British Politics and Social Policy during the Second World War

Abstract

This article sets out to examine the relationship between party politics and social reform in the Second World War. The issue of government policy towards reform was raised initially by Richard Titmuss, who argued in his official history of social policy that the experience of total war and the arrival of Churchill's coalition in 1940 led to a fundamentally new attitude on welfare issues. The exposure of widespread social deprivation, Titmuss claimed, made central government fully conscious for the first time of the need for reconstruction; the reforms subsequently proposed or enacted by the coalition were therefore an important prelude to the introduction of a ‘welfare state’ by the post-war Labour administration. These claims have not been borne out by more recent studies of individual wartime policies, but as a general guide to social reform in the period the ideas of Richard Titmuss have never been entirely displaced. In fact the significance of wartime policy, and its close relationship with post-war reform, has been reaffirmed in the most comprehensive study of British politics during the war – Paul Addison's The road to 1945. For Addison, the influence of Labour ministers in the coalition made the government the most radical since Asquith's Liberal administration in the Edwardian period. The war, he notes, clearly placed on the agenda the major items of the post-war welfare state: social security for all, a national health service, full employment policies, improved education and housing, and a new system, of family allowances.

The “Good Citizen” as a “Respectable Worker:” State, Unemployment, and Social Policy in the United Kingdom and Italy, 1930 to 1950

“…Wartime British social security marked a renewed effort of the state to provide greater inclusiveness, notwithstanding the resistances coming from neoliberal areas of the Conservative Party and from the unions (Harris 1983; Jefferys 1987). Both mistrusted the key role that the state would assume in the social security scheme, threatening either individual's self‐aid or the prerogatives of sectional interests.…”

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“…After publication, a committee of civil servants recommended to the Wartime Coalition government that the plan should only be accepted subject to significant amendments including cuts in the level of family allowances, the introduction of an income test, limits to the length of time people could claim unemployment benefit and abolition of subsistence pensions (on the basis that there was plenty of time for people to save for retirement) and so on. According to Jefferys (1987, p. 131) the Conservative backbench MP Harold Nicolson noted that the ‘Tory line seems to be to welcome the report in principle, and then to whittle it away by detailed criticism .’ The Wartime government's subsequent presentation to parliament was so negative that 121 Members voted against it and many more abstained. The Wartime coalition government was at risk of breaking up in the middle of the war and so, within a week, it was forced to reverse its position and move forward with plans to legislate during the war.…”

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“…Labour refused to countenance alterations to the Bill and threatened to withdraw. 64 The Economist noted on 24 March 1945, that 'The Coalition is getting more and more threadbare'. At the 1945 Conservative Party Conference it was evident that many were tired of coalition.…”