| Universal benefits: what would William Beveridge do now? Winter fuel help for dukes is hard to justify except in political terms: it locks them into the welfare stateWhen William Beveridge's snappily titled report Social Insurance and Allied Services was published on 1 December 1942, queues of war-weary Britons formed overnight to buy a copy. Sales of the dense 200,000-word volume topped 100,000 within a month.Coming a few days after church bells had rung for Montgomery's victory over Rommel at El Alamein the timing could not have been better. At last people felt they could look to a postwar world where all would be free from Beveridge's "five giants" of want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness that had marred pre-war Britain.Winston Churchill himself popularised the phrase "cradle to the grave", which would come to embody the welfare state, a phrase that Clem Attlee would not adopt until 1950 – after his heroic Labour government had created it.In 1942 what was different from the proto-welfare system created by Lloyd George and (in his Liberal social reformer phase) Churchill before 1914, was the principle of universalism. It is seen by many as threatened by this week's coalition decision to end child benefit for families in which one earner pays more than 40% tax (the better-off 15%) after 2013.The 1911 National Insurance Act embraced compulsory tripartite contributions from employee, employer and the state for the first time, but it explicitly targeted the poorest for unemployment and (means-tested) pensions; it did so in a patchwork of voluntary and state agencies. The old and hated 1834 Poor Law survived as a safety net.Pompous and obsessed as he could be, Beveridge, who had a near-genius for publicity, had worked on reform with Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Between the wars Attlee, Hugh Dalton and Harold Wilson all worked for him. The saintly RH Tawney was his brother-in-law.Shut out of the war effort, Beveridge was fobbed off with postwar social planning. Encouraged by fellow Liberal JM Keynes, among others, in 1942 he brilliantly seized his moment, to the annoyance of Labour politicians such as Ernie Bevin as well as Churchill, who correctly sensed that this civil servant was playing high-stakes politics.Starting with the 1944 Education Act and the 1945 Family Allowance Act – the last act of the wartime coalition – then Labour's crowning glory, the 1946 NHS Act and much else, Beveridge's vision, trimmed for cost on Keynes's advice, slowly came into being.It was built on the wartime prestige of the organising state's victory over Hitler and the high level of social solidarity that shared suffering had (temporarily) created. At that time George Orwell and JB Priestley spoke for Britain more than Evelyn Waugh. Plenty of Tories then backed Beveridge's broad vision, though they balked at the cost and the state-driven model.Despite attacks and reforms, what became known as the "Butskellite consensus" – after Labour's Hugh Gaitskell and Tory Rab Butler – remained core orthodoxy until Margaret Thatcher's election in 1979, when the social democratic model was coming under pressure from a revived free-market assault, individualism and incipient globalisation.In a sense, the 1945 model was a victim of its own success. Extreme poverty had been marginalised, millions educated, deference destroyed, choice and opportunity entrenched in unimaginable ways. But income tax, once a problem only for the middle and upper classes, dug deeper into most pockets. There was a backlash.Churchill's 1909 labour exchanges and much else from 1945-51 did not survive Thatcher's handbagging, but Nye Bevan's NHS did: universal, funded from taxation, free at the point of use for everyone, the "nearest thing the British have to a religion," as former chancellor Nigel Lawson put it.The coalition's attack on universalism by trimming £1bn off the £13bn child benefit bill has been condemned by Labour politicians. But they, too, moved away from the 1945 settlement in their search for better services at lower cost to the taxpayer, just as chancellor Gaitskell did as early as 1951 when he imposed charges for teeth and prescriptions in the new NHS.Gordon Brown's introduction of tax credits in 1998 was an attempt to redistribute scarce resources by targeting them on the neediest – a complex system of means-testing which came to embrace people on £50,000 a year. But some experts saw it as a device by which Labour too would erode or kill child benefit, Barbara Castle's 1975 improvement on family allowance and child tax allowances, paid to mothers.In the election campaign David Cameron defended universalism as a means of locking middle-class taxpayers into the welfare state, bus passes, child benefit and winter fuel allowances as a tangible payback which would help ensure that welfare did not again become "a poor service for poor people".Cameron now invokes the debt crisis to justify the Lib-Con flip-flop. But the coalition is still facing both ways. It has restored the link to earnings of the long-neglected state pension, protected the universalist NHS and – up to a point – schools.In truth free bus passes and winter fuel help for dukes and bankers is hard to justify as "progressive universalism" except in political terms: it locks them in. But it is part of an ongoing debate, as much pragmatic as ideological, which has been going on since the 1940s. It is full of quirks and anomalies. Who now remembers the 11p-a-week tobacco concession paid to smoking pensioners as late as 1957?In its pragmatic, hand-to-mouth way the coalition has scrapped Labour's universal child trust fund, though there is more evidence of "market failure" – people not saving enough – than there is of them not spending money on their kids. Iain Duncan Smith's efforts to spend money helping/cajoling the poor out of chronic unemployment would be familiar to Beveridge, who had a keen Victorian sense of personal responsibility (he was born in 1879). Defending benefits for high earners solely on principle might just have puzzled him more.Child benefitWelfareDavid CameronMichael Whiteguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Woman on fire dies in back garden Detectives investigate the death of a woman who was found alight behind a house in Bradford, West Yorkshire. bbc.co.uk |
Spending cuts will hit families hardest, says IFS Chancellor George Osborne's spending cuts will have a disproportionate impact on families with children, the Institute for Fiscal Studies think tank warned today. telegraph.co.uk |
Economy: known unknowns | Editorial Despite George Osborne's statement that the government will 'stick to the course', a rewrite could still prove necessaryMany a parliamentary speech is made for the sake of form, but it is rare for a minister to stand at the dispatch box and admit they are simply going through the motions. Yesterday George Osborne effectively did that, formally announcing he would "stick to the course" and leave tax and spending well alone, in a statement which fulfilled a legal requirement for a pre-budget report, a requirement which this laissez-faire chancellor is in the process of abolishing.After May's cuts package came June's "emergency" budget and then the spending review, so the country can be grateful to have been spared another spoon of Mr Osborne's bitter medicine. Much of the country will also, it must be admitted, feel relief at the passing of Gordon Brown's insistence on presenting two set pieces of fiscal theatre each and every year, whether or not the circumstances required them. But any hopes that Mr Osborne might lead the Treasury away from Brownian spin are fading. Yesterday's forecasts from the Office for Budget Responsibility – the new body expressly designed to take the politics out of economic prediction – found their way into the weekend press.Mr Osborne seized on the sunnier spots in the OBR's analysis to justify his stance of doing nothing new. A more comprehensive appraisal of the boffins' report would have acknowledged that the somewhat higher growth for this year is the corollary of a more sluggish recovery over the following two. The big reduction in projected public sector redundancies since the summer, meanwhile, has been bought at the price of benefit cuts, cuts which will not merely punish the poorest but also threaten the rest, by draining demand from the economy.Mr Osborne has an unmistakable way of looking satisfied, and his evident contentment with the OBR's verdict was understandable – its broad-brush reiteration of the budget's arithmetic helps in presenting his fiscal plans as set in stone, avoiding the early rewrite that a shift in the numbers would have required. A rewrite, however, could still prove necessary, for this is a world in which stuff happens.The OBR's Robert Chote went out of his way to stress the uncertainties. For all the fiendish complexities, at heart forecasting is the art of the ruler: straight lines reconnect a depressed present with a trend extrapolated from a happier past. Thus business investment – which has sunk like a stone – is now predicted to surge. Perhaps it will. If so, the wider economy may dodge the axe being flung at the state. But perhaps business will falter. If so, Mr Osborne will learn the lesson being absorbed by those early cutters in Dublin whom he once admired. Namely, that writing pain into the start of his story does not guarantee a happy ending.Economic policyGeorge OsborneEconomicsOffice for Budget ResponsibilityConservativesTax and spendingHouse of Commonsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Higher electricity prices on the way amid freezing temperatures Households are being warned to expect higher electricity bills. telegraph.co.uk |