I was brought up with the welfare state. When I was about eight, I was suddenly taken ill with suspected appendicitis. An ambulance rushed to our home in Belsize Park, London, its bell ringing, and I was loaded into it on a stretcher to be taken to the Royal Free Hospital.
There was no room in the children’s ward, so I was put in a men’s ward. I still remember it. The grown men and myself – the one boy – lay in beds in two long rows. The ward had plenty of windows, so it was bright and airy. The beds had crisp white sheets, made up by a small army of smartly dressed nurses. The men flirted with the nurses. I don’t think I had ever witnessed such a thing before, so I was fascinated. As for the hospital, there seemed no question but that it was well run and all was well with the welfare state world.
Only gradually, over many years, did I begin to have doubts about the welfare state. Many events, people and books chipped away at my early assumption that the welfare state was a ‘good thing’. My times in Hong Kong and then travelling through its economic opposite – the Soviet Union – had their influence.
Jumping ahead to the early 1990s, I was a leader-writer at the Daily Mail. The normal practice, at least in those days, was for the leader-writer of the day to attend the morning news conference. One day I sat down, as usual, with my A4 pad of paper on which I had jotted down a few ideas for editorials. I cannot remember the details, but the news editor’s list that day was particularly grim. The normal diet of vileness that reaches a newspaper office is anyway always richer than the public knows. There is so much unpleasantness, that editors filter it out. If they printed all the horrors, people would change to another paper offering less depressing fare. Paul Dacre, the editor of the Daily Mail, used to demand of his news editor, ‘get me something light!’
But on this particular day, the diet of murders, rapes, senseless violence, incivility, unmarried parenting, poor educational standards and hospital waiting lists was particularly heavy. Among the stories there was, I think, the rape and murder of a very old woman. A few pounds had been stolen from her. It was depressing.
When the conference finished, the news team left, leaving Paul Dacre, his number three, Peter Wright (now editor of the Mail on Sunday), and myself. Normally the editor would stay behind his ample desk to discuss the leaders. This time he came around to join us. He slumped down on a sofa, put his face in his hands for a moment, then sat back with a despairing sigh. Instead of discussing leaders, he exclaimed: ‘What has happened to this country? It wasn’t like this when we were growing up, was it? It isn’t that we just have a rosy view of the past, is it? It is so depressing! What’s happened?’
We did not need to ask what he meant.
I had been writing repeatedly about all these things and more as a leader-writer. Many correspondents specialise in crime or health or something else. But a leader-writer for the Daily Mail has to consider everything – from foreign wars to soccer hooliganism. When Paul Dacre asked ‘what happened?’, although the idea was only half-formed, I hesitantly replied: ‘The welfare state’.
There was a silence in the room for a while. It seemed almost a sacrilege to suggest such a thing. All three of us, I suspect, had been brought up to think the welfare state was Britain’s crowning peacetime achievement. Surely this was the thing which had brought peace of mind and security to millions of people? It had brought education to all. It had brought healthcare ‘free at the point of delivery’. Even a drunk whose life was in tatters would be looked after by the welfare state. It was decent and kind. Could this well-loved institution possibly be the cause of the unwelcome changes in Britain?
I do not know how far Paul Dacre was persuaded. He did, though, commission me to write an article – under Peter Wright’s careful supervision. Even modest criticisms were considered at the time as sensitive. The article certainly would not appear as an editorial – indicating it was the view of the newspaper, but only under my own name, which meant it could be dismissed as the wild view of a maverick.
That first article went in the paper on 30 March 1993 with the headline ‘Is the Welfare State destroying Britain?’. It was followed by half a dozen more on related subjects. Of course I was not the first to suggest the welfare state had damaged society. Others had gone before and far further – in America and in various think-tank studies in Britain. But this was at, or near, the beginning of the time when such thoughts were expressed in the British popular press.
I have since thought a great deal about the reply I gave that day in 1993. Was it justified? Could such terrible things as the murder and rape of an old woman really be linked with such an idealistic thing as the welfare state? By what route could the link be made? Did it stand up to examination?
And what would there be to look after the poor and the weak without the welfare state? Had there been anything there before the welfare state existed? I would not want to condemn people to Dickensian misery. I would not want to make a ‘better’ society if it meant people being left uneducated, untreated in illness, hungry and without shelter.
The first issue, though, was to establish whether the premise was true. Has Britain really changed a great deal since the 1950s and before? Is it so much worse? Idealising the 1950s as a ‘golden age’ is likely to get an immediate scornful response. People think of rationing and rather strait-laced people leading drab lives. No one would want to go back to that. How has Britain really changed since the mid-century and before? Is there more crime? Are people less decent? Has Britain genuinely suffered some sort of fall from grace?