Bread for All review – how Britain is regressing to the early 19th century

an article by Stefan Collini published in the Guardian


St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, in 1939. Before the NHS, many people could not afford even basic medical care. Photograph: Kurt Hutton/Getty Images

Kingsley Wood, the Tory chancellor of the exchequer in the wartime coalition government, grudgingly conceded in 1943 that he would “rather give money for education than throw it down the sink with Sir William Beveridge”. Beveridge had certainly designed a very big sink. His formidably technical 300-page report, Social Insurance and Allied Services, published in 1942, laid out an ambitious system of social security that built on, but went well beyond, the mosaic of services that had grown up piecemeal over the previous half century or more. The report was a surprising bestseller: 100,000 copies were sold in the first four weeks.

The government was reluctant to endorse such a disruptive and expensive scheme, but most public opinion was strongly on Beveridge’s side. In a familiar attempt to scare the electorate, the Daily Telegraph misquoted Beveridge saying that his report was taking the country “half-way to Moscow”. In reality, he was taking it no further east than Whitechapel and Poplar, the social laboratories in which so much late-Victorian and Edwardian thinking about the best means to relieve poverty had been incubated.

Continue reading this fascinating review. The changes happened in my lifetime but I was too young to appreciate them at the time. One thing I do notice though is that the political conservatism that I grew up with is nothing like the Tory Party as it now is.Bread for All: The Origins of the Welfare State is published by Allen Lane. To order a copy for £17 (RRP £20) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

---