line with his attempt to balance rights with duties, but also to keep people in touch with work, he recommended both a training benefit and arrangements that would be recognised by those who in the 1980s and 1990s called for American-style Workfare for the unemployed. He did so, however, in a context which was not implemented. For Beveridge recommended that unemployment benefit should be paid without time limit, not just for the first six months as was the case before he reported, nor for the twelve months that was actually implemented in 1948. To reduce someone’s income just because they had been out of work for a certain period was ‘wrong in principle’, Beveridge said.37 Most men would rather work than be idle. But the danger of providing adequate benefits indefinitely was that men ‘may settle down to them’, adding that ‘complete idleness, even on an income, demoralises’. Thus he said men and women should be ‘required as a condition of benefit to attend a work or training centre’ after six months, the requirement arriving earlier in times of good employment and later in times of high unemployment. The aim would be twofold: to prevent ‘habituation to idleness’ but also ‘as a means of improving capacity for earning’. There was a dear precursor here for the gradual tightening of entitlement to benefit and the requirement for training and Re-start programmes that Lord Young, Patrick Jenkin and their successors were to introduce in the 1980s and which Labour was to adopt with far greater vigour at the turn of the century. Attaching such conditions to benefit, Beveridge also noted, would unmask malingerers, and those claiming benefit while working.
For young persons, Beveridge said, ‘who have not yet the habit of continuous work the period [before training] should be shorter; for boys and girls there should ideally be no unconditional benefit at all; their enforced abstention from work should be made an occasion for further training’.38 Neither of these work and training requirements was implemented: the full employment (indeed, labour shortages) of the 1940s and 1950s made them seem unnecessary. The recommendation that the young should be denied unconditional benefit would have to wait until the days of John Moore and Lord Young forty-five years later, with disastrous results for some.
In his report Beveridge attempted to reconcile a new universalism that did indeed stretch from the cradle to the grave – from maternity grant to funeral grant by way of all-in insurance – with incentives to work, to save and to take individual responsibility, while at the same time checking abuse. In so doing he redefined the social security debate, but also defined the battleground as it has been fought over ever since. The left would ever after be able to stress the universalism of Beveridge and his desire to end poverty through all standing together to help each other. The right would look at his insistence on leaving room for private initiative; that the state should not provide all, but only a basic minimum, and then in return for clear-cut duties. Each, over time, would issue calls to go ‘Back to Beveridge’: to which bit of Beveridge would depend on who was doing the calling.
The plan was indeed unconsciously eclectic in many of its underlying ideas. It contained bits of Socialism and bits of Conservatism in its liberal mix. The way in which its vision yoked together competing ideas into what appeared to be a coherent whole helps explain why it proved in the end acceptable to all political parties: it contained something for everyone. The flaws in its design, however, ensured there can never, in any pure sense, be a return to Beveridge. That is not just because he failed to design that unattainable goal, an ideal system. The rest of Europe, while taking in the main a different road from Beveridge’s very British revolution, equally failed to design fault-free systems. Their route (generally earnings-related benefits linked to earnings-related contributions, often run locally or independently of central government and often through bodies more like friendly societies than the state) also ran into difficulties. Any social security system must generate conflicts between individual and collective responsibilities, between rights and duties, between incentives and security of income. It may never be got right once and for all; the balance will endlessly shift. And it was on to such shifting sands that Beveridge’s report was launched. Before it came into effect, however, a general election had to be held.
Precisely how and why Labour won its unexpected landslide in 1945, producing the first ever majority Labour Government is outside the scope of this book,39 but three quotations can explain it for present purposes. The first is from Lord Hailsham, recalling a conversation he had with a French officer in the Lebanon as early in the war as 1942, before he even returned for the Beveridge debate. The Frenchman remarked that it would be difficult after the war to avoid socialism.
‘Au contraire,’ said I, ‘il sera impossible.’
‘Pourquoi?’
‘Parce qu’il est déjá arrivé.’ In this I was not far wrong.40
The second source is Churchill to Lord Moran: ‘I am worried about this damn election. I have no message for them now.’41 At Walthamstow, near the end of the campaign, his worries were confirmed as for once he was booed into silence by a 25,000-strong crowd demanding ‘What about jobs?’ and ‘What about houses?’42
The third quotation is also from Hailsham: ‘Again and again during the 1945 elections I was greeted with voters who exclaimed to me absurdly: “We want Winston as Prime Minister, but a Labour government.” When I explained patiently that that was the one thing they could not have, they were wont to reply: “But this is a free country, isn’t it? I thought we could vote for who we want.”‘43
While the electorate might have trusted Winston, they chose, with memories of the 1930s still fresh, not to trust the Tories with the reconstruction of Britain, a project that involved much more than just Beveridge and his five giants. Before Labour took power, however, the foundations of post-war education – that most political of all the arms of the welfare state – had been laid.
Upon the education of the people of this country the fate of this country depends.
Disraeli, quoted by R. A. Butler in frontispiece of the 1943 White Paper Educational Reconstruction
We are not likely to see another dissolution of the monasteries.
Professor H. C. Barnard, writing in 1947 on the public schools
EDUCATION is the most political of all subjects, for it is firmly about the future. It defines the sort of society people want to see. At one extreme, for those who believe that the next generation should be more equal than the present one, the demand is for equal access to equally good education for all – although furious arguments can then follow about what is meant at which stage of a child’s life by ‘equal access’ and ‘good’, given wide variations in home background, income, aspirations and ability. At the other is a belief that there will always be inequalities and that it is better to organise for that reality, selecting out the high fliers to ensure that they do fly high and are thus able to support the mass for whom it might be safer all round if expectations were not too greatly raised. Education locks into a host of other issues. Should society be culturally or industrially equipped? Should important cultural, religious and economic differences between particular groups be sustained or suppressed? Should extra resources go into helping the least able, boosting the average or ensuring that the brightest are fully stretched? Should the ultimate aim of education be wealth creation, or should it simply be provided in its own right and for its own sake, to free people for the richer enjoyment of life through the knowledge, skills and concepts instilled?
Not all these conflicting objectives are necessarily incompatible all the time, but they do ensure that education is deeply