Beveridge Deals with the Birth Rate (1943)

From the July 1943 issue of the Socialist Standard

And We Deal with Beveridge

Sir William Beveridge, being the noise of the moment, has been taken up by the Sunday Observer, who have been paying him for a weekly article on the editorial page. As Sir William is a public figure, it is to be presumed that he receives no mean payment for these articles. In the issue of April 11th, he deals with “The Problem of the Birth Rate.” The title itself is interesting. Why is it a problem, and to whom? Let us now examine this problem.

In dealing with present-day society, certain basic features have to be borne in mind. These are the fact that society is divided into two classes—those who, by virtue of their non-possession of wealth, are compelled to sell their labour-power to some firm or organisation which is willing to buy it, and those who, by virtue of their ownership of the factories and the general means of production and distribution, are able to buy the energies of the first group for so many hours per week. In relation to the second group, the first group stand as slaves—wage-slaves. Perhaps they might even be termed “free slaves,” because in peace time they have the theoretical right to terminate their employment by a week or a month’s notice. But should they do this, they are not entitled to unemployment pay, and being without wealth, they are compelled immediately to seek another master. This is the extent of their “freedom.”

As is to be expected, Sir William ignores this feature, and for the moment we will ignore Sir William.

At this stage we might well ask whose birth-rate is it that Sir William is concerned with—is it the birth-rate of the wage-slaves or the birth-rate of the owning class? It must be fairly obvious that it is the birth-rate of the wage-slaves which is the problem, because numerically the owning class represent such a tiny fragment of the population that, even if they had sixteen per family, it would still not alter the birth rate. Evidently it is the birthrate of the wage-slaves which is the perplexing problem.

The next question is who is it that is concerned with the workers’ birth-rate, and why? If Mr. Jones told Mr. Brown that he was not satisfied with Mr. Brown’s birth-rate, we should imagine that Mr. Brown might feel a little bit annoyed, especially if Mr. Jones hadn’t done anything about it himself. Now it must here be pointed out that there is a distinct difference between the “birth-rate problem” and the desire to have children. If a worker wishes to have children, it is not out of a desire to increase the birth-rate; but simply and solely because that is a natural human desire. In reproducing himself, therefore, the worker does not make a prior study of the birth-rate statistics. As Sir William points out, most marriages result in one child; if second and third children are not born, it is because they are not wanted, and in most cases the reason they are not wanted is that the workers cannot afford to rear them decently—not because they do not want them. There is a further tendency which may be noted in passing. As wages tend to follow the cost of living, and as the cost of rearing a small family is less than that of rearing a large family, wages adapt themselves accordingly, so that before the war, owing to the low level of “real” wages, it was becoming increasingly the practice for both married partners to be working. Here the change from relative comfort to the poverty of one partner supporting three represented such a big change that there was less disposition than ever in such cases to have children.

Now the question of the birth-rate is this. If the birth-rate is increased, it means that there will be a large increase in the number of workers (and fighters)—for in wartime it is the workers, the wage-slaves, who do the fighting; even if the whole of the owning class did all the fighting, their numbers are so small that they would soon be overwhelmed. Now we are beginning to understand why it is that the problem of the birth-rate is so serious—for the owning class, and we can return to Sir William Beveridge at the point where he quotes Winston Churchill as saying : “If, therefore, this country is to keep its high place in the leadership of the world, and to survive as a Great Power that can hold its own against external pressure, our people must be encouraged by every means to have larger families.” Thus both Churchill and Beveridge desire that there should be a continual good supply of workers (and fighters). It is not possible to deal with this aspect of the question more fully at the moment, but it may be well to ask whether, if Britain lost the war, the British owning class would not lose a very large proportion of their wealth.

Beveridge twice makes the statement that “people will not have children for pay,” yet this is precisely the nature of that one of his suggestions which might, be described as practical. He says : “If children’s allowances are to be effective in remedying this inequality” (as between children in small and large families),” they must be adequate; they must be enough for subsistence in every case, and should be supplemented by special schemes for particular occupations.” He also recommends free comprehensive medical service for maternity, with provision for its special costs. His other idea, which might be described as the impractical or the imponderable one is a “change in public opinion”—i.e., that workers should be induced to have children as a result of pronouncements by members of the owning class that they should do so in order that “Britain’s role of leadership” should be maintained. One would hardly have thought it necessary to point out to an economist like Sir William Beveridge that workers are not going to have children for such imponderable reasons as this. If Bill Brown told Tom Jones that he had had a baby in order to help retain Britain’s role of leadership, would he not be greeted with ribald laughter?

Ramo.