Contents

History of the welfare state in the United Kingdom

Liberal reforms 1908-1914

The Liberal Party under Henry Campbell-Bannerman rallied voters around the traditional platform of free trade and land reform and led them to the greatest electoral victory in Liberal Party history.^[1] Key reformers included H. H. Asquith the prime minister from 1908; David Lloyd GeorgeasChancellor of the Exchequer and Winston Churchill at the Board of Trade and as Home Secretary. They focused on the "People's Budget" of 1909 that proposed to fund expanded social welfare programmes with new taxes on land and high incomes. It was blocked by the Conservative-dominated House of Lords, but eventually became law in April 1910.

Before 1906 the Liberals favored "freedom from", with minimal government regulation and taxes, as preached by William E. Gladstone. That now changed as half of the Liberal MPs elected in 1906 were supportive of the "new liberalism". It meant "freedom from" unhappy csocial and economic constraints. It advocated government action to improve people's lives.^[2]

Liberals in 1906–1911 passed major legislation designed to reform politics and society, such as the regulation of working hours, National Insurance and the beginnings of the welfare state, as well as curtailing the power of the House of Lords. Women's suffrage was not on the Liberal agenda.^[3] There were numerous major reforms helping labour, typified by the Trade Boards Act 1909 that set minimum wages in certain trades with the history of "sweated" or "sweatshop" rates of especially low wages, because of surplus of available workers, the presence of women workers, or the lack of skills.^[4]

At first it applied to four industries: chain-making, ready-made tailoring, paper-box making, and the machine-made lace and finishing trade.^[4] It was later expanded to coal mining and then to other industries with preponderance of unskilled manual labour by the Trade Boards Act 1918. Under the leadership of David Lloyd George Liberals extended minimum wages to farm workers.^[5]

Labour reforms 194-1950

Wartime proposals

National Health Service Act

The National Health Service Act 1946 (9 & 10 Geo. 6. c. 81) came into effect on 5 July 1948 and created the National Health ServiceinEngland and Wales thus being the first implementation of the Beveridge model. Though the title 'National Health Service' implies a single health service for the United Kingdom, in reality one NHS was created for England and Wales accountable to the Secretary of State for Health, with a separate NHS created for Scotland accountable to the Secretary of State for Scotland by the passage of the National Health Service (Scotland) Act 1947. Similar health services in Northern Ireland were created by the Northern Ireland Parliament through the Health Services Act (Northern Ireland) 1948.

The whole Act was replaced by the National Health Service Act 1977,^[6] which itself is now superseded by the National Health Service Act 2006 and the Health and Social Care Act 2012.

See also

• Liberal welfare reforms
• Welfare state in the United Kingdom

Notes

Further reading

• Abel-Smith, Brian. "The Beveridge Report: Its origins" International Social Security Review 45#1 (1992) 5–16. online
• Bruce, Maurice. The Coming of the Welfare State (1966) online

• Emy, Hugh Vincent. Liberals, Radicals and Social Politics 1892-1914 (Cambridge UP, 1973) online.

• Fraser, Derek. The evolution of the British welfare state: a history of social policy since the Industrial Revolution (2nd ed. 1984).
• Gilbert, Bentley B. The Evolution Of National Insurance In Great Britain: The Origins of the Welfare State (1966). online
• Gilbert, Bentley B. "Winston Churchill versus the Webbs: The origins of British unemployment insurance." American Historical Review 71.3 (1966): 846-862. online
• Harris, Bernard. The origins of the British welfare state: social welfare in England and Wales, 1800–1945 (Palgrave, 2004).
• Harris, Jose.『Political thought and the welfare state 1870–1940: an intellectual framework for British social policy.』Past & Present 135.1 (1992): 116-141. online

• Harris, Jose. Unemployment and Politics: A Study in English Social Policy, 1886-1914 (1972)
• Hay, Roy.『Employers and social policy in Britain: The evolution of welfare legislation, 1905–14.』Social History 2.4 (1977): 435–55.
• Hay, James Roy. Origins of the Liberal Welfare Reforms, 1906–14 (1975) 78pp full text online
• Hellwig, Timothy T. "The origins of unemployment insurance in Britain: A cross-class alliance approach." Social Science History 29.1 (2005): 107-136. online
• Hill, Michael J. The welfare state in Britain : a political history since 1945 (1993) online
• Hudson, John, et al.『Exploring public attitudes to welfare over the Longue Durée: Re‐examination of survey evidence from Beveridge, Beatlemania, Blair and beyond.』Social Policy & Administration 50.6 (2016): 691-711. online
• Jones, Margaret, and Rodney Lowe, eds. From Beveridge to Blair: the first fifty years of Britain's welfare state 1948-98 (Manchester UP, 2002). online
• Katselidis, Ioannis A. "Unemployment and Labour Market Policy in British Economic Thought during the Late Victorian and Edwardian Era (1885-1914)." History of economic ideas 24#1 (2016): 57-82.
• Kelso, Patrick Winston. "Winston Churchill and Social Reform." (2006) online.
• Laybourn Keith. The Evolution of British Social Policy and the Welfare State, c. 1800–1993 (Keele University Press. 1995). online
• Levine-Clark, Marjorie. Unemployment, Welfare, and Masculine Citizenship: So Much Honest Poverty in Britain, 1870–1930 (Springer, 2015).
• Lowe, Rodney. "The Second World War, consensus, and the foundation of the welfare state." Twentieth Century British History 1.2 (1990): 152-182.
• Marshall, T. H.Social policy in the twentieth century. (5th ed. Unwin Hyman, 1985) online
• Matsunaga, Tomoari. "The Origins of Unemployment Insurance in Edwardian Britain." Journal of Policy History 29.4 (2017): 614-639.
• Melling, Joseph. "Welfare capitalism and the origins of welfare states: British industry, workplace welfare and social reform, c. 1870–1914", Social History (1992), 17:3, pp.453-478, online
• Mommsen, Wolfgang J., and Wolfgang Mock, eds. The emergence of the welfare state in Britain and Germany, 1850–1950 (Taylor & Francis, 1981).
• Morgan, Kenneth O. Labour in power, 1945-1951 (1984) online. esp. pp. 142–187.
• Sullivan, Michael. The development of the British welfare state (1996).
• Thane, Pat.『The working class and state 'welfare' in Britain, 1880–1914.』The Historical Journal 27.4 (1984): 877-900. online

• Weiler, Peter. The New Liberalism: Liberal Social Theory in Great Britain, 1889–1914 (Routledge, 2016).
• Welshman John. Underclass: A History of the Excluded, 1880–2000 (2006) excerpt
• Whiteside, Noel. "The Beveridge Report and Its Implementation: a Revolutionary Project?" Histoire@Politique 2014#3 (n° 24), pp.24–37. DOI 10.3917/hp.024.0024

Historiography

• Laybourn, Keith.『Social Welfare: Public and Private, 1900–1939.』in A Companion to Early Twentieth‐Century Britain ed. by Chris Wrigley, (2003) pp: 373–387.

• Schneer, Jonathan. "British Labour and the Mandate of 1945." International Labor and Working-Class History 28 (1985): 56-68. online

Primary sources

• Morgan, Kenneth O., ed. The Age of Lloyd George (1971)

External links

• Text of the Beveridge Report
• The Welfare State – Never Ending Reform Brief history of the Welfare State by Frank Field (BBC website)