It was the war that changed all this. Just as World War One had precipitated legislation and social provisions in its wake—if only to deal with the widows, orphans, invalids and unemployed of the immediate post-war years—so the Second World War transformed both the role of the modern state and the expectations placed upon it. The change was most marked in Britain, where Maynard Keynes correctly anticipated a post-war ‘craving for social and personal security’. But everywhere (in the words of the historian Michael Howard) ‘war and welfare went hand in hand’. In some countries nutrition and medical provision actually improved during the war: mobilizing men and women for total war meant finding out more about their condition and doing whatever was necessary to keep them productive.
The post-1945 European welfare states varied considerably in the resources they provided and the way they financed them. But certain general points can be made. The provision of social services chiefly concerned education, housing and medical care, as well as urban recreation areas, subsidized public transport, publicly-funded art and culture and other indirect benefits of the interventionary state. Social security consisted chiefly of the state provision of insurance—against illness, unemployment, accident and the perils of old age. Every European state in the post-war years provided or financed most of these resources, some more than others.
The important differences lay in the schemes set in place to pay for the new public provisions. Some countries collected revenue through taxation and provided free or heavily-subsidized care and services—this was the system chosen in Britain, where it reflected the contemporary preference for state monopolies. In other countries cash benefits were paid to citizens according to socially-determined criteria of eligibility, with the beneficiaries left to purchase services of their own choice. In France and some smaller countries citizens would be expected to pay up front for certain categories of medical provision, for example, but could then claim back much of their expenses from the state.
These differences reflected varying systems of national finance and accounting, but they also signified a fundamental strategic choice. In isolation, social insurance, however generous, was not in principle politically radical—we have seen how relatively early it was introduced in even the most conservative of regimes. Comprehensive welfare systems, however, are inherently re-distributive. Their universal character and the sheer scale on which they operate require the transfer of resources—usually through taxation—from the privileged to the less well off. The welfare state was thus in itself a radical undertaking, and the variations among the European welfare states after 1945 reflected not just institutional procedures but also political calculation.
In eastern Europe, for example, the Communist regimes after 1948 on the whole did not usually favour universal welfare systems—they did not need to, since they were at liberty to redistribute resources by force without spending scarce state funds on public services. Peasants, for instance, were frequently excluded from the social insurance and pension arrangements on political grounds. In western Europe only six countries—Belgium, Italy, Norway, Austria, the Federal Republic of Germany and the UK—introduced compulsory and universal unemployment insurance after 1945. Subsidized voluntary schemes remained in the Netherlands until 1949, in France through 1967, in Switzerland until the mid-1970s. In Catholic Europe long-established local and communal coverage against unemployment probably impeded the development of universal systems of insurance by reducing the need for them. In countries where inter-war unemployment had been especially traumatic—the UK, or Belgium—welfare spending was driven in part by the desire to maintain full or close to full employment. Where it had not been so significant—in France or Italy, for example—this was reflected in a rather different balance of priorities.
Although Sweden and Norway (but not Denmark) were in the vanguard of benefit provision across a broad range of social services, and West Germany kept in place the welfare provisions inherited from past regimes (including Nazi-era programmes aimed at encouraging a high-birth rate), it was in Britain that the most ambitious efforts were made to build, from scratch, a genuine ‘Welfare State’. In part this reflected the unique position of Britain’s Labour Party, which won an outright victory at the elections of July 1945 and—unlike the governments of most other European countries—was free to legislate its entire electoral programme unconstrained by coalition partners. But it also derived from the rather distinctive sources of British reformism.
The social legislation of post-war Britain was based on the justly famous wartime report by Sir William Beveridge, published in November 1942 and an immediate best-seller. Beveridge was born in 1879, the son of a British judge in imperial India, and his sensibilities and ambitions were those of the great reforming Liberals of Edwardian Britain. His Report was at once an indictment of the social injustices of pre-1939 British society and a policy template for root and branch reform once the war was over. Even the Conservative Party did not dare to oppose its core recommendations and it became the moral basis for the most popular and enduring elements in Labour’s post-war programme.
Beveridge made four assumptions about post-war welfare provision, all of which were to be incorporated in British policy for the next generation: that there should be a national health service, an adequate state pension, family allowances and near-full employment. The last of these was not a welfare provision in itself, but it underpinned everything else since it took for granted that the normal situation of a healthy post-war adult was to be in full-time paid work. On this assumption generous provision could be made for unemployment insurance, pensions, family allowances, medical and other services, since these would be paid for by levies on wage packets, as well as by progressive taxation of the working population at large.
The implications were significant. Non-working women with no private health insurance of their own got coverage for the first time. The humiliation and social dependency of the old Poor Law/Means Test system was done away with—on the (presumptively) rare occasion when the citizen of the Welfare State needed public assistance he or she was now entitled to it by right. Medical and dental services were provided free of charge at the point of service, pension provision was made universal, family allowances (at 5/- [25 p] per week for second and subsequent children) were introduced. The main parliamentary Bill legislating these provisions received the Royal Assent in November 1946 and the National Health Service (NHS) Act—the core of the welfare system—was introduced into law on July 5th 1948.
The British Welfare State was both the completion of an earlier cycle of reforms, with its roots in the mid-nineteenth century Factory Acts, and a genuinely radical departure. The contrast between the Britain of George Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier (published in 1937) and that of Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s famous put-down to a heckler twenty years later (‘You’ve never had it so good’) is a tribute to the National Health Service and the provisions for security, income maintenance and employment that accompanied it. It is all too easy, looking back today upon the miscalculations of the first post-war reformers, to minimize and even dismiss their achievement. Within a few years many of the universal provisions of the NHS proved unsustainably expensive; the quality of the services provided has not been maintained across the years; and over time it has become clear that certain of the fundamental actuarial assumptions—including the optimistic prediction of permanent full employment—were short-sighted or worse. But anyone who grew up (like the present writer) in post-war Britain has good reason to be grateful for the Welfare State.