The Road to 1945 (and what we can learn)

So The question I'm really thinking about here then, how did all that happen? And this is gonna be quite quick, quite synoptic.

I mean, sort of pulling together various threads, um, 'cause if I tried to kind of qualify everything or go over every possible nuance, we really would be here all day.

I think if we're going to understand the context, it's important to understand that, of course, 1945 doesn't happen in a vacuum.

Uh, the 1945 Labour government comes straight out of the 1940 to '45 wartime government.

I'll explain a bit more about that relationship in a bit.

And it doesn't really mark the beginning of the British welfare state.

I mean, you could trace the beginning of the British welfare state right back to the poor laws passed under the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, which gave a duty of care to local landowners effectively, uh, in regard to their treatment of the poor, the, the orphaned, the widows in their parishes.

You could certainly trace the beginnings of the British welfare state back to the reforms made by the 1906 Liberal government, which introduced things like the old age pension for the first time.

And again, we're not gonna have time to get into all that much detail, but I'm gonna start just by setting the scene a little bit, thinking about, you know, what happens in the early 19th century and what happens between then and the period between World War I and World War II.

Obviously, even before the early 19th century, there are very old traditions according to which society generally assumes that looking after the most needy people, looking after the health of the poor, looking after, uh, the, those who are particularly socially vulnerable has to be somebody's job.

In the Middle Ages, it's basically the job of the church, in particular the, the monasteries.

From the 16th century to the early 19th century, it's basically the job of the local landowners in particular areas, who are also the kind of people who are gonna become judges.

They're gonna effectively enforce the law.

They're basically the local ruling class and w- the local governing class, and it's generally assumed that they have some sort of direct responsibility for ensuring that n- as far as possible, nobody within their jurisdictions starves.

The early 19th century basically sees a big pushback against that as the rising commercial capitalist class, uh, finds itself, uh, not really inclined to fulfill those historic obligations for a whole variety of reasons, uh, partly ideological reasons, partly material reasons, the fact that there are many, many more poor people than there used to be by that point, and funding them is expensive.

And your, you know, your, your go-getting early Victorian or early 19th century pre-Victorian business person generally thinks of themselves as being in a much more precarious situation than does your traditional country squire.

And so they're more inclined to hoard their money and look for excuses not to have to share it with their poorer neighbors.

For a whole bunch of reasons, uh, the Elizabethan poor laws get abolished.

They get replaced with the hideous regime of workhouses according to which the poor, especially the urban poor, but not only the urban poor actually, uh, basically had to go live in work prisons if they didn't want to starve.

And o- then over the course of the 19th century, that comes to be seen as increasingly unacceptable, and we start to move towards a situation by the early 20th century where people think basically you need the state to be making some kind of minimal provision for the most vulnerable people.

It's worth thinking about, well, what are some of the, the key social changes that take place over the course of the 19th century? Well, not surprisingly, the key one I'm gonna focus on is changing class relations.

Uh, in really crude Marxian terms, this is the era when the social group which Marx calls the bourgeoisie, uh, which really just means people who live in suburbs at the time, uh, the capitalist class, the commercial class, is becoming more and more powerful and is effectively displacing the traditional authority of the nobility and the greater gentry, in other words, the people whose social authority derives principle, principally from land ownership.

Um, the, the way in which that displacement takes place is quite complicated.

I mean, the classic model that we often have in our minds is that derived from, say, the experience of the French Revolution or maybe the early stages of the English Revolution in the 1640s, 1650s, whereby basically a bunch of, um, you know, a bunch of people who would have been thought of as sort of occupying middle ranks in society, uh, find themselves with enough wealth and enough self-organization that they are able to challenge the traditional aristocracy and even the monarchy for, you know, their traditional authority.

Really, that's partly what happens sometimes, but it would also be accurate to say that a lot of what happens in Britain over the course of the 17th, 18th, 19th century is really traditional landowners turning themselves into capitalists as they realize that, uh, they can make significantly more money that way than they can just collecting their old feudal rents.