The British Welfare State & Civil Society: Reimaging the ‘Golden Age’, 1945-70s

• In Event: The Development of Welfare States and Social Policy

Abstract

This paper engages critically with the historical state quo ante suggested by the conference themes: ‘retrenchment, renovation and reimagination’. Across the West/Global North a 'rise-and-fall' narrative posits a post-1945 'golden age' (les Trente Glorieuses). Marked by comparative rapid economic growth and falling inequality, these years are widely characterized as an ‘era’ of coherent governance through rational state bureaucracy, alongside consolidating mass national democracy and creation of welfare states.

A stylized British Welfare State history frames this conventional account. Britain was retrospectively reimagined as becoming the 'world's first welfare state' in 1945. This paper recovers complex, repeated (re)imaginings of the state, civil society and citizenship over the three decades after 1945. It analyses the renovation and redesign of social policy and related institutional architectures of the British state, critically, through a novel civil society lens across these years. The continuities and changes involved encompassed retrenchment as well as expansion. The analysis develops in three main stages, I: 1) sketch an intellectual history of the British welfare state and then address interlinked themes of 2) state-civil society and 3) centre-periphery relations. Across these three themes I interrogate and revise the idealised account.

Elements of an anachronistic orthodoxy set in relatively early (in, eg, Briggs 1961). Re-readings of T.H. Marshall’s talismanic 1949 ‘Citizenship and Social Class’ essay entrenched this orthodoxy. His ‘social citizenship’ is widely taken as the ‘core idea of a welfare state’, as the essay’s main ‘proposition’ (Esping-Andersen 1990: 21). Yet Marshall only uses the phrase ‘welfare state’ once in this essay, and not while discussing postwar WW2 reforms. His passing reference, in discussing the late 19th century extension of political rights, revealed something of how Marshall understood the temporality of (re)imagining the state and society: ‘The planned society and the welfare state had not yet risen over the horizon or come within view of the practical politician.’ He went on to publish an epitaph to the welfare state as early as 1961, identifying the rise of the affluent society as the cause of its demise. This intellectual history also embraces Hayek, and his debates with various radical lawyers (see Friedmann 1951). Hayek’s influential Road to Serfdom (1944) focused on economic planning rather than the welfare state per se. While still critical of some welfare statist proposals, the main thrust of his argument in The Constitution of Liberty (1960) is that displacement of arguments for socialism by those for the welfare state amounted to a victory for his vision of liberty.

The debate over welfare, the state and civil society was not encapsulated within the academy: it also animated public debate and the internal discussions of organised civil society. 'Voluntary action' (Beveridge 1947) by organised civil society in core social service domains continued throughout the postwar period. Though often hailed as the 'father' of the British welfare state, Beveridge repudiated that term. He described something like a 'co-creation' of social service marked by a 'perpetually moving frontier' between statutory and voluntary action. The ‘voluntary sector’s’ continuing social service role has received some s scholarly attention (Brenton 1985, Findlayson 1994), while two official anniversary histories record the role of the key London-based organisation known now as the National Council for Voluntary Organisations/NCVO (Brasnett 1969, Davis Smith 2019). Here, I draw on evidence from the previously unused archives of the NCVO’s sibling organisations for Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. I trace continuities and changes, new departures, retrenchment and ideational recycling as the imagine and reimagine the state and civil society through their internal debates from the 1940s. They adjusted to the state’s gradual displacement of voluntarism in social work, youth services and in relation to ‘disability’ between 1945 and the 70s.

Retrieving the neglected histories of voluntary action, third, casts new light on the UK's multi-national character. Conventional wisdom treats welfare provision as centralizing, while helping to consolidate a singular ‘British’ national identity. In fact, the state remained somewhat devolved, either politically (Northern Ireland) or administratively (Scotland and, to some degree, Wales). I put the conventional view in dialogue with a neglected post-war history of the consolidating multi-national structure for voluntary action. That structure eerily prefigured the architecture of democratic, sub-state devolution created after 1997. Distinct sub-state identities remained powerful throughout these decades. Though not in Northern Ireland, these identities were clearly understood as national in Scotland and Wales.

Author

• Daniel Wincott, Cardiff University