So, this is Social Security (1966)

From the November 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

"During the last 50 years a comprehensive scheme of national insurance has been gradually developed to become the central feature of our system of social security.” These were the words of the then Minister of Pensions and National Insurance Richard Wood, in a forward to a government booklet: Everybody’s Guide To National Insurance, May, 1964. If this statement does anything at all, it underlines capitalism’s continuing, indeed developing, need for all sorts of compulsory insurance provisions for its working population.

We have come a long way since the days of Lloyd George and his five shilling pension proposals, and the very limited dole and "panel” medicine of the inter-war years. To even these comparatively modest measures, there were always the objectors who thought “the country could not afford it,” but it was Lloyd George himself who shoved his opponents contemptuously aside with the observation that paying a pension was cheaper than maintaining old people in work-houses. And this has been the sort of criterion which has guided the reformers ever since; despite the professed humanitarianism of the Labour Party, their spokesman Jim Griffiths was under no illusion about the aims of national insurance when he commended his sweeping post-war proposals to the Commons on February 6, 1946:

The loss to the Nation caused by preventive illness alone is appalling, for it has been estimated at £300 millions a year, equal to 3/5ths of the cost of the scheme in its initial year. To those who fear we cannot afford this scheme, I would advise them to ask themselves if we can afford to go on without it. 

Under this National Insurance Bill, a wide range of “benefits” was enacted based to a large extent on the old Beveridge proposals, and estimated to cost some £452 millions in 1949 and £496 millions in 1955. Contributions were to range from 2/2d. to 4/7d. a week from workers, and their employers were to make weekly contributions ranging from l/9d. to 3/10d. per employee. There was also to be a grant from the Exchequer, and all of this money was to be pooled in the National Insurance Fund, to which would be charged the costs of benefits and administration.

This arrangement has remained largely unaltered over the years, but it is nonsense to suggest, as some Labourites and others were doing then, that the scheme would abolish poverty. Prime Minister Attlee claimed in a Commons speech (February 7, 1946) that “the Bill would help to maintain the high standard of purchasing power among the masses of the people.” But just take a look at some of the benefit rates then, and see if you agree with him: — 

Unemployment or sickness               26/-per week (£2 married couple)

Pension  . . .   . . .                             26/-per week (£2 married couple)

100 per cent Disability Pay                45/-per week 

Nat. Assistance (ordinary) . . .            50/-per week

    for man and wife (begun 1948)      65/- per week

Incidentally, an interesting and pertinent comment is made on the scheme by M. Penelope Hall in her book The Social Services of Modern England. She says:

One drastic modification in the Beveridge Plan was made at the start. Benefits have never been paid at subsistence level. Beveridge regarded this modification to his scheme as disastrous. 

In the 20 years since 1946, government cost estimates have been sadly put out by continuously rising prices and increases in the cost of living, so that various amending Acts have had to be passed, stepping up the benefits and the contribution rates. By 1959, for example, unemployment, sickness and pension rates all stood at 50/- per week single, while National Assistance was at 76/- (normal) and 96/- (special) for a man and wife. This was the year, you may recall, that the Tories were pointing with pride to their achievements in this field, ignoring such uncomfortable facts as 1¾ million people having to apply for National Assistance—about 1.4 millions of them old age pensioners.

But even the Conservatives, jubilant at their 1959 election victory, could not pretend that provisions were adequate, even by the miserable standards that capitalist politicians set, and not long after that their graduated pensions scheme was introduced, which meant larger contributions from those earning over £9 a week, to secure proportional payment in addition to a flat-rate pension. Under such an arrangement, you would get an extra sixpence a week added to your flat-rate pension for every £7 10s. paid in, and when you consider the piffling extent of these changes, you might wonder what all the song and dance was about. Certainly there was nothing from the workers’ point of view, although from the Government’s angle the new scheme gave the pension system some flexibility, and so no doubt was intended to keep down the extra cost.

The whole question of National Insurance was tossed about by the main parties at the 1964 election, and it was becoming apparent anyway that an overhaul was due in the system of payments and contributions. For example, while there was not the heavy and persistent unemployment of the twenties and thirties, there was the question of “labour mobility” and the tiding over of unemployed workers when retraining for new jobs, following the decline of some of the older industries. So the Labour Government’s measures now include compulsory compensation payments to any worker made redundant after a minimum of two years at the same job.

In the government’s social security arrangements, it is interesting that they have retained essentially unchanged the graduated pension scheme of which they had been so scornful when the Tories introduced it. In addition, there is the “Earnings-Related Short-Term Benefits Scheme” which just means that there will be a flat-rate sickness and unemployment benefit of £4 a week minimum, plus further payments, depending on your average weekly earnings between £9 and £30 a week. Here again we see the pressure of present-day conditions in the government’s attempts to offload at least some of the burden of the rising cost of benefits from the central Exchequer. Quite clearly also, the 1946 scales and payment methods no longer suffice to keep workers ticking over in sickness or between jobs, and once more the modern emphasis is on “flexibility”. It could be that this is something we shall see more of in the future, what with the growth of new industries and the decline of the old, to say nothing of plain old-fashioned unemployment because of trade crises.

And what other changes have there been recently? Oh yes, the old Ministry of Pensions and Njational Insurance has been replaced by the brand new “Ministry of Social Security” (surely a contradiction in terms) with responsibility for all the schemes which were formerly administered separately, such as National Assistance. These particular payments will be known as “supplementary benefits” and are a fitting reminder of the way in which reformers' plans can misfire. In 1953, Lord Beveridge admitted that he and the experts had originally expected National Assistance payments to be on a small scale only and to gradually diminish. But, in fact, the very opposite has' happened, and the government has resigned itself to the fact by allowing for increased rates of benefit when the new arrangements start in the autumn.

What all these measures add up to is merely the organisation of 1966 poverty by 1966 methods, and the usual attempts to maintain the workforce at the appropriate standards of health and efficiency to keep capitalism’s production and profits going. It has been the irritating habit of Labourites to claim that these Acts bring dignity to workers’ lives, but their very existence is an indication of the essential indignity of working class life. And despite the increasing intricacy of state insurance and widening of its scope, there are many who stay stubbornly poor even by “Supplementary Benefits” standards. Like the 15,000 families admitted by Assistance Board Chairman Lord Runcorn to be “living on assistance at the moment, at an income well below their needs, because allowances are based on the best estimate that can be made of a man’s future earnings.” Or like “those whose take-home pay is less than they need by assistance standards, although in full employment.”

Eddie Critchfield

Theatre Review: Nye (2024)

Theatre Review from the July 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nye  by Tim Price (Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff)

The celebrated Welsh actor, Michael Sheen, takes the lead role in a new play about the celebrated Welsh politician, Aneurin (‘Nye’) Bevan. With a script by Tim Price and under the direction of the National Theatre’s artistic lead Rufus Norris, the scenario has Sheen, dressed in pyjamas and close to death in a hospital bed, going back in memory through the key moments of his life. A series of scenes, sometimes surreal in their framing, show him progress from stammering schoolboy to coal miner, from trade union activist to rebel Labour MP, and finally from the back benches of parliament to government minister overseeing the establishment of the NHS.

The play has already had what can be called ‘rave reviews’. The Times declared that ‘Sheen burns with genuine passion’, the i paper called it ‘a taut and fluid triumph’, and other words used to describe it have been ‘spectacular’ ‘mesmerising’ and ‘unrepeatable’. The full house of around 2,000 at the performance I attended were indeed mesmerised, as was I, by Sheen’s performance and indeed by the performance of the whole cast of actors around him, taking parts such as Bevan’s wife, Jennie Lee, his best and most longstanding friend, Archie Lush, and his bitter political adversary, Winston Churchill. One could not but be powerfully drawn into Bevan’s journey, both mental and political, and in particular into the leading role he played in setting up the ‘welfare state’ immediately following the Second World War as Labour government Minister for Health and Housing. His role in this, and particularly in the NHS, is the play’s main raison d’être, so that even the staunchly conservative Telegraph had only words of praise for Sheen’s performance and went so far as to refer to the production as ‘a valiant and valuable affirmation of the NHS’.

The question of course that a reviewer in the Socialist Standard must ask, even while sharing the widely positive view of the production itself, is to what extent its unmitigated praise of Bevan and his politics is justified. Prior to the formation of the NHS in 1948, workers who could afford it generally contributed to various small insurance policies to provide a form of insurance for medical treatment. But many did not. And this was cumbersome and inefficient, and above all a hindrance to workers’ productivity. It was decided by the wartime coalition government, therefore, in line with the recommendations of the 1942 Beveridge Report, to reorganise the health system under central control. Both main parties, Labour and Tory, committed to such a reform in their 1945 election manifestos, and so when Labour won an overwhelming victory in that election, it fell to that party to put it into operation.

The justification for this and other welfare reforms was summed up in the Beveridge Report:

‘Social insurance and the allied services, as they exist today, are conducted by a complex of disconnected administrative organs, proceeding on different principles, doing invaluable service but at a cost in money and trouble and anomalous treatment of identical problems for which there is no justification.’

In other words, it was going to be more efficient and more cost effective for the services in question to be streamlined and brought directly under state control. So while no one would deny the famous adage of Bevan’s, repeated in the play, that ‘no society can legitimately call itself civilised if a sick person is denied medical aid because of a lack of means’, it has to be borne in mind that the main rationale of this reform was to make the system of workers selling their energies to an employer for a wage or salary more efficient and not first and foremost to benefit those workers.

The Socialist Party’s frequent characterisation of the NHS as ‘a cheap back-to-work service’ or a ‘way of patching up workers’ may seem a little over-cynical, especially as the nation-wide hospital and free medical advice and treatment system that was set up under the supervision of Bevan as Labour health minister in 1948 was clearly of benefit to workers who no longer had to find the money to pay for medical treatment. But, that said, there can be no doubt that it was not introduced with benevolence in mind. Indeed, such an arrangement was soon mirrored in various other countries whatever the professed ideology of the governments in office there. The fact is that ‘welfare’ reforms were necessary to guard against social breakdown, a situation potentially detrimental to capitalism and its profit-making imperative.

Yet of course, as many reforms, the NHS never worked quite as intended. The ‘free’ health service soon became unpredictably ‘expensive’ and certain charges (eg, for prescriptions) were introduced, and it has rarely not been in a state of crisis. Today’s increasing waiting lists, difficulties in securing GP appointments and overwhelmed emergency units show how the economic forces of capitalism constantly beguile the intentions of well-meaning reformers such as Bevan.

There can be little doubt about Bevan’s sincerity, at least in the early and middle part of his life and career, as focused on in this production. He was a spellbinding orator not afraid to be seen as a rebel and to use the strongest terms possible to state his credo (once famously referring to the Tories as ‘lower than vermin’). But, in the end, his was the idealism of someone who threw his energy into political life under the impression that capitalism could be adjusted to work in the interests of the working class. And what, as a celebration of the man, this play fails to convey is that this impression was a mistaken one and indeed that Bevan himself, in later years, moved from expressions of triumphant idealism towards pragmatic acceptance of capitalist politics and its limitations. It was in a private pay-bed in an NHS hospital in fact that he ended his days, the bed from which we are taken in this play through the key moments of his life. But thoroughly recommended as a spectacle.

Howard Moss

The Welfare State (1950)

From the June 1950 issue of the Socialist Standard

All the major political parties applaud the Welfare State. They vied with each other, during the election campaign, to claim credit for bringing it into existence. The Conservatives made the most of the fact that the government which set up the commission to inquire into the problem of reorganising the social services was a coalition Government predominantly Tory. The Liberals claimed their share of the glory because Sir William Beveridge, who gave his name to the report, was chairman of the Commission, and a Liberal. To the Labour Government was left the triumph of passing the legislation.

The truth about it all was that the so-called “Welfare State” arose not through the good will of any political party but because of the need to adapt the social services to the changing condition of capitalism. The need to allay any possible working class discontent after the war. Of course, it was a benefit to the health of the working class. That was another reason. To take advantage of post-war conditions and capture as many foreign markets as possible it was necessary to increase production. To do this a healthy efficient working class was needed.

But the capitalist class give with one hand and take back with the other.

The New Statesman and Nation, criticizing the Daily Mail's handling of the figures which led to the headline “Father Pays £34 9s. a year to Put Family of Four on the Panel,” makes some calculations of its own and comments:—

“This would make ‘fathers' payment for health services (Daily Mail calculation) around £23. or almost equal to the estimated benefit (Marshal Aid calculation) which a family receives under the scheme.”—(April 1st. 1950).

From these figures, as far as the health services are concerned, the working class are just getting what they pay for. The Economist in an article deals with the total social expenditure, and it quotes from the report of the E.C.A. Mission to the United Kingdom, “Facts about the British Economy.” Publishing a.table giving the Mission’s estimates The Economist writes: —

“The left-hand side of the table puts the total social expenditure for an average family—on the assumption that the population can be divided into families of four persons—at 57 shillings a week, including expenditure from the local rates and from the national insurance funds. The right-hand side of the table gives estimates of taxes paid by lower income families in 1948, taken as those with an income of under £500 in 1947. The total taxes estimated to be paid by such families who make up about 80 per cent. of the population, were larger than the whole of current social expenditure.” (The Economist, 1/4/50).

The socialist view is that the Welfare State won't abolish the poverty problem which confronts the working class out is just the best method the capitalist class have devised to distribute wages from the point of view of efficiency. When the Beveridge Report, the blue print of the Welfare State, was published, the Communist Party, the Labour Party, the Liberal Party and some sections of the Tories were in favour of it. The Socialist Party of Great Britain thought fit to publish a pamphlet putting forward the socialist view. It had the title “Beveridge Re-organises Poverty.” How right it was! The Economist thinks that way too. It later continues: —

“Since it is the lower income groups which benefit mainly from social expenditure the report says ‘the social expenditures are chiefly financed by transfers of income within the lower income group, in accordance with variations in the patterns of consumption, family size, etc., rather than by transfers between different income levels.’ ” (The Economist, I /4/50).

J. T.

Cooking the Books: Pocket money (2010)

The Cooking the Books column from the November 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

“TAXMAN WANTS ALL OUR WAGES. We would just get pocket money” screamed the front page headline in the Daily Express (22 September). As the Times had explained five days earlier:

“HM Revenue & Customs is considering plans to deduct tax directly from workers’ pay packets before salaries reach their bank accounts”.

So what’s new? Income tax is already deducted before wages reach workers’ bank accounts, only this is now done by employers not the government. This in fact is one reason why we have said that, as far as income tax on wages and salaries is concerned, workers don’t even pay it. They never see the money. It’s paid by employers.

PAYE (Pay As You Earn) was introduced as part of the war-time Beveridge Plan to “redistribute poverty”, i.e. to try to ensure that the total wages bill was distributed efficiently, from a capitalist point of view, amongst the working class, so that no worker got either too much or not enough to reproduce their working skills taking into account their family circumstances.

Basically, it involved cutting the take-home pay of single workers or workers whose wife worked as they didn’t need to be paid to maintain non-existent dependants. Employers couldn’t be expected to do this themselves as their only concern was the quality of the labour power they purchased, for which they paid the going rate irrespective of the family circumstances of its seller. So it was done through the tax system

The Marxian theory of taxes and the working class is one of the most difficult concepts to get over. Sometimes it’s mistakenly expressed as “the workers don’t pay taxes”. The accurate and scientifically correct way of expressing the concept is that “taxes are not a burden on the working class”.

Even if workers don’t pay the income tax that is deducted from their pay packets before any money reaches their bank accounts, workers do physically pay other taxes. For instance, workers in employment pay council tax in that they themselves have to pay this either in cash or by a cheque or transfer from their bank account.

Workers also pay indirect taxes such as excise duties on alcohol and tobacco and VAT on the goods and services subject to it. These, insofar as they increase prices, increase the cost of living and so the cost of reproducing labour power. This is passed on to employers as higher than otherwise money wages. It is in this sense that taxes on wages and on goods and services workers consume are ultimately a burden on employers.

We’re talking here about average expenditure. Only taxes included in expenditure on goods that enter into the general average cost of living are passed on to employers, not all the indirect taxes that an individual worker might pay. Just because a worker spends more than average on alcohol and cigarettes does not mean that economic forces will lead to their employer paying them a higher wage or salary.

So, yes, individual workers can be affected, adversely or favourably depending on their spending habits, by changes in the taxes they pay. Naturally those who end up worse off will complain, but this is not a class issue as an issue that concerns workers as a whole.

Whether income tax is deducted by employers or by the government is certainly of no concern to workers. What’s relevant is not the gross pre-tax figure that appears on their pay slip, but their take-home pay as that’s what they have to spend on reproducing their working skills. “Pocket money” is rather an apt

Reforming Capitalism (1967)

From the October 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

To avoid misunderstanding about the terms we use, we will state briefly what is meant by reformism and by revolution.

Reformism means the formulation of day to day policies to make superficial adjustments to capitalism through legislation to meet the changing requirements of the system. A reformist party is one which, on the basis of such policies, seeks power to administer capitalism.

By appealing to workers on a programme of reforms, the political agents of capitalism create the illusion of trying to change things. The workers who vote for such parties and policies are being duped into supporting the system which rests upon their exploitation. Revolution stands against all this. It means the abolition of the system which reformists seek to preserve.

Perhaps by using one popular reform as an example we can make the Socialist position more clear.

It can hardly be an exaggeration to say that no single piece of reform legislation in modern times, was ever heralded with such widespread acclaim as the so-called National Health Service Act of 1946.

Politicians of all parties were confident that a way had been worked out to maintain a standard of working class health, cheaply and consistent with industrial efficiency and profitability. Also they had a handy device to fob off any working class unrest with the conditions of post-war capitalism.

The majority of the working class at the time were deluded by the sales talk with which the act was presented to them and widely regarded it as free state benevolence for which they should be duly grateful.

The idea of free access to wealth is incompatible with the private property basis of capitalism.

There can be no “little bits’ of Socialism. It’s all or nothing. And this is just why the National Health Service has not fulfilled its promise. The Socialist Party of Gt. Britain never expected otherwise and published a pamphlet called Beveridge Re-organises Poverty five years before the Act came into force. Two references from this pamphlet will show the line of our approach. We quoted the Beveridge Report as follows:

“.. . that each individual citizen is more likely to concentrate upon his war effort if he feels his government will be ready in time for that better world . . .”

and Samuel Courtauld’s comment on the Report:

“.. . social security of this nature will be about the most profitable long-term investment the country could make. It will not undermine the morale of the nation’s workers: it will ultimately lead to higher efficiency among them and a lowering of production costs.” (Manchester Guardian 19 Feb. 1943).

Whether, after nearly twenty years, this reform has lived up to the hopes of the capitalist class, we cannot say, but for the workers it should be a hard-earned experience in the futility of reformism. Far from anything being free, the last twenty years have been one long moan by successive Labour and Tory leaders about the costs of the “service”. There has been an unending trail of legislation making adjustments to the Act itself, largely concerned with money matters. In October 1949, just over a year after the Act came into force, the then Labour Prime Minister, Mr. Attlee announced proposed charges of one shilling for each NHS prescription. Although this proposal was endorsed by the Labour Parliament, it was not until March 1952 that the Tory Government put it into effect. It should be noted that the present Labour Government’s removal of the charges was followed by the most ruthless and sustained attack upon wages in post-war years.

After only five years of NHS in May 1953 Aneurin Bevan was complaining about the high cost of prescriptions. Proprietary dexedrine had cost £400,000 in 1952, when its chemical equivalent would have cost £158,000 over the same period. (The British National Health Service (p. 84) by D. Mc. I. Johnson.)

Three years later the Guillebaud Report on the cost of National Health Service was published, but despite much earnest delving into bureaucratic machinery, nothing more was heard.

Section 2 of the NHS (Family Planning) Act 1967 gives local health authorities power to make charges for certain contraceptives, according to ‘means’ and subject to the approval of the Minister of Health.

Although this might conjure up some humorous situations in one’s mind, it is anything but funny to read about the conditions of near breakdown in the health administration which are so widespread to-day, after nearly twenty years of this capitalist panacea.

Thousands of disillusioned doctors going abroad to get away from it; surgeons in over-crowded hospitals working a 90 hour week; people waiting for kidney operations, who well may die simply because the machines are expensive; old, decaying hospitals with hopelessly inadequate amenities; nurses as ruthlessly driven for long hours and low wages as ever. In the midst of this situation the Tory government in 1963, published a Hospital Plan for England and Wales. This proposed the spending of £600 million in a ten years programme of hospital building up to 1973. This figure for ten years is about one-third of the amount then being spent yearly on armaments. A fitting comment on the priorities of capitalism. Although it must be said that much has been achieved on the technical side of surgery and research, this is a tribute to the workers in these fields and has nothing to do with the NHS as such. In fact much research is still carried out which is financed by voluntary contributions including investigation into the causes of such diseases as cancer.

The conclusion is inescapable, reforms must be looked at against the general background of capitalism. If human welfare is to become our main consideration, this system must make way for Socialism.

Harry Baldwin

More Words . . . (2004)

From the September 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Since it first published its Manifesto in 1905, the Socialist Party has produced dozens of pamphlets, as these give the chance to expound on questions at greater length than an article in the Socialist Standard. Pamphlets have ranged from discussions of contemporary issues to more substantial considerations of matters of theory and practice. Here we will look, in chronological order, at five which are of particular significance, dealing with religion, nationalisation and other reforms, Bolshevism and the nature of socialist society, briefly placing each of these in their political context.

    

In 1910, when Socialism and Religion was published, socialist ideas were mainly spread by outdoor meetings, the same places where religious speakers were peddling their nonsense. Hence the need for an extended statement of the materialist case against religion. It was also a time when some supposedly Marxist parties were declaring religion a private matter, on which their members could take different views. In contrast, this pamphlet stated unequivocally that socialism and religion were incompatible, first by explaining how religious ideas arose. The idea of gods developed as people worshipped a dead chief and turned his grave into a temple. Christianity grew gradually out of various other faiths: it is neatly described as “a cemetery of dead religions”. Whereas science, by developing its understanding of the world, becomes more complete and systematic, religion consistently retreats in its claims as it is confronted with the real world. So many tenets once viewed as central to Christianity have come to be viewed by adherents as merely allegorical. Further, religion serves the interest of the ruling class by helping to make workers meek and submissive; by offering them salvation in the next world, it renders them more prepared to accept suffering in this. On the other hand, the religious question is secondary to the wider battle for working-class emancipation, and abolishing religion would not abolish exploitation.

    

The 1943 pamphlet Family Allowances: A Socialist Analysis was remarkable in its demonstration that an aspect of the much-vaunted welfare state would not be “an entirely unmixed blessing for the working population”. The Beveridge Report had recommended the payment of family allowances and the government had accepted this proposal. It was widely felt that this would bolster living standards and put an end to the worst aspects of poverty, but the Party was able to show that this would not happen. This was partly on the basis that wages are the price of labour power, and, together with whatever state handouts are available, provide workers with just enough to keep their heads above water. But remarkably, a large part of the evidence for this position was taken from the words of the reformers themselves. Independent MP Eleanor Rathbone had long been a campaigner for family allowances, and the pamphlet quotes her as saying that they would involve “simply redistributing the available resources for the remuneration of the workers and so effecting a reasonable revolution”. The aim, then, was to keep the workers quiet without costing the capitalists much at all. Sixty percent of men had no dependent children, and the employers were in effect paying them for the upkeep of children they did not have, rather than just paying for the worker and their partner if any. Rathbone’s solution was to fund family allowances by reducing wages in general – a very different picture from the philanthropic one usually depicted.

    

Among other policies for which many had high hopes in the immediate post-war period was nationalisation: the 1945 pamphlet Nationalisation or Socialism? argued that this idea had no connection with socialism and would do little to change the way society was run. Much space was devoted to explaining why industries were nationalised and how this suited the interests of the capitalist class as a whole. It was undertaken, for instance, when an industry that was necessary for capitalism was insufficiently profitable for its private owners, or when some group of capitalists had a monopoly and could charge exorbitant prices to their capitalist customers. Winston Churchill, for one, is quoted as follows: “There is a broadening field for State ownership and enterprise, especially in relation to monopolies of all kinds.” While some earlier supporters of nationalisation had advocated simple confiscation of capitalist property by the state, the general view in the 1940s was that compensation would be paid. It was even assumed that capitalists would be given government bonds or stock and so would continue to receive a healthy rate of interest. The capitalist would thus be deprived of control of industry, whereas the Socialist Party had always emphasised the importance of ownership (as in the first clause of our Declaration of Principles). The community would not control the means of production until they were owned in common.

    

Russia Since 1917 (published in 1948) was unusual in consisting solely of reprints from the Socialist Standard rather than original material. As the preface noted, some points of detail would have been phrased differently with the benefit of hindsight, but on the whole the articles demonstrated the soundness of the Party position on Russia and Bolshevism. The earliest post-Revolution articles are remarkably cautious, noting the lack of available information (partly owing to the censorship operating under the Defence of the Realm Act). Due credit is paid to the Bolsheviks, for stopping the slaughter on the Russian front and conducting negotiations in public. Allegations of massacres by the Bolsheviks were dismissed as a tissue of lies. On the other hand, there was no mincing of words when it came to criticising them. A lengthy article from August 1918 made it clear that the Russian people were not convinced of the necessity of Socialism, though it also stated that “members of the working class took control of affairs in Russia” (note: not the working class as a whole). The analysis of Russia as state capitalist was first broached in July 1920, citing Lenin’s support for state capitalism. Later articles endorsed the analysis of Russia as capitalist, and a remarkable review of The Soviet Union Year-Book (from September 1930) emphasised the staggering profits made, e.g. an average of 96 percent profit on capital invested in 1927-8. The existence of Soviet millionaires was noted, and party officials were seen as part of a privileged section of the population, though not explicitly described as a capitalist class.

    

The publication of Socialism as a Practical Alternative in 1987 reflected a feeling within the Party that more needed to be done to fill in some of the details of how a Socialist society could function, though naturally what was said was seen as a set of proposals only, and not in any way laying down the law for the future. One significant point made was the importance of decision-making in local communities. Co-operation at higher levels would also be needed, perhaps with some existing organisations being adapted to the new Socialist world. The expertise of the Food and Agricultural Organisation, for instance, could be taken over to co-ordinate world food production. But it was envisaged that, after a while, global and regional levels of organisation might give way to more local administration, though the very idea of “local” becomes harder to define in a global village. A particularly intriguing idea that is broached is that of “conservation production”, which would involve the conservation of raw materials, with most being recycled and re-used. Parts of goods that were not subject to wear and tear could be made from durable materials, and only a small fraction of the materials used would be permanently lost. A useful comparison is made with gold: because it is a “precious” metal, it is hardly ever discarded, so gold mined by the early Egyptians is still in use. While this is an unusual case in commodity-based society, it could certainly be extended in a system of production for use. This pamphlet contains many other valuable ideas about how socialism could be organised.

Paul Bennett

Tory Reform—The Old, Old Story (1944)

From the June 1944 issue of the Socialist Standard

A group of Conservative Members of Parliament, over forty of them, have drawn up a Statement, and formed themselves into the Tory Reform Committee. As a result, they say, of joint work on a number of separate issues, like the Beveridge Report, Post-War Reconstruction, the Catering Bill, Civil Aviation, War Pensions, Education, and so on, they have found “that there exists among us a common outlook on the principles which should govern the conduct of political affairs.”

We are therefore dealing with a considered written statement by an influential group of prominent Tory M.P.s—(Forward! by the right; a Statement by the Tory Reform Committee)—giving some indication of their estimate of the shape of things to come, and their reaction to them.

They start off with what will probably be the main theme of the Armistice and post-war years : —

“The spirit of National Unity, developed in war and consecrated on the battlefields, must be preserved in the period of reconstruction.

The chief task of statesmanship will be to maintain that unity, and carry that spirit on into the years of peace.

There must be give and take between all classes of the community, between employers and workers … if the national objectives are to be obtained.” (p. 2.)

We can certainly agree with Viscount Hinchingbrooke there. As usual, we the workers will give, and they, the Tory employers—will take.

We are very promptly informed in the next point what the spirit of national unity is for : —

“The standard of living of this country can only be restored and improved if maximum production is regarded as the joint responsibility of capital, management and labour, working as partners.” (p. 3.)

The next bit is almost word for word what we read in Mr. Arthur Deakin’s articles in the Transport Workers’ Record : —

“We consider that a man who invests his skill and labour in an industry should feel an interest in and exercise an influence over that industry, equal in degree, if not in kind, to that exercised by the man who invests his savings.” (p. 3.)

So that’s where the Hon. W. W. Astor and Sir Alfred Beit got their wealth—they saved it up.

“To this end we welcome the extension of Production Committees.” (p. 3.)

After saying that Trade Unions will help in the future towards “increased efficiency,” they pronounce against the retention of war-time controls—”management must be given full and unhampered freedom.”

Two further great reforms are income-tax collection on current earnings and “a prosperous agriculture.” Then comes Compulsory Military Service.

“We regard Compulsory Military Service as an essential part of our democratic system.” (p. 4.)

The reason for Compulsory Military Service (Conscription) is given in the next spasm : —

The Principle of Empire Unity.

“Only as a United Commonwealth can we play our proper part with America, Russia and China in any international organisation which may be devised for world security. (p. 5.)

It will no longer be sufficient to say that each part of the Empire is primarily responsible for its own local defence unless at the same time adequate Imperial forces of all arms are so disposed throughout the world that they can be moved in sufficient time to defend any threatened points. (p. 5.)

“We recognise the need to ensure that British industry is at least as well equipped as that of its industrial rivals,” they say.

They require the maintenance of high standards of “industrial efficiency” (p. 8). They hold a substantial increase in our export trade to be essential “if this country is ever to regain the standard of living to which it has been accustomed.” which can only be achieved “if industry is enterprising in the quest for markets” (p. 9). They want the birth-rate to be increased (Family Allowances).

"There must be “state ownership of certain monopolies,” and a revival of “a widespread healthy and vigorous private enterprise.” (p. 10.)

A point for the Labour Party : —

“The nationalisation of the Bank of England would therefore make no practical difference.” (p. 12.)

Finally, they say on Demobilisation and Resettlement : —

“At the end of the last war, carefully prepared plans had to be abandoned because the Services did not understand, and therefore would not accept them. (p. 14.)

Summing up.

No Socialist ever expected the Conservative Party, not oven its Reform Committee, to have any proposals whatever for the solution of to-day’s social problem.

We have cited the actual written words of their own publication on policy, to show that their only possible idea at the conclusion of this war is to start all over again, still more scientifically, with Conscription, the Beveridge Report, increased efficiency, better education, greater export trade, larger share of the market, increased armaments—the same old game of a dog chasing its own tail, which leaves the worker in the same position as before.

Stupid workers who are led away by this sort of rubbish, or the feeble imitation of it called the Labour Party, or the I.L.P., cannot expect anything else than hard work, low wages and insecurity until the next war, when a new Tory Reform Committee will issue “the old, old story that is ever new.”

Horatio.

The Beveridge Plan—for Saving Capitalism (1944)

From the April 1944 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Why the Churchill Government did not immediately seize upon the Beveridge Report as a gift from the gods and as a splendid idea for saving and insuring the capitalist system and giving some reality to stand for national unity will probably puzzle future historians of our time.” (From “Forward,” 25th December, 1943.)

“It can be said, however, that Beveridge has performed a competent piece of work for the capitalists, and that he has shown them how the complex problems of distributing the very barest necessities to the more unfortunate members of the working-class can be organised in accordance with the best modern methods of business efficiency.“ (From “Beveridge Reorganises Poverty “ S.P.G.B., 3d. Post free 4d.)

Some Socialist points on the Beveridge Report (1942)

From the December 1942 issue of the Socialist Standard

Time does not allow a thorough examination of the Beveridge Report in this issue, but a few preliminary remarks may be made on aspects of particular interest to Socialists.

First we may ask why all this fuss about proposals which even the Times—not remarkable for its generosity towards social reforms—admits are “moderate enough to disarm any charge of indulgence”? (Times, December 2.) The spokesmen of capitalism are already preening themselves on the score that the Report shows what a generous and progressive country this is. They might pause to notice Beveridge’s claim that everything he proposes could and should have been done decades ago. All that time they have been boasting of the numerous reform measures they have introduced, yet the sum total of them all is so niggardly and displeasing in the eyes of its beneficiaries, the workers, that the latter can be impressed by the seemingly important advance the Beveridge scheme represents by contrast with the evil condition of to-day.

Even so the scheme should be viewed in proper perspective. The Times reads into the Report the “confident assurance that the poor need not always be with us,” but this is merely a misuse of terms, and one incidentally for which Beveridge appears not to be responsible. He talks all the time of abolishing “want,” by which he avowedly means something quite different from abolishing poverty. By want he means the condition into which the workers fall when their wages stop, not the condition in which they always are because they are carrying the capitalist class on their backs. Beveridge is quite clear about the distinction and says so. Did he not make a statement on December 1 (reported in the B.B.C. news broadcasts but apparently not in the Press) that it had always been his view that want could be abolished within the ranks of the wage-earners without any inroads into the wealth of the rich? He is saying in effect in his Report want could be abolished without interfering with capitalism, but neither he nor the Times want to abolish poverty. But for the poverty of the poor there could be no riches for the rich—a state which he and they find quite acceptable.

The Report has had a good Press, and already it is claimed that the Liberals and half the Conservative Party view it with favour. A characteristic and intelligible capitalist comment was reported in the Daily Worker (December 3, 1942) from Captain Somerset de Chair, who is a’ Conservative M.P. He is reported as follows : —

“I welcome it as a comprehensive plan to remove insecurity without resorting to the uncertain hazards of social reconstruction, he said.

This plan promises what we young Conservatives have always demanded—a square deal for the working man within the existing social and economic framework, instead of some utopia on the further side of an economic torrent.”

The Report is mistakenly referred to as a measure of insurance for the workers against the evils of capitalism. It would be more accurate to see it as a measure of insurance for the capitalists against the (for them) desperate evil of working class discontent with capitalism. Better far to give something away in time than to risk losing all.

The Report has been criticised by the Insurance Companies whose profits would be affected by the proposal to hand over their industrial assurance work to a Government Board. This was to be expected, but it gives rise to some interesting speculations. The Insurance Companies, with their enormous investments in all kinds of industrial and commercial enterprises, wield great influence, not excluding influence in Parliament and the Press. Fifteen or twenty years ago it was common in so-called Labour papers to see bitter attacks on the Prudential and other companies. What has happened to change all this, so that nowadays the clamour against them has almost disappeared? The Daily Express (November 28) had a curious little reference to this in an article on a book by the late Sir Arnold Wilson in which he attacked the insurance companies. According to the writer of the article. Sir Arnold was struck by the way in which the economists had ignored the problem presented by the “concentration of financial power” in the hands of the companies. “The oracles,” he found, “were strangely dumb.” “He searched libraries. He found little. He consulted the experts. And chief among them was Sir William Beveridge, who explained why the London School of Economics, on grounds of expediency, had ignored the subject.” (Daily Express, November 28. Italics ours.)

Sir William is, of course, no longer with the London School of Economics, and perhaps finds his hands less tied. In one fundamental respect, the scheme is a gamble, and Socialists can be certain that the gamble will be a losing one, for it is based on the expectation that unemployment will be permanently reduced after the war to a level less than it was before. If this optimistic assumption proves wrong, then the whole of the financial provisions are undermined and either the benefits would have to be reduced, or the high contributions raised still more or a large further deficit made up from taxation. This optimism of Sir William Beveridge is too much for the City Editor of the Times He points out (December 3) that Beveridge assumes that unemployment will not exceed an average of 8½ per cent. of the insured workers, but

“Only in one year, 1927, in the 14 years before the war was the average below 10 per cent.; in 1932 it was over 22 per cent. It is right to hope that unemployment can be reduced to below 8½ per cent. . . . But it is clear that a corollary of the social security plan must be a plan for full and efficient employment. Without it the social budget will be thrown out of gear.”

The Labour Party who gaily went into office in 1929 with a pledge to deal with unemployment and a hope that things “were on the up grade” should not need to be reminded that what happened to them (unemployment soon mounting to three millions) may well happen again even in the best of all possible capitalist worlds.

The Labour Party might also reflect on another incident in their experience. When the crisis occurred in 1931 it was a common theme with them that capitalism was for ever bankrupt and never again could there be any question of trying to make capitalism palatable to the workers by offering social reforms. Capitalism, they said, would never again be able to afford reforms. Socialists pointed out the absurdity of this belief that capitalism, choked with its own surplus products, could not afford to surrender some of them to alleviate the workers’ miseries. What have the Labour Party to say now that they are hailing Beveridge and allowing themselves to be manoeuvred into defending his scheme ?

One of the major purposes of the Report has already been served, its use as war propaganda. Both from the point of view of offering the workers at home some more or less concrete hope of benefits to come and from the point of view of offsetting Nazi propaganda for a new European Order the Report can be described as an instant success for the Government.

Edgar Hardcastle

Editorial: Anticipating Beveridge (1942)

Editorial from the December 1942 issue of the Socialist Standard

Writing in advance of the issue of the Beveridge Report on Social Insurance, amidst the deafening clamour that has heralded that much boosted publication, we confidently predict that from a working-class standpoint it will be one of the ripest political red-herrings of our generation. It is one of those occasions when the Socialist prophet cannot go wrong.

In justification of this discordant note in the almost universal harmony we can point to the limited scope of the inquiry, and the well-known anti-Socialist views of the author. The outstanding social problem of our age is the poverty of the working-class. It is not the result of unemployment or of illness, or of industrial accident, or of inadequate powers of wealth production. It exists side by side with great wealth and affects the employed as well as the unemployed worker. It is the result of the private ownership by the capitalist class of society’s means of producing and distributing wealth. The facts of this concentration of ownership in the hands of a small minority of the population are well enough known, and Sir William Beveridge is, of course, quite well aware of them. Nor is it a new story. To go back no further than 1904 we have the telling statement of Sir Leo Money: “It is probably true that a group of about 120,000 people who with their families form about one-seventieth part of the population, owns about two-thirds of the entire accumulated wealth of the United Kingdom.” With perhaps some slight modification, that estimate is still true as other, later, investigators have shown. Sir William Beveridge and others like him may answer that they do not believe it necessary or practicable to abolish the system of society which rests on that foundation, but why is that fact about the basis of the capitalist system excluded and deliberately excluded from this and every other official “investigation” into the poverty problem of the working class? And why should the workers allow themselves to be side-tracked by inquiries into poverty which start off by excluding the major factor in the case? In an address to the Fabian Society on November 21st, 1942, Sir William, according to a press report (Sunday Express, November 22) urged the need for “thorough unbiased investigation and discussion,” but he had already stated the scope of the inquiry so as to exclude any investigation into capitalism itself. The problem, he said, “is that of discovering how to combine the proved benefits of private enterprise at private risk . . . with the necessity of national planning in the aftermath of war.” In short he, and those who selected him for the investigation, are only concerned with the problem of alleviating some of the secondary evils of capitalism.

Those who chose him knew what they were doing. They took no chances. Throughout his public career Sir William Beveridge has been a defender of capitalism, confining his diligent inquiries to fields which exclude the question of a frontal attack on the capitalist system. His concern has never been with the problem why are the working class poor, but always with the problem of providing for the periods when the worker’s income from the sale of his labour power ceases. As he wrote in 1924 in his “Insurance for All and Everything” (published by the Daily News, Ltd.) :

“The problem is not that of guaranteeing an income at all times to everybody irrespective of his work and services. That way lies Communism. The problem is the narrower one of giving security against all the main risks of economic life to those who depend on continuous earning, of arranging that part of what such persons earn by their work shall take the form of provision for themselves and their dependants whenever their work is interrupted or stopped by causes beyond their control.” (Page 31.)

In other words, Sir William, accepting the system which gives the privileged class their property-income without the necessity of working, limits his examination to the problem of legislating for the propertyless class. It is all right though for the capitalist to have an “income at all times irrespective of his work and services.”

On occasion Sir William Beveridge has attempted to justify his bias for capitalism and its inequality. He did so in a speech on November 10, 1942 : “To concentrate on absolute equality of incomes for all men is an unpractical and a wrong aim. It attaches excessive importance to material things and treats envy as our master passion” (News-Chronicle, November 11, 1942). Of course nobody ever suggested anything so unpractical as trying to build a social system on private ownership of the means of production and “absolute equality of incomes,” but we need not here go into that caricature of Socialism. What is of interest is the slick defence of our millionaire-pauper system with the ethical argument that to aim at equality attaches excessive importance to material things, and treats envy as our master passion. It was ever the trick of those who have material things monopolised in their control to deprecate the sin of envy in the dispossessed. What, we might ask, of the greed of those whose motto is “What we have, we hold”?

In conclusion, we may quote a passage from Sir Leo Money’s “Riches and Poverty” (1904). Commenting on the way in which reformers of his day ignored the facts about inequality, he used a description which might well be applied to Sir W. Beveridge and othere of his kind : —

“Our most ardent reformers discuss their plans without reference to the economic framework of the society which they propose to reform. As a result we get a vast amount of misdirected effort, a dreary outpouring of vague and empty rhetoric . . . and a succession of timorous proposals for reform ludicrous in relation to the nature and magnitude of the problems with which they seek to deal.”

Something will perhaps result from the Beveridge proposals after they have been discussed elaborately to the exclusion from many workers’ minds of the real poverty problem, and after being scaled down in the customary way. Thus they will serve the main purpose of those who instituted the inquiry, but unless the workers themselves speedily attack the problem of the achievement of Socialism, another ten years will find a new and vain inquiry being started to clear up the mess left behind by Beveridge.

Running Commentary: Carter's Collapse? (1979)

The Running Commentary column from the August 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Carter's Collapse?

After the blue-chinned scowl of Nixon and the fumbling, stumbling of Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter’s grin was meant to represent a new era in American politics.

They said Carter was clean — no hint of a Watergate hung about him. He was clever — no after-effects of playing too much American football without a helmet clogged up his mental processes. He was energetic, skipping from his campaign ’plane with the spring of a young deer.

And his smile — open, warm, ready, friendly. With his pretty wife and his photogenic daughter, he just had to be the greatest president since Roosevelt dominated American politics from his wheelchair.

Carter started as if he intended to be different, running his Cabinet meetings in open-necked sportswear and with the press watching. This, we were told, was truly open government, as if there has ever been, or is likely ever to be, a capitalist state which really allowed its secrets to be open to public scrutiny.

And then Carter kept talking about human rights, as if this was his own original discovery, and as if a politician mouthing about human rights had any significance for those humans.

Well, it has all collapsed very quickly, and the news from America indicates that the voters there are disillusioned with their grinning president, whose hold on his position gets more precarious each day.

Carter, it is said, fumbles and delays, changing his mind almost day by day over issues like the fuel shortage which is so hot in America. His financial policy is described as indecisive and inconsistent. Meanwhile, American capitalism gets deeper into crisis, with the threat of worse to come.

Even if Carter were decisive, clear and firm, it would make absolutely no difference to the grim realities of life under capitalism for the American workers. That is one lesson for them to learn from this, the collapse of their latest idol. Another is that all politicians are powerless in the face of the anarchy of capitalism, which means that the ecstasy with which their coming to power is greeted always turns soon to disillusionment and then to despair.

Jimmy Carter’s grin won a lot of votes, but for the American workers it is no laughing matter.

Crueller Cuts?

Like the Flanders swamps of 1914-18, there are many much fought-over fields in the politics of capitalism. One of these is so-called public expenditure, about which there promises to be an increasingly fearsome battle during the Tories' period of office.

The term public expenditure generally refers to money spent by government and councils. About this there are many myths, one of them being that public expenditure is good; it means hospitals, social services and — something beloved by millions of workers — big new roads.

Because of this, public expenditure is supposed to actually create something also beloved by millions of workers — jobs. (There is no actual record from earlier societies of slaves ever welcoming the making of new chains for themselves, but let that pass.)

One thing which must be said is that public expenditure also finances agencies like the police and the prisons which are, perhaps, not beloved by quite so many workers, and armed forces and armaments, which are beloved only by those workers who take sides in the matter.

But a myth we are going to hear a lot of over the next few years is that since public expenditure is good, it is something favoured only by the Labour Party and which the wicked Tories will do their best to abolish.

Memories in politics are notoriously short, so it is useful to remind ourselves that the last Labour government, like all its predecessors, made consistently savage cuts in public spending.

As a result of these cuts, hospitals were shut in the face of strong objections, social services were severely restricted, schooling was cut back. A Conservative government could hardly have been more Scrooge-like in its zeal.

This fact of history was clearly illustrated in a recent (June 19) article in The Guardian by Joel Barnett, who was Chief Secretary to the Treasury in Callaghan's government. This article, by a typical Labour sleight of word, was both an attack on the Tories for their planned cuts and a justification of those imposed by Labour:

I don’t believe present levels of public expenditure should be sacrosanct, nor that every programme should be, as it were, untouchable, and free from cuts.

In the battles to come, and in the increasing pressures on their living standards, workers will — as usual — be bombarded by lies, myths, distortions. It is vital that they remember: both Tories and Labour run capitalism as savagely as they need to. And capitalism cannot be coaxed out of its own basic savagery into benignity by spending money, public or private, big or small.

Anti-Social Insecurity

It is not often that any person — and still less, any capitalist agency — is given the gift to see themselves as others see them. It is even more surprising that this should happen to, of all things, the Department of Health and Social Security (for such it is described).

To explain this strange happening, let us go back a little into recent history. During the last war, the British capitalist class realised that mere patriotism was not enough to persuade the workers to accept what they were required to endure.

Something more was needed: a mixture of threats and promises. Out of this latter grew the assurances that after the war capitalism would bend all its efforts to building a better society, free of the mistakes which were made before 1939.

And out of that came the famous Beveridge Report, parent of the National Health Service and the National Insurance Scheme introduced by the post-war Labour government. A central principle of National Insurance was that its benefits would be available as of right to anyone in need — in other words, without being subject to the notorious Means Test — and that they would be enough to meet all needs. It was envisaged that a small minority of people in rare cases would need extra help, and for those there would be the Supplementary Benefits, which would be means tested.

Well, it has not worked out like that at all, and now the original idea of Beveridge is in tatters. About one-tenth of the population — something like six million people — need to apply for Supplementary Benefit, which pays out some £2 billion a year.

This increasing reliance on what was supposed to be only a safety net has meant that the scheme has become more and more complex something unwelcome to workers who are sick or old or infirm, and who need a simpler method of claiming benefit.

A recent report by the Supplementary Benefits Commission called attention to this crisis and suggested that, to meet the needs of applicants, the scheme needs an extra £200 million a year. The Commission chairman described the need as “urgent” and said that unless the government acted swiftly, “it will be impossible to maintain standards of service for people in Britain who are in real need . . .”

Those workers who rely on Social Security will be amazed to learn that the treatment they get from the DHSS is called a service and that it aspires to standards. On the receiving end, they know how this patch-up job of capitalism simply does not work. They may get some consolation to know that the SBC now thinks the same.

Would that some ghostie would give the same gift, of seeing themselves as others see them, to all the agencies of so-called reform within capitalism.

Giants Unslain (2021)

From the April 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1942 Sir William Beveridge published a report under the unexciting title Social Insurance and Allied Services. It has become famous as the founding document of the post-war welfare state, and has supposedly led to major improvements in the lives of most British citizens. In fact, it achieved very much less than this, as the report itself just referred to ‘a redistribution of income within the wage-earning classes’, and stated that its proposals for social insurance should merely ‘aim at guaranteeing the minimum income needed for subsistence’. The following year the Socialist Party published a pamphlet Beveridge Re-Organises Poverty, which concluded that the proposals would ‘level the workers’ position as a whole’ and so would indeed be ‘a redistribution of poverty’.

Beveridge identified ‘five giant evils’, which were capitalised as Want (i.e. poverty), Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. How has the battle against these fared in the nearly eighty years since the report was produced? On its 75th anniversary, Stephen Armstrong wrote in The Guardian (10 October 2017) that, after the period of relative prosperity that lasted till the late 1970s, the giants were now ‘creeping back into the mainstream of our daily life’. Not very much has changed in the short period since then. Let’s look at each giant in turn, combining general points and statistics with specific examples.

At the end of last year it was reported that more than a million of the UK’s poorest people are regularly struggling to pay for food. Independent food banks reported a doubling of the number of emergency food parcels handed out in 2020 compared to the year before. The Trussell Trust stated that ‘half of all households visiting food banks struggled to afford essential goods such as food and clothes because they were repaying Universal Credit debts’ (Guardian 1 December). This is a welfare system which is supposed to keep people above the level of going without, ensuring that they do not have to choose between eating and heating. But it clearly fails to provide even ‘the minimum income needed for subsistence’, in Beveridge’s words.

Covid has increased the numbers in poverty, but it is not the underlying cause. According to one analysis, an extra 700,000 people had been thrust into poverty by the pandemic. In all, over 15 million people (nearly a quarter of the population) were living in poverty, and for the great majority of those the disruption caused by Covid was not responsible.

Turning to disease, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has stated that, among the poorest and second poorest fifth of the population, more than one in four children between ten and fifteen experienced moderate or severe mental health difficulties. The poorest fifth have at birth a healthy life expectancy around fifteen years less than the least deprived fifth. More generally, life expectancy is increasing in Western Europe, but in the UK the rise slowed dramatically between 2011 and 2015; austerity and reduced spending on health services are at least partly to blame for this, according to a 2017 article in the British Medical Journal. The same article noted that there were major disparities between health care in the north and south of England, with economic disadvantages being responsible for the north being left behind.

A 2019 report from the World Health Organization noted that five-year cancer survival rates are worse in the United Kingdom compared to other high-income countries in the EU. Over a million people experienced ‘catastrophic spending on health services’, primarily on over-the-counter medicines.

Last year the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health published a report State of Child Health 2020. This noted that there had been improvements in some areas, such as better health checks for those with diabetes, and improved oral health, but in other areas there were problems. The rate of infant mortality increased slightly in England in 2017, while over a third of children aged 10 or 11 in England were obese or overweight. And again it was the poorest areas that had the most problems. Further, it was recently reported that black women in the UK are four times more likely than white women to die in pregnancy or childbirth, with those in deprived areas more likely to die.

Ignorance was described by Beveridge as something that ‘no democracy can afford among its citizens’; after all, capitalism needs a reasonably educated workforce. In the 1930s the vast majority of children left school at age fourteen with no formal qualifications, and the proportion of the population attending university was well below that in other countries, such as Germany and the US.

Things have changed since then, of course, but many problems remain. The National Literacy Trust states that one adult in six is functionally illiterate, with ‘very poor literacy skills’, and so has difficulty reading on unfamiliar topics. In England in 2019, one in thirteen of those aged 16–64 had no qualifications. Many students from poorer backgrounds struggle with parts of the education system, especially the transition to university.

By squalor was meant primarily housing conditions. Shelter reported in 2019 that 280,000 people were recorded as being homeless in England, i.e. one in every two hundred people (and one in 52 in London). And 220,000 had been threatened with homelessness that year. It is generally accepted that these figures are an underestimate, as so much homelessness is undocumented. People are forced to sofa-surf or live in dire hostels or B&Bs. Living on the street has an appalling effect on a person’s mental and physical health, reducing their life expectancy by many years.

It is not just being without a home that causes problems. A recent article in The Guardian (12 January) dealt with a block of flats in Islington where residents went without water for four and a half days after the mains pipe exploded and the PFI consortium that managed it simply failed to carry out the necessary repairs. More widely, an estimated 8.4 million people in England are living in a home that is unaffordable, insecure or unsuitable, according to the National Housing Federation.

But squalor (or unsafe living conditions) need not just be a matter of housing, and the growth of large cities is another factor. It was recently ruled by a coroner that the death of a nine-year-old girl in London in 2013 was partly caused by air pollution, specifically nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter pollution in excess of WHO guidelines, mainly the result of traffic emissions.

Idleness, Beveridge said, ‘destroys wealth and corrupts men’. The depression that began in 1929 had led to mass unemployment, with one-fifth of the workforce being unemployed in 1930. Reducing this was widely seen as essential for the health of the economy.

Unemployment figures go up and down over time. In the three months to October 2020, the UK unemployment rate was 4.9 percent, 1.2 percentage points higher than a year earlier. The rise is partly due to coronavirus, of course, and there were a quarter of a million fewer vacancies than a year before. The annual decrease in employment was the largest annual reduction since 2010. In all, 8.6 million people were economically inactive, and a record number had been made redundant. Moreover, many jobs nowadays are zero-hours. So idleness has certainly not been overcome.

The point here is not to over-emphasise the dire conditions so many face now, or to understate the appalling situation in the 1930s. Rather, it is to show how little has been achieved in nearly eight decades despite the best efforts of reformers, and to point out how many problems remain. The giants of the 30s and 40s still haunt present-day society, and it will take a revolutionary change to do away with them completely.

Paul Bennett

Who Likes Facing Labour's Future? (1976)

From the February 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party of Great Britain has never shared the euphoria of the Left for so-called welfare legislation. All the starry-eyed illusions that were let loose in those post-war years, about what a wonderful thing the Welfare State and the National Health Service would be, served the capitalist class well.

The reformists could not come up empty-handed after six years of war. The delusion was carefully fostered of making a start to build a bright and happy future. High hopes were encouraged that nationalization of basic industries would mean that things like coal-mines and transport ran as a public service, with profit considerations pushed aside.

The welfare state, with the National Health Service at the heart of it, was to be the show-piece and crowning glory of it all.

In the war days of the Beveridge Report, had not Quintin Hogg remarked:

  Some of my hon. Friends seem to overlook one or two ultimate facts about social reform. The first is that if you do not give the people social reform, they are going to give you social revolution.

Parliamentary Debates 

17th February 1943 Col. 1818

Had not all the war propaganda dangled the prospect of a better life when it was all over? The free provisions of free specs and dentures did not last long. Workers soon had to start paying half, on top of ever rising compulsory contributions. The economics of capitalism soon reminded the reform-mongers that things (under capitalism) have to be paid for. All along the line, in every nationalized industry, (and not least in the NHS) the chickens have come home to roost.

A generation of workers have placed their trust and wasted their lives on the pie-crust promises of ambitious politicians. More than thirty years have passed since the Labour Party issued its post-war election manifesto: Let us Face the Future. People like Barbara Castle, who were rising “stars” of the left, when Aneurin Bevan was chief demagogue, have lived to stand in the crumbling ruins of all the misguided hopes which they themselves helped to build. Once again the ludicrous spectacle is one where the reformers proposed and capitalism disposed. We are now living in their future.

Every group of workers in the NHS has been (and will continue to be) ruthlessly exploited by their Labour government overlords. (Yes, we know and by the Tories.)

The nurses, whose devotion to their patients has been mercilessly used by successive governments, were forced to organize, demonstrate and threaten strike action. Then the ambulance crews were pushed into the same position. The ward orderlies and laundry workers caved in under the weight of increasing drudgery and near starvation wages. The extreme reluctance of any of these workers to add to the suffering of the sick and aged, has been cynically played on by the Tory and Labour governments.

The latest miserable episode is that of the junior doctors. Driven by being on duty or on stand-by for as much as one hundred hours per week and working for as many as eighty hours with virtually unpaid overtime, they banned overtime. This brought about the closing down of wards, casualty departments and even entire hospitals. If this reads like a nightmare, that is what capitalism does to the dreams of reformers.

It should be understood, that dental decay, bad eyesight and tuberculosis etc., among the working class are very costly to the capitalist class, particularly in war time. Absenteeism from work with avoidable sickness has an adverse affect upon profits. A patch-up and back-to-work service is a wise investment for capitalism. Capitalists and their political hirelings certainly look at welfare in this way. Speaking at the Manchester Rotary Club on February 18th 1943, the millionaire Samuel Courtauld said, in reference to the Beveridge Report:

  . . . social security of this nature will be about the most profitable long-term investment the country could make. It will not undermine the morale of the nation’s workers: it will ultimately lead to higher efficiency among them and a lowering of production costs.

The economics and priorities of capitalism remain supreme. The system has not been slowly eroded by the “gradualists” who thought they would whittle it away by reforms. They have been whittled away. They have nowhere to turn. Their political bankruptcy is exposed for all to see.

The rampant chaos and discontent in the hospital centres entirely upon money. Costing and inflation problems slowly strangle the postal “services”. The same considerations decree how much of the railways shall survive and whether steel mills and coal mines shall close down. They also dictate how much gas and electricity members of the working class may use. Nowhere have their plans worked. Nowhere has nationalization served working class interests. Perhaps the following has a familiar ring:

   No Tory Government could make this appeal, for the workers would suspect that the summons to hard work, discipline and abstinence would result only in fortunes for the few and the later wastage of unemployment. The new Government is in a different situation. It also must appeal for hard work, discipline and, for a short period, continued abstinence. All these are needed to increase the total wealth for distribution. But a Labour Government at the same time can give concrete proof of its resolve to use this wealth for the benefit of the whole community. By its social insurance and health and housing plans it can show its determination to secure a greater equality in the distribution of wealth. By its nationalization proposals it can show its resolve that the re-equipment of industry shall not merely bring greater profits to the few. By its financial measures it can prove that, when this period of shortage is over, no return will be allowed to wasteful unemployment.

Michael Foot, Daily Herald 7th August 1945

Aneurin Bevan, once said the Tories were “lower than vermin”. What does that make the Wilson, Castle and Foot mob? Regretfully, calling names however well deserved, does little to raise the level of class-consciousness. When the working class wake up, they will contemptuously brush aside these petty upstarts and, in fact, dismiss all leaders. Ultimately the responsibility rests with the workers. Their political maturity (or lack of it) is reflected in how they vote. The power to continue the agony of capitalism, derives from the votes of the workers. The power to end it, will come from the same source.

Harry Baldwin

The three quotations are to be found in the SPGB pamphlets: Beveridge Re-Organizes Poverty and Is Labour Government the Way to Socialism?