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Beveridge did not formally oppose married women working. Indeed, he proposed benefits for those who did through a special lower rate of national insurance contribution which they had the choice of paying – although it produced lower unemployment and disability benefits as it was assumed that the husband would already be providing a home to live in. But work by married women was likely to be ‘intermittent’, Beveridge believed, and he did not see the income from it as a crucial part of the household’s financial survival. All this stemmed from his view that benefits should provide only a basic income and that man and wife were ‘a team’. Thus the woman’s pension, and her entitlement to benefit during her husband’s unemployment and disability, came from her share in that partnership. This even stretched to the old age pension being notionally cast as a pension for a couple that was reduced for single people, rather than being seen as a single person’s pension to which extra was added for a dependant. Beveridge disliked the concept of wives as dependants, and he argued that his proposals ended that. The description ‘adult dependant’, he said, should be reserved ‘for one who is dependent on an insured person but is not the wife of that person’.²³

His concept of the married woman’s role – and crucially his rhetorical recognition that she derived rights from her ‘vital unpaid service’²⁴ – proved in tune with the times. Mass Observation recorded 70 per cent of women giving the report, with its recognition of the value of unpaid women’s work, unqualified support.²⁵ Some did see through the rhetoric, recognising that the improvements Beveridge’s proposals undoubtedly brought did not fundamentally change the married woman’s position. Elizabeth Abbott and Katherine Bombas, for example, in a 1943 pamphlet for the Women’s Freedom League, argued that ‘the actual proposals … leave her as before, a dependant and not a partner’.²⁶

In fact the framework Beveridge had chosen – a work-based scheme, founded on employee contributions – inevitably left women who did not work dependent on their husbands’ contributions. The other failures of the scheme included its inability to deal adequately with the large post-war rise in single parenthood, divorce and separation, but to blame Beveridge for that is a little like blaming medieval armourers for not foreseeing the effects of gunpowder. In 1938 there were just 10,000 divorce petitions. By 1945 the number had increased two and a half times, but still only to 25,000²⁷ – a tiny fraction of their twentieth century peak of 183,000 in 1995.

Disability, too, presented difficulties. For those injured at work a separate industrial injuries scheme could be created. And for those not injured at work who simply became disabled, unemployment benefit was available if they had paid sufficient contributions. Others, however, would have to fall back on means-tested national assistance and local authority services. Carers do not feature in the report, in part because if married women are not expected in the main to work, they are there for other ‘vital duties’. And Beveridge could not have foreseen the extent to which medical science would preserve life among many more people who acquired their disability at birth or in childhood and so never had the chance of qualifying for non-means-tested benefits through insurance contributions.

If these were the chief issues Beveridge failed to resolve – issues that are with us still – his report also reflects vividly the conflicting goals that ran through the debates about social security both before and after its publication. Throughout, he attempted to balance rights with duties, incentives against security, and individualism against collectivism. Thus he wanted as far as possible to have benefits paid as of right, without the means-tests which he said made help available ‘only on terms which make men unwilling to have recourse to it’.²⁸ But he balanced that with the duty of having to contribute.

Benefit in return for contributions, rather than free allowances from the State, is what the people of Britain desire. This desire is shown both by the established popularity of compulsory insurance and by the phenomenal growth of voluntary insurance against sickness, against death and for endowment, and most recently for hospital treatment. It is shown in another way by the strength of popular objection to any kind of means test. This objection springs not so much from a desire to get something for nothing, as from resentment at a provision which appears to penalise what people have come to regard as the duty and pleasure of thrift, of putting pennies away for a rainy day. Management of one’s income is an essential element of a citizen’s freedom. Payment of a substantial part of the cost of benefit as a contribution irrespective of the means of the contributor is the firm basis of a claim to benefit irrespective of means.²⁹

There was another reason why Beveridge went for an insurance system rather than a tax-based one. In the 1940s liability for income tax started much higher up the income scale than it does now. Many in the working class did not pay. As late as 1949 a single man did not start paying income tax until he was earning 40 per cent of average manual wages, while a married man with two children under eleven had to earn fractionally above average manual earnings to pay any income tax at all. Over most of the next fifty years, under governments of all colours, the income tax threshold fell as government spending – not just on the welfare state – expanded. By 1992, the equivalent percentages were down to below 25 per cent and 29 per cent respectively.³⁰ It is one factor that led lower earners progressively to question the value of the welfare state.

Beveridge was clear that he did not want a ‘Santa Claus’ state which appeared to give something for nothing, and in the 1940s a tax-based social security system would have been chiefly paid for by business, the then much smaller middle class, and those above them. What the less well paid did already have to find, however, were the existing national insurance contributions for the health and unemployment schemes. Unlike income tax, they were used to paying these. Indeed, Beveridge went to some lengths to suggest, with questionable accuracy, that the contributions he proposed amounted to ‘materially’ less in aggregate than the sums already paid out for national insurance contributions, for voluntary policies covering sickness, death and endowment, for hospital treatment policies and for medical fees.³¹ It was another reason why he wanted ‘Benefit in return for contributions, rather than free contributions from the State’. In suitably Thatcherite terms, he also argued that citizens ‘should have a motive to support measures for economic administration’ and ‘should not be taught to regard the State as the dispenser of gifts for which no one needs pay’.³²

Furthermore, Beveridge worried about incentives to work and to save and to encourage people to take responsibility for their own lives. ‘The State in organising security should not stifle incentive, opportunity, responsibility; in establishing a national minimum, it should leave room and encouragement for voluntary action by each individual to provide more than the minimum for himself and his family.’³³ Indeed, in harsher words later in the report, he said that ‘to give by compulsory insurance more than is needed for subsistence is an unnecessary interference with individual responsibilities’.³⁴

Thus his whole scheme was built on a minimum income to provide subsistence, not on the model followed in most of Europe of providing earnings-related benefits. What Beveridge built was a platform on which everyone could stand, with a safety net below it in the form of means-tested national assistance for those who lacked the contributions to qualify. It was, however, a platform down to which anybody who was slightly better off fell if they became unemployed or disabled. He did not, as the continental countries did, attempt to build a system which maintained the individual’s economic place in society, if only for a time. It was to be a minimalist, not a maximalist provision, one that left in Beveridge’s word ‘room’ – in practice incentives – for those who could afford it to provide for themselves over and above the state scheme.

In addition, this minimum provision was to be based on flat-rate contributions in return for flat-rate benefits. Critics have since divined in this the basic flaw in Beveridge’s grand design. He wanted to provide something that took people off means-tested benefits. But because he pitched his insurance benefits at subsistence level – a level that would only meet ‘reasonable human needs’ and even then only for ‘normal’ cases – the amount paid was little different from the sums provided by the safety net of means-tested national assistance. That had to be the case, unless those on national assistance were to be given less than enough to live on – too little to prevent Want. As a result, there was little in financial terms to make national insurance benefits more attractive. Their attraction lay in their being paid by right, without a means-test.

On top of that, however, Beveridge wanted not just flat-rate benefits, but flat-rate contributions in which everyone paid the same for the same cover. That meant the contributions had to be pitched low enough to be affordable by the low-paid. Such contributions, however, were simply not able to generate enough cash to pay benefits at well above the national assistance rates without either a large Exchequer subsidy, which did not appear politically achievable, or much heavier contributions from employers, which would simply be passed on in either lower wages or higher prices. In this way, the very solidarity Beveridge sought – everyone paying the same in return for the same benefit – helped undermine his aim of abolishing Want.

Beveridge’s insistence on a minimum also came about because the man who once believed the unemployed needed the ‘whip of starvation’ to ensure economic advance,³⁵ still worried about work incentives. He in fact favoured, without listing it in his recommendations, a minimum wage. But at the same time he believed that ‘the gap between income during earning and during interruption of earning should be as large as possible for every man.’³⁶ Again, this reinforced the argument for a minimum standard of benefit.

In line with his attempt to balance rights with duties, but also to keep people in touch with work, he recommended both a training benefit and arrangements that would be recognised by those who in the 1980s and 1990s called for American-style Workfare for the unemployed. He did so, however, in a context which was not implemented. For Beveridge recommended that unemployment benefit should be paid without time limit, not just for the first six months as was the case before he reported, nor for the twelve months that was actually implemented in 1948. To reduce someone’s income just because they had been out of work for a certain period was ‘wrong in principle’, Beveridge said.³⁷ Most men would rather work than be idle. But the danger of providing adequate benefits indefinitely was that men ‘may settle down to them’, adding that ‘complete idleness, even on an income, demoralises’. Thus he said men and women should be ‘required as a condition of benefit to attend a work or training centre’ after six months, the requirement arriving earlier in times of good employment and later in times of high unemployment. The aim would be twofold: to prevent ‘habituation to idleness’ but also ‘as a means of improving capacity for earning’. There was a dear precursor here for the gradual tightening of entitlement to benefit and the requirement for training and Re-start programmes that Lord Young, Patrick Jenkin and their successors were to introduce in the 1980s and which Labour was to adopt with far greater vigour at the turn of the century. Attaching such conditions to benefit, Beveridge also noted, would unmask malingerers, and those claiming benefit while working.

For young persons, Beveridge said, ‘who have not yet the habit of continuous work the period [before training] should be shorter; for boys and girls there should ideally be no unconditional benefit at all; their enforced abstention from work should be made an occasion for further training’.³⁸ Neither of these work and training requirements was implemented: the full employment (indeed, labour shortages) of the 1940s and 1950s made them seem unnecessary. The recommendation that the young should be denied unconditional benefit would have to wait until the days of John Moore and Lord Young forty-five years later, with disastrous results for some.

In his report Beveridge attempted to reconcile a new universalism that did indeed stretch from the cradle to the grave – from maternity grant to funeral grant by way of all-in insurance – with incentives to work, to save and to take individual responsibility, while at the same time checking abuse. In so doing he redefined the social security debate, but also defined the battleground as it has been fought over ever since. The left would ever after be able to stress the universalism of Beveridge and his desire to end poverty through all standing together to help each other. The right would look at his insistence on leaving room for private initiative; that the state should not provide all, but only a basic minimum, and then in return for clear-cut duties. Each, over time, would issue calls to go ‘Back to Beveridge’: to which bit of Beveridge would depend on who was doing the calling.

The plan was indeed unconsciously eclectic in many of its underlying ideas. It contained bits of Socialism and bits of Conservatism in its liberal mix. The way in which its vision yoked together competing ideas into what appeared to be a coherent whole helps explain why it proved in the end acceptable to all political parties: it contained something for everyone. The flaws in its design, however, ensured there can never, in any pure sense, be a return to Beveridge. That is not just because he failed to design that unattainable goal, an ideal system. The rest of Europe, while taking in the main a different road from Beveridge’s very British revolution, equally failed to design fault-free systems. Their route (generally earnings-related benefits linked to earnings-related contributions, often run locally or independently of central government and often through bodies more like friendly societies than the state) also ran into difficulties. Any social security system must generate conflicts between individual and collective responsibilities, between rights and duties, between incentives and security of income. It may never be got right once and for all; the balance will endlessly shift. And it was on to such shifting sands that Beveridge’s report was launched. Before it came into effect, however, a general election had to be held.

Precisely how and why Labour won its unexpected landslide in 1945, producing the first ever majority Labour Government is outside the scope of this book,³⁹ but three quotations can explain it for present purposes. The first is from Lord Hailsham, recalling a conversation he had with a French officer in the Lebanon as early in the war as 1942, before he even returned for the Beveridge debate. The Frenchman remarked that it would be difficult after the war to avoid socialism.

‘Au contraire,’ said I, ‘il sera impossible.’

‘Pourquoi?’

‘Parce qu’il est déjá arrivé.’ In this I was not far wrong.⁴⁰

The second source is Churchill to Lord Moran: ‘I am worried about this damn election. I have no message for them now.’⁴¹ At Walthamstow, near the end of the campaign, his worries were confirmed as for once he was booed into silence by a 25,000-strong crowd demanding ‘What about jobs?’ and ‘What about houses?’⁴²

The third quotation is also from Hailsham: ‘Again and again during the 1945 elections I was greeted with voters who exclaimed to me absurdly: “We want Winston as Prime Minister, but a Labour government.” When I explained patiently that that was the one thing they could not have, they were wont to reply: “But this is a free country, isn’t it? I thought we could vote for who we want.”‘⁴³

While the electorate might have trusted Winston, they chose, with memories of the 1930s still fresh, not to trust the Tories with the reconstruction of Britain, a project that involved much more than just Beveridge and his five giants. Before Labour took power, however, the foundations of post-war education – that most political of all the arms of the welfare state – had been laid.

PART II

THE AGE OF OPTIMISM

1942–51

CHAPTER 4

Butler – Education

Upon the education of the people of this country the fate of this country depends.

Disraeli, quoted by R. A. Butler in frontispiece of the 1943 White Paper Educational Reconstruction

We are not likely to see another dissolution of the monasteries.

Professor H. C. Barnard, writing in 1947 on the public schools

EDUCATION is the most political of all subjects, for it is firmly about the future. It defines the sort of society people want to see. At one extreme, for those who believe that the next generation should be more equal than the present one, the demand is for equal access to equally good education for all – although furious arguments can then follow about what is meant at which stage of a child’s life by ‘equal access’ and ‘good’, given wide variations in home background, income, aspirations and ability. At the other is a belief that there will always be inequalities and that it is better to organise for that reality, selecting out the high fliers to ensure that they do fly high and are thus able to support the mass for whom it might be safer all round if expectations were not too greatly raised. Education locks into a host of other issues. Should society be culturally or industrially equipped? Should important cultural, religious and economic differences between particular groups be sustained or suppressed? Should extra resources go into helping the least able, boosting the average or ensuring that the brightest are fully stretched? Should the ultimate aim of education be wealth creation, or should it simply be provided in its own right and for its own sake, to free people for the richer enjoyment of life through the knowledge, skills and concepts instilled?

Not all these conflicting objectives are necessarily incompatible all the time, but they do ensure that education is deeply political in the broadest, and far from purely party, sense. How it should be organised, what should be taught, how it should be taught, to whom and for what purpose, were to become some of the most closely fought issues of the modern welfare state. There is a certain irony, therefore, in the fact that education was the first of the five giants to be reformed, and reformed by a Conservative. In July 1941, R. A. (‘Rab’) Butler went to Downing Street to be appointed President of the Board of Education. His own account sets the scene:

The PM saw me after his afternoon nap and was audibly purring like a great tiger. He said, ‘You have been in the House [of Commons] for 15 years and it is time you were promoted.’ I said I had only been there for 12 years but he waved this aside. He said, ‘You have been in the Government for the best part of that time [Butler was currently in the Foreign Office] and I want you to go to the Board of Education. I think you can leave your mark there. You will be independent. Besides,’ he said with rising fervour, ‘you will be in the war. You will move poor children from here to here,’ and he lifted up and evacuated imaginary children from one side of his blotting pad to the other; ‘this will be very difficult.’ He went on: ‘I am too old now to think you can improve people’s natures.’ He looked at me pityingly and said: ‘Everyone has to learn to defend himself. I should not object if you could introduce a note of patriotism into the schools. Tell the children that Wolfe won Quebec.’ I said that I should like to influence what was taught in schools but that this was always frowned upon. Here he looked very earnest and commented, ‘Of course not by instruction or order but by suggestion.’ I then said that I had always looked forward to going to the Board of Education if I were given the chance. He appeared ever so slightly surprised at this, showing that he felt that in wartime a central job, such as the one I was leaving, is the most important. But he looked genuinely pleased that I had shown so much satisfaction and seemed to think the appointment entirely suitable. He concluded the interview by saying ‘Come and see me to discuss things – not details, but the broad lines.’¹

Two days after taking over, Butler met the Archbishop of Canterbury. Three weeks later that was followed up by a session with a deputation of thirty-three Free Church and Anglican leaders with the Archbishop again at their head. They had come to discuss their ‘five points’, almost all of which related to religious education. Butler judged the meeting ‘successful’, finished it by asking a slightly startled Archbishop to close with a prayer,² and promptly went on holiday.

Given that, for many of the years that followed, religion ceased to be a central issue in British schools, an explanation is needed for Butler’s holding his first substantive meetings with the churches. Until the 1830s schooling had been entirely voluntary with no state funding. A country that had produced Shakespeare, Milton, Newton and Smeaton and in the early nineteenth century had Faraday, Stephenson, Telford and Keats in its ranks had just four universities in Scotland and two in England – Oxford and Cambridge. Fewer than ten public (that is, private, fee-paying, boarding) schools were in existence, although there was a spread of endowed and often ancient grammar schools, private tuition, and small ‘dame’ schools taught by women in private houses. In addition, a little very rudimentary teaching for the young was provided in Sunday Schools or in elementary schools which were run by church-sponsored voluntary societies. In 1818 just 7 per cent of children attended day school. The beginnings of an educational movement were, however, under way, although there were still strong fears that ‘too much education might lead to disaffection’ in a society where the labour and service of the many supported the wealth and leisure of the few. Lord Melbourne, the Whig Prime Minister, famously told Queen Victoria in the late 1830s: ‘I do not know why there is all this fuss about education. None of the Pagets [the Marquis of Anglesey’s family] can read or write and they do very well.’

The industrial revolution, however, produced a demand for better educated workers to which the state was finally to respond. In 1833 a half-empty House of Commons approved a £20,000 grant for school building to help the two church-based school societies, one Anglican and one Free Church, which had been founded in 1811 and 1810 respectively.³ The Anglican society’s full title, The National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church, in a sense says all that needs to be said about education before 1830.

Parliament as a whole was barely interested. Although this was the moment when the state first became involved in any way in education, the government was still spending more in a year on the Queen’s stables than on educating its children.⁴ The church schools were helped because they were about the only people standing on the barren field; the Catholic schools were later also to receive funds. But by opting to subsidise church schools rather than create secular state ones, Parliament invested in a problem that Butler would still be grappling with more than a century later, for religious feeling ran high. Nonconformists bitterly opposed Anglican instruction in schools, as did Roman Catholics, and vice versa. Sir James Graham, the Home Secretary in 1841, was to complain bitterly: ‘Religion, the Keystone of education, is in this country the bar to its progress.’⁵ For the various church societies – Church of England, Roman Catholic and the Nonconformists embracing various brands of Methodists, Quakers, Baptists, Congregationalists, Unitarians and others – went to war.

What was taught and how it was taught was not yet remotely the business of the government. What was taught was heavily biased towards the Bible. How it was taught was in many schools the ‘monitorial’ system: one teacher taught the older pupils who in turn taught the younger ones. Andrew Bell, the driving force behind the National Society, a bitter rival to the Quaker Joseph Lancaster who was patron of the British and Foreign, said: ‘Give me twenty-four pupils today and I will give you twenty-four teachers tomorrow.’ In this way a hundred children could be ‘taught’ by one master.⁶

Slowly, amid passionate rows between the various churches about who should be aided, and between all of the churches and those few who favoured state education about whether the godless state even ‘had a right to educate’, government aid spread to books, equipment and teachers’ salaries. In 1839 the very first inspections carried out by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Schools began. Scotland still had more universities than England (and proved better endowed in schooling also), but in 1825, in part because Nonconformists remained barred from Oxbridge (they were not admitted until the 1850s), London University was founded and 1833 saw the creation of the University of Durham.

Parliament’s interest grew and Royal Commissions on Oxbridge, the elementary schools, endowed schools and the nine public schools followed in the 1850s and 1860s. In 1867 working-class men in urban areas, where schooling was least good, gained the vote, and in 1870, W. E. Forster produced his Elementary Education Act – introducing the first state schooling at a time when an estimated 700,000 children aged between six and ten were in school but an estimated one million were not.⁷ Up to this point, as Derek Fraser nicely puts it, the only way to receive a state education was to be ‘a cadet, a felon or a pauper’ since the army, prison and workhouse did provide at least some schooling.⁸

Forster’s Act, landmark though it was, merely tried in his own words to ‘fill up the gaps’. ‘We must take care … not to destroy the existing system in introducing a new one.’⁹ It allowed school boards to be established in areas of clear need to provide elementary schools. The boards were financed by a mix of government grant and local rates and they were directly elected – the view having grown that a direct local interest in education was vital if progress was to be achieved. In this way, education became an interest of local government, although central government grants to the voluntary church schools continued. Schooling was still neither free (as it was already in the New England states of America) nor compulsory. The school boards could award free places, in Forster’s words, ‘to parents who they think really cannot afford to pay’ and with government approval could even establish free schools ‘under special circumstances’ – in effect, chiefly in the poorest areas of large towns. While hinting that he personally favoured free schooling, Forster argued the Treasury’s case that providing it for all would be ‘not only unnecessary but mischievous. Why should we relieve the parent from all payments for the education of his child … the enormous majority of them are able, and will continue to be able to pay these fees.’¹⁰ Parents were expected to find around a third of the cost of education. Subject in each case to parliamentary approval, the boards were also allowed to frame by-laws making education for five- to twelve-year-olds compulsory. Gradually they began to exercise this power. By 1876 half the population was under compulsion, and in 1880 school was made compulsory for all five- to ten-year-olds. For ten- to fourteen-year-olds the picture still varied widely around the country.

In theory, the new, non-denominational state schools were to complement the church ones, which in return for their grant now had to allow parents to withdraw their children from religious instruction. This was an attempt to settle the religious issue. In practice, as Harry Judge put it, ‘in many places the parson and the school board glowered at one another, and fought for pupils and resources’.¹¹ A dual educational system, which duelled, had been created.

Meanwhile the public schools were expanding rapidly, catering for a growing middle class at a time of rapid economic expansion. Their ethos was stamped on them by Dr Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby from 1827 to 1841. Correlli Barnett in The Audit of War, his assault on the causes of Britain’s post-war decline, writes that Arnold:

through the medium of disciples who went on from Rugby to become leading figures in other public schools … was more responsible than any other single person for the nature of later Victorian élite education and the character both of the revamped ancient public schools and all the numerous new ones that opened between 1840 and 1900 to cater for the swelling middle classes.¹²

That character was hierarchical, games-playing, privileged, classics-based, robust Christianity. The Clarendon Royal Commission on the public schools in 1864 complained that natural science was ‘practically excluded’ and that their education was thus ‘narrower than it was three centuries ago’; this exclusion was ‘a plain defect and great practical evil’.¹³ Barnett argues that these public school attitudes transferred into the ‘liberal’ education of Oxford and Cambridge, based on ‘Greats’: mathematics, classics and philosophy. Not for them science, technology, the creation of wealth. The universities, John Stuart Mill said in 1867, ‘are not intended to teach the knowledge required to fit men for some special mode of gaining their livelihood. Their object is not to make skilful lawyers, or physicians, or engineers, but capable and cultivated human beings.’¹⁴