The Welfare State

As the Second World War drew to a close discontented British troops and workers were determined not to return to the conditions of the 1930s.

As author John Gorman emphasised in his work ‘To Build Jerusalem’ -

“For the labour movement the war strengthened the commitment of ‘no return to the thirties’. After the experience of fighting from Dunkirk to Berlin, and in deserts and jungles, there was a resolve to refuse to return to a Britain of class privilege, private wealth and public squalor”.

The government’s response to this unrest was the Beveridge Report, also known as ‘Social Insurance and Allied Services’, published in 1942, which formed the basis for establishing the Welfare State and National Health Service after WW2.


The Report claimed “It is, first and foremost, a plan of insurance - of giving in return for contributions benefits up to subsistence level, as of right and without means test, so that individuals may build freely upon it.”

To this end the report’s principle proposed change was “Unification of social insurance in respect of contributions, that is to say, enabling each insured person to obtain all benefits by a single weekly contribution on a single document.”

(Above quotations from the Beveridge Report November 1942).


This weekly National Insurance contribution would serve as access to benefits such as free health care, unemployment pay and a State pension upon retirement and thereby a comprehensive system covering people ‘from cradle to grave’.

By any objective assessment this was an historic gain for the population of Britain.


The Beveridge report was at the time a culmination of the welfare policies that had been adopted previously. The report acknowledges for example, the Poor Law, the Workmen’s Compensation Act 1897, the Pensions Act passed in 1908, the Unemployment Act of 1934.

This move for more State intervention in welfare and social policy grew during the Second World War; free school milk and meals were introduced for example, and apart from initiating the Beveridge Report the government introduced white papers on education and a national health service. These developments materialised in the Education Act of 1944 which provided free secondary education for all and in the reforms introduced by the Clement Attlee led Labour government after the war, with the passing of the National Insurance Act and the NHS Act.


Since the 1980s we have seen successive governments attempt to roll back these historic gains, culminating today in the attempt by the current coalition government to end welfare and social provision completely.


Trade unions, which represent millions of workers, must not only secure the interests of workers at their place of employment but must see it as their duty to also protect and defend all the past gains, made at great sacrifice, by our ancestors.


Ends.