The Evolution of the British Welfare State

Product Information

During the 18th century, the Poor Law continued to operate. In the 17th century, there were some workhouses where the poor were housed but where they were made to work. They became much more common in the 18th century 19th Century Poor Law Pensions and unemployment benefits were made more generous in 1928 and in 1930. In 1931 unemployment benefit was cut by 10% but it was restored in 1934. Furthermore, prices continued to fall during the 1930s. By 1935 a man on the ‘dole’ was about as well off as a skilled worker in 1905, a measure of how much living standards had risen. Ocr tesseract 4.1.1 Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 1.0000 Ocr_module_version 0.0.10 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA-WL-0000133 Openlibrary_edition

An established introductory textbook that provides students with a full overview of British social policy and social ideas since the late 18th century. Derek Fraser's authoritative account is the essential starting point for anyone learning about how and why Britain created the first Welfare State, and its development into the 21st century.This is an ideal core text for dedicated modules on the history of British social policy or the British welfare state - or a supplementary text for broader modules on modern British history or British political history - which may be offered at all levels of an undergraduate history, politics or sociology degree. In addition it is a crucial resource for students who may be studying the history of the British welfare state for the first time as part of a taught postgraduate degree in British history, politics or social policy.New to this Edition:- Revised and updated throughout in light of the latest research and historiographical debates- Brings the story right up to the present day, now including discussion of the Coalition and Theresa May's early Prime Ministership- Features a new overview conclusion, identifying key issues in modern British social history Contents The 1948 National Health Act, aimed at achieving that very objective, and established for the first time a national minimum. For the unfortunate people made to enter workhouses, life was made as unpleasant as possible. Married couples were separated and children over 7 were separated from their parents. The inmates were made to do hard work like breaking stones to make roads or breaking bones to make fertilizer.Thus far, much of scholarly endeavor has been either about welfare state expansion or welfare state retrenchment, and accordingly the resilience of welfare states in relation to change. More recently, though, a number of research projects have begun to examine the new risk configurations that have emerged in the transition to postindustrial societies and that in turn have challenged welfare state arrangements that were established in the context of old, traditional risk contexts of industrial societies (Taylor-Gooby 2004; Bonoli 2005; Armingeon and Bonoli 2006). Numerous risk categories peculiar to postindustrial restructuring make an entry (Esping-Andersen 1999). Yet the central driving force of this postindustrial change is the notable rise in the international mobility of capital, which has an unprecedented impact on the welfare state. Swank has argued that Marxists, neoliberals, political scientists, economists, and popular analysts utilize “nearly identical reasoning to argue that the globalization of capital markets has effectively increased the power of capital over governments that seek to expand or maintain relatively high levels of social protection and taxation” ( 2001:203). Those subscribing to such views believe that the high-spending welfare regimes are coming under sustained pressure to reduce the size and cost of their welfare programs because failure to make “domestic investment conditions attractive to internationally mobile capital” (Evans and Cerny 2003:55) will lead to capital flight from their economies. Drawing from the international relations literature, Evans and Cerny ( 2003) argue that the era of postindustrialism is remarkably different from the period that preceded it. In the postwar boom period, social policy was a relatively autonomous field of policy, a domestic issue that was unimpeded by wider economic concerns and so favorable to continual increases in state spending on welfare state activity. Yet “globalization has undermined these conditions.” Hence they anticipate the emergence of the “competition state,” which is “the successor to the welfare state, incorporating many of its features but reshaping them, sometimes quite drastically, to fit a globalizing world” ( 2003:20, 24). Brings the story right up to the present day, now including discussion of the Coalition and Theresa May's early Prime Ministership

The biblical view of human nature - its fallen status, yet conceived to be redeemed - was lost sight of in left-wing intellectual circles by the 1960s. Welfare was by them seen primarily as an act of altruism and this paternalistic view was advanced behind the cover of politically correct statements, so much so that even the Right lost the confidence to mouth, let alone act on, the broader, age-old understanding of mankind.An increasingly interdependent world economy has also led many scholars to anticipate a significant degree of convergence (Scharpf 1991; Mishra 1996; Greider 1997; Martin and Schumann 1997; Gray 2002). Indeed, many countries have embraced the free market policy prescription as a solution to a range of policy problems, and some scholars predict a long-run decline – a race to the bottom – of the welfare state (Rodrik 1997; Allard and Danzir 2000) or a future of “permanent austerity” (P. Pierson 2001b:456). On the other hand, many studies of welfare state trajectories during the 1990s and the early years of the twenty-first century indicate that various welfare states respond differently to more or less similar sets of challenges, thereby negating a second coming of convergence thesis. The key to this divergence has been the politics of reform in each country, which has produced very different results and reform paths (Esping-Andersen 1999; Scharpf and Schmidt 2000a; 2000b; Huber and Stephens 2001; P. Pierson 2001a). The resulting paralysis of both will and mind resulted in little concern for how different types of welfare (insurance or means-tested) affected behaviour; and to raise the question of fraud was to be automatically deemed politically unbalanced. 'Thinking the unthinkable' was the task for Labour's final years in opposition before 1997, and was part of the strategy of making Labour electable. It was never meant to be an activity undertaken in government. In 1911 the National Insurance Act was passed. All employers and employees made contributions to a fund. If a worker was ill he was entitled to free treatment by a doctor. (Normally you had to pay and it was expensive). If he could not work because of illness the worker was given a small amount of money to live on. However, his family was not entitled to free medical treatment.

A significant advance has been made in theorizing welfare state development. Yet much of early work tends to focus on finding one single powerful causal force within the well-established procedures and assumptions which are based on conceptions of linearity. Instead, the second generation of welfare state research began to identify salient interaction effects of multiple factors. In his early work, Esping-Andersen ( 1985), one of the most prominent adherents of the “working-class mobilization theory,” presented a classic formulation that distinguished social democratic models from others. Yet later, in his masterwork (Esping-Andersen 1990), he refined and significantly changed this duality, abandoning an ideal mode of one extreme or the other, and identified three separate routes of welfare state instead. The poor called the new workhouses ‘Bastilles’ (after the infamous prison in Paris) and they caused much bitterness. However, as the century went on the workhouses gradually became more humane. The Modern Welfare StateThis neo-Marxist understanding of welfare state development is not uniform, however: there are at least three distinctive theoretical propositions within it. To start with, instrumentalists heavily criticize the core claim of pluralists that the state plays the role of neutral broker in mediating conflicts between various interests. Rather, for them, the state plays an instrumental role only to serve the capitalist’s interests. Miliband argues that “the intervention of the state is always and necessarily partisan: as a class state, it always intervenes for the purpose of maintaining the existing system of domination, even where it intervenes to mitigate the harness of that system of domination” ( 1977:91). It is the capitalist who monopolizes economic organizations, exercises strong influence on political organizations, and determines social provision depending on the necessity for capital accumulation. Hence welfare reforms basically function as a form of social control rather than of social investment (Piven and Cloward 1971; Ginsburg 1979; Miliband 1991). Neither the basic structure of capitalist society nor the status, income, and political power of those who have already been influential are affected by social policy. Clearly, this line of reasoning carries some compelling elements, not least because it offers a narrative that broadly fits with the historical path of development of the nations to which it was applied. Nonetheless, the core proposition of this logic of industrialism has been subject to a number of criticisms. First, as is the case with the transnational diffusion literature that predicts the sequence within which welfare programs are adopted but not their form (e.g., Abbott and DeViney 1992), it oversimplifies the process of policy development and ignores the important structural variations in the organizational and institutional features of welfare states.