Policy examples from other countries are drawn on in public debate to strengthen arguments for change or reform. Opponents of change must then de-legitimise the applicability of those examples. This article places this phenomenon in historical perspective, exploring the transfer of policy ideas to Britain from North America and Australasia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Land and social reformers appealed to policy examples from fellow ‘English-speaking’ societies, which as ‘new countries’ could experiment more than ‘old countries’ and therefore provide lessons for Britain. However, their opponents emphasised that the experience of new countries was inapplicable to Britain.
The extent of imperial influences upon nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British life, including in the development of social policy, has attracted significant scholarly interest in the past decade. The bearing of New Zealand's 1898 Old-Age Pensions Act upon the British debate over elderly poverty exemplifies the contested transfer of social policy ideas from settler colony to ‘Mother Country’. Reformers in Britain hailed a model non-contributory pension system with an imperial pedigree. However, the widely acknowledged distinction between ‘old’ countries such as Britain, and ‘new’ countries of English-speaking settlement, characterized the New Zealand example's reception. While progressives identified the colony as a ‘clean slate’ lacking the obstructive historical inheritance of the Poor Law, critics of state-funded pensions warned against drawing policy-making lessons from New Zealand. Yet when a reformist Liberal government introduced an Old Age Pensions Bill in 1908, it used Britain's age to justify the legislation's relative conservatism.
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