Beveridge: Spin Doctor and Sage
If there is one man who deserves a place in the pantheon of reform, outside party politics, it is that cadaverous, white-haired, publicity-mad, kindly, harsh, determined and entirely impossible man, William Beveridge. He had left his wealthy upper-class circle to become a social worker in the East End of London, just like Clement Attlee. He then became a journalist and a civil servant before the First World War, a friend of intellectual socialists. He worked with the young Winston Churchill in the Liberal government, was one of the architects of rationing in 1916 and was later a Liberal MP. He knew Whitehall inside-out but left to become an academic, using the young Harold Wilson as his dogsbody. This was a hard life. Beveridge was fanatically hard-working, rising at six for a cold bath before spending the rest of his day icily wallowing in cold statistics, writing and dictating. When war came again, Beveridge decided that government could not properly function without him and pestered the Churchill team for a job. He was bitterly disappointed when Bevin, who disliked him intensely, finally shut him up with the offer of a review into the confusing array of sickness and disability schemes for workers. It was hardly glamorous or central to the war effort and Beveridge apparently wept tears of rage and frustration when he was told. He set to work, however, and quickly decided there could be no coherent system of work benefits without looking too at the plight of the old, women at home and children. Workers were not alone, self-sufficient. They had families. They aged. He would have to devise a system to include everyone, while keeping the incentive to work. There would have to be family allowances, and a National Health Service, but all this would be undermined if Britain returned to the era of mass unemployment; so the State would have to manage the economy to keep people in work. Giving Beveridge a limited remit and telling him to get on with it was like giving Leonardo da Vinci some paper and telling him to doodle away to pass the time.
Earlier we noted that the spirit of Oliver Cromwell was abroad in the England of the mid-forties. Beveridge was urged by his helper, soon to be his wife, Jessy Mair, to adopt the language of Cromwell too. Soon he was stomping around telling anyone who would listen that he intended to slay five giants – Want (he meant poverty), Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. Beveridge was addicted to what a later Britain would call ‘spin’. He used his position as a well-known broadcaster, and his contacts with the press, to drip out advance hints of the great report he was preparing, which he clothed in millennial language. He was also lucky in his timing. After the bleakest of the war years, Britain’s fate was on the turn. There were, inevitably, plenty who were nervous or hostile. Leading industrialists protested that Britain was fighting Germany to keep the Gestapo out of our houses not to build a costly Welfare State. The Conservative Chancellor, Sir Kingsley Wood, briskly told Churchill that Beveridge’s plan would be unaffordable. Whitehall mandarins resented his egotism and self-promotion. But he had the wind at his back. Popular expectations were too high and memories of the thirties were too vivid for the white-haired giant-killer to be stopped.
Beveridge’s was a long, detailed, number-filled report, longer than this book, with no pictures and very few adjectives. Yet there were queues in London on the day of publication waiting to grab copies. It sold like no government report before, and very few since. Within a month, 100,000 copies had been bought; eventually six times as many were sold. It was distributed to British troops, snapped up in America, and dropped by Lancaster bombers over occupied Europe as propaganda – ‘Look, here’s the kind of thing a democratic society promises its people.’ A detailed analysis of the Beveridge Report was discovered in Hitler’s bunker at the end of the war, ruefully describing it as ‘superior to the current German social insurance in almost all points’.At home, unaware of the impact he was making in the unlikeliest places, Beveridge lectured. He wrote columns. He filled halls. He broadcast. A few months later the cautious Churchill acknowledged that, far from distracting attention from the war effort, the Beveridge Report was greatly boosting morale. He gave his first broadcast on domestic issues, accepting ‘a broadening field for state ownership and enterprise’ in health, welfare, housing and education, noting that Britain could not have ‘a band of drones in our midst’, whether aristocrats or pub-crawlers; and in a splendidly Churchillian twist announcing that ‘there is no finer investment for any community than putting milk into babies.’
The inevitable tumble that follows a Report and White Paper – the watering-down, haggling, legislating and organizing – had to take place before the new National Insurance system was finally brought into being in 1948. Yet it was a fantastic feat of organization which puts modern government to shame in its energy and speed. A new office to hold 25 million contribution records was needed, plus 6 million for married women. It had to be huge and to go up quickly. Prisoners of war were used to build it in Newcastle; meanwhile a propeller factory in Gateshead was taken over to run family allowances. The work of six old government departments was brought into a new ministry. More than half the staff who were transferred were still working away with typewriters and fountain pens in the bedrooms of 400 Blackpool hotels and boarding houses where they had been sent for the war. Forms were printed, box files assembled, new teams picked. Jim Griffiths, the Labour minister pushing it all through and refusing to take no for an answer, wanted a thousand local National Insurance offices ready around the country, decently decorated and politely staffed. After being told a hundred times that all this was quite impossible, he got it. Britain has been a subtly different and slightly less dangerous place to live in ever since. The level of help given was rather less than Beveridge himself would have wanted, and married women in particular were still treated as dependents; there was a lot to be argued about over the next fifty years. Still, from Beveridge’s first rough notes in an office where he was thought to be safely out of harm’s way, to a revolution in welfare, sweeping away centuries of complicated, partial and unfair rules and customs, it had been just six years’ work.