health Service is still defended as a vast improvement over the horrors of the system which preceded it, also called the National Health Service, developed from the fact that poorhouses were increasingly the refuge of the destitute sick and old. Reports commissioned by the government, released in 1981 and 1987, indicate that class differences in illness and mortality have widened greatly and steadily from World War II to the present. Since, according to The (London) Times,13 the “economically inactive,” a group including “all illegitimate births and many of the permanently sick as well as many single parents,” are not included in national statistics, the poor cities in the North, where health care is worst and unemployment exceeds 20 percent, would not figure appropriately in this measure of the success of the Welfare State. For it is the Welfare State, the high-water mark of British socialism, whose successes are to be measured in this decline in the relative well-being of the poor. Mrs. Thatcher’s new dispensation can only exacerbate this trend, presumably, since poverty, unemployment, and radiation exposure, among other factors which correlate strongly with ill health, have all increased under her government.
I have no reason to believe that illegitimate births do not occur under the auspices of the Health Service, that the chronically ill do not die in hospitals, at least fairly often. How can the government not have information about these people? On what principle can it exclude such information? Does the midwife keep no record of delivering an unwed mother’s child? Is National Health Insurance really insurance, in the sense that it covers only those who have paid for it? Then what becomes of the others? If there is a charity health system for the indigent, how can the government fail to have access to its records? If it has access to them, how can it rationalize their exclusion from health statistics?
I would suggest that we have here the modern incarnation of the unworthy poor, Booth’s Class A. The Welfare State is made for the deserving, and desert is established by employment, as it has been for five hundred years. Are these “economically inactive” neonates the descendants of the wandering beggar women punished for burdening the parishes with their babies when Edward VI was King?
What would happen to infant mortality figures in America if official statistics excluded illegitimate births? What would official motives be in excluding such births? What would the government be expressing in terms of its social vision if it took no account of the condition of the most vulnerable? This British method of accounting is no recent innovation but established official practice.