Why and how did the state get involved in social welfare provision in the late 19th and first half of the 20th century?
Yet, in the early 20th century, a shift occurred. There were numerous reasons for this: increasing pauperism, international competition, fears for Britain’s supremacy as an empire, and political rivalry. In this essay, I will evaluate these reasons and the State’s response to establish why and how the it got involved with welfare provision in the late 19th century and early 20th.
Legislation post-World War II made Britain into one of the most ‘uniform, centralised, bureaucratic and ‘public’ welfare systems in Europe’. Before this, Britain’s state provision for its neediest existed in the form of the Poor Law Amendment Act (1834), a modified piece of legislation dating back to Tudor Britain. The Poor Law existed to alleviate poverty by ‘putting the poor to work’; it preceded the creation of workhouses, and discouraged the allocation of relief to the able-bodied. The prevailing attitude of this approach was that of ‘Adam Smith liberalism’; those who were poor were, to an extent, deserving of being so. Adam Smith theorised that in a free-market, individuals who worked hard would do well, and this attitude was embraced across industrialised Britain. David Garland notes that ‘this approach to morality placed a heavy burden of responsibility on private individuals’, and consequently, workhouses were made purposefully unpleasant, ‘less attractive than the meanest conditions of life experienced by wage-earners outside’. Such an approach to poverty, that of placing blame solely on the individual and doing little to alleviate its grip, ultimately proved counter-productive, as we shall see throughout this essay, but context is important to understand the environment from which the welfare state was born.
The result of this approach was that, by the late 19th Century, social investigations into poverty revealed mass destitution. This increasing poverty is one of the major reasons the state chose to get involved with the provision of welfare. As Peter Flora acknowledges, ‘to a certain extent the free market itself facilitated…state intervention by subverting…traditional local and voluntary relationships’ that local communities relied on. The Poor Law (1834) had removed the previous ‘highly localised, amateur, voluntarist, and intimate in scale’ structures for poor relief, so there were few programmes in place to help tackle poverty. As poverty grew, the middle-classes fled, and poor inner-city suburb rate-payers were unable to fund local infrastructure. There was little investment in local areas, and soon the country was littered with pockets of destitution; one example of mass pauperism was the borough of Poplar in East London – poverty was so rampant that the treasury was forced to loan money to ease the burden, but these were loans that could never be repaid. At this point, it became apparent that the Government would spend more money dealing with the effects of poverty than its prevention. Ultimately, one of the reasons for State intervention in the providence of welfare was due to its own dismantling of local poverty relief and reliance on free-market ideals; as we see throughout this essay, being poor is not a moral fault, and treating it as such does not solve it.
This rampant poverty had another affect that the British government found to be untenable: a poor workforce is less likely to remain competitive in a labour-based economy. The poor diet and over-crowded accommodation that accompanied pauperism fostered economic inefficiency; this situation deteriorated further during the economic slumps of 1884-7, 1888, and 1892-5. So-called ‘regular’ workers were sacked and had no more right to state provision than the ‘underserving poor’ of ‘Adam Smith Liberalism’. Put otherwise, the ‘respectable man’ was now shoulder to shoulder with the poor once considered ‘underserving’ and ‘lazy’ for being unable to compete in a free-market economy. With the workforce so demoralised, there was fear of economic decline internationally. As countries started their own industrial revolutions, competition from imperial Germany meant the British monopoly on steel production was over, and this lowered profit all around. Germany provided a state-sponsored social insurance for its workers that protected against common ailments such as risk of accident and ill health; Peter Alcock writes that this ‘inspired jealously’ in Britain as, despite Germany’s position as Britain’s major industrial competitor, poverty appeared ‘less problematic’. The need for investment in the health and well-being of Britain’s workforce was gaining traction on both the left and right of parliamentary politics; simply ‘preventing people from starving’ was no longer enough.
There were also political catalysts for welfare intervention: the economic slumps of the late nineteenth century had another consequence, and for the first time, workers began to efficiently organise. The Social Democratic Federation (SDF) recruited from among the unemployed, and socialist ideas – brought on from by years of low wages and unemployment – fed strikes organised by the new Trade Union Congress (TUC). In the early 1900s, trade unions and socialist groups formed to create the Labour Representation Committee, sowing the seeds for the early Labour party and challenging both major political parties. This challenge to the status quo was one of the motivating factors of the Liberal government’s later reforms to welfare provision. It had become apparent that the working classes would no longer settle for abysmal work standards for little pay. The Second Boer War (1899-1902) sparked change in the Government’s attitude towards social welfare provision. It cost Britain 450,000 men to defeat a Boer army of 35,000; the quality of soldiers was blamed. Potential military recruits had been turned away for being physically incapable of holding arms, and as Alcock writes, ‘the concern for physical, economic, and general national efficiency reached new heights’. This very much became a political issue; the Conservative party was voted out of office, and the threat of new left-wing unions pushed the elected Liberals to get involved with social welfare provision.
As Stefan Collini writes, ‘debates about social policy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries’ were ‘by no means a simple narrative of smooth, cumulative progress’ but ‘the patchwork of increasing provision did express a growing recognition that the state had a much larger role to play in helping to provide a liveable minimum for all its citizens’. This, as well as mounting political pressure from the far left, meant both Liberal and Conservative parties began to introduce controversial legislation to promote the well-being of the new generation and retain the support of the working-class. The Committee on Physical Deterioration (1903) was established, and made recommendations that were crucial to the Liberal party (1906 – 14) reforms of social provision; they suggest medical inspections of children in schools, free school meals for the very poor, and training in mothering skills. In 1908, the Liberal party endorsed free medical inspections in schools and legislated for the funding of trained health visitors, midwives, and infant welfare centres. In that same year,
To conclude, the reasons the State got involved in social welfare provision were complex and manifold, but can ultimately be narrowed down to rampant poverty and its effect on the British population. Adam Smith liberalism placed emphasis on personal responsibility and hard work; in a free-market, the thesis goes, all one has to do is apply themselves to be successful. However, with economic decline and mass pauperism it became apparent that the much-lauded free-market was not working as its proponents said it should. Furthermore, while there were many reasons to aid the public for philanthropic reasons, it should be noted that the primary motivator for state intervention was the fact that a poor workforce economically disadvantaged the country. It is an interesting factor that one of the Government’s primary motivators for state intervention was the result of Boer War – simply put, the country needed a healthier workforce in order to continue in its place as the world’s foremost economic power. Ultimately, the State laid the foundations for the welfare state in the early 19th century to maximise the profits of the country.