The indigent who were considered worthy of parish assistance were called paupers. The unworthy, those who were considered able-bodied but shiftless, were not to be relieved, though in fact they were often assisted on the same terms as the “deserving poor,” that is, meagerly and punitively, since the system was in any case preoccupied with the need to withhold charity, considered the great source of moral corruption of the poor and therefore the great source of poverty. So late and well reputed a social thinker as the young William Beveridge urged that starvation be left as a final incentive to industry among the shiftless poor. Beveridge was to become the father of the Welfare State.
The mandate of Poor Law charity was only to provide subsistence, because if the recipient of charity were to do as well as the independent worker, the worker, too, would become demoralized and slide into pauperism. At the same time, a very important article of economic faith was that the wages of workers could not exceed subsistence — if they did, the depletion of capital would cause a decline in investment and employment that would return the worker unceremoniously to something less than the level of subsistence. So it was difficult to make the situation of paupers less desirable than the situation of the employed, especially considering the horrendous conditions under which most work was done. Paupers were subjected to the miseries of the separation of their families, and they were auctioned off or forced into emigration, depending on the improvisations of local authorities determined to keep relief recipients to an absolute minimum. To assure that parish assistance would be limited to those who were qualified by birth or legal settlement to receive it, the movement of workers was narrowly restricted.
The abusive treatment of paupers was justified on the grounds that it discouraged the class above them, the employed, from sinking into Poor Law dependency, and it was justified by the suspicion that the class below them, the poor unworthy of assistance, were to be found among them despite all precautions, and it was justified on the grounds that dependency easily became habit, that charity demoralized its recipients. Every worker was a potential pauper, and every pauper was a burden, presumptively demoralized, and an agent of demoralization of others. These assumptions created and sustained the legal situation of the great majority of British people.
Even now British subjects have no rights established in law. Supposedly they enjoy customary rights, but where in their harrowing history any custom friendly to their interests could have been established I am at a loss to know. Until the 1980s people were imprisoned without trial on the word of the arresting officer for appearing to intend a crime, under the Vagrancy Act of 1824. Such arrests have supposedly ended, but in Britain few things ever really end. Clearly, those against whom such laws are carried out have none of the protections we imagine to be “Western.” The laws are highly consistent, however, with the conditions of the Poor Law, which voided every notion of individual rights — except, of course, the slippery right to subsist, always boasted of and worried about despite high rates of death among paupers, and at best enjoyed only by those the parish could or would relieve.
Parliament, which would be the political expression of fundamental rights in the British population if it were a straightforward representative institution, is characterized by an extraordinary mix of prerogatives and disabilities, which combine to weaken all other institutions without creating real power in the Parliament itself. No British court can override the laws it passes. Recently it abolished seven major elected city governments, including the Greater London Council, an action of special significance because these were major power bases for the Labour Party. To this day Parliament can expunge an official crime by legalizing an action of government retroactively. It has almost perfect legislative freedom, in theory, but in fact it has no right to any information the Prime Minister does not give it. A bill, while it is in preparation, is an Official Secret, forbidden to Members of Parliament as to anyone else. Experts on modern Britain describe the system as an elective dictatorship, but I have my doubts about that formula. Whitehall, the bureaucracy that is actually charged with developing legislation, collecting information, and implementing policy, is not elected, and does not change with parties or ministries. Question time, when the Prime Minister replies to questions from Members of Parliament, can deal only with specified subjects. It is forbidden, for example, to inquire into purchases made by the National Health Service. As Ralf Dahrendorf, head of the London School of Economics, says in his book On Britain, “What happens is not decided in Westminster [that is, in Parliament]. It is not even discussed at Westminster in any detail. As a result, the visible political game becomes strangely superficial.” Mr. Dahrendorf admires the system, on balance. However, that the “deceptively lively adversary surface”6 of parliamentary activity is a surface, rather than an authentic and consequential process of deliberation, means that even the right to vote is a very small concession of power on the part of those who do decide “what happens.” In other words, there is a pervasive absence of positive, substantive personal and political rights in Britain.
The structures of institutions express conceptions of society. Sellafield amounts, in its dinosaur futurism, to a brutal laying of hands on the lives of people: a blunt, unreflecting assertion of power. It is the same unchallenged assertion of economic prerogative that legally immobilized the majority of the British population for five hundred years, so that the cost of relieving their wretchedness, when wretchedness became extreme, could be contained.
The movement of workers from the country to the cities and from the North to London demonstrates that these laws, which mandated the forced return of strayed workers to the place of their legal settlement, were not consistently enforced, though in the beginning of this century Beatrice Webb, guiding spirit of Fabian socialism, may be heard grumbling about the numbers who were returned and the costs entailed. If cities represented opportunity, relatively speaking, migrants had the impetus of destitution and humiliation at their backs, to enhance the pull of urban life. Everywhere, whatever they did, workers were seen as burdens, actual or potential, and this perception governed every aspect of their existence.
America had its paupers and poorhouses, through the nineteenth century at least, though these institutions seem never to have seized on the national imagination, or to have remained in the popular memory. Hawthorne’s failed utopia, Blithedale, becomes a poor farm. Thoreau is visited at Walden by paupers, including one who declares himself “deficient in intellect.” In the early twentieth century, Booker T. Washington notes that blacks are almost never paupers, by which he means that they are provident and self-sufficient people. Given our profound cultural debt to Great Britain, it is no wonder if our policies with regard to the poor are sometimes crude and high-handed. But imagine what it would be like if we had truly replicated British social organization, if every American who lived by a wage had been immobilized to simplify the administration of welfare in the event he should need it, and if this arrangement had been persisted in for hundreds of years. This would surely trench very far on the dignity and liberty of citizens, and their pursuit of happiness.
Margaret Thatcher is easing the burdens of Britain by cutting back on education, health care, and other threadbare amenities, pinching one of the poorest populations in Europe, supposedly to punish and cure their poverty. This is a typically visceral reaction against the supposed cost to the state of allowing meager comfort to people perceived as demoralized and reduced to dependency by intemperate generosity.