mice 
There is nothing but the text.....
Is Mumsnet down today (13th May)
Gransnet forums
News & politics
From The Guardian this year. The Welfare State, 1912- 2013: Orbituary.
(37 Posts)From The Guardian this year.
The Welfare State, 1942-2013, obituary
After decades of public illness, Beveridge's most famous offspring has died
Aditya Chakrabortty
The Guardian, Tuesday 8 January 2013
o
For much of its short but celebrated life, the Welfare State was cherished by Britons. Instant public affection greeted its birth and even as it passed away peacefully yesterday morning, government ministers swore they would do all they could to keep it alive.
The Welfare State's huge appeal lay in its combination of simplicity and assurance. A safety net to catch those fallen on hard times, come rain or shine, boom or bust, it would be there for all those who had paid in.
Such universality allowed people to project on to it whatever they wished. Welfare State's father, the Liberal William Beveridge, described his offspring as "an attack on Want", one of the five evil giants that had to be slain in postwar Britain. But for future Labour prime minister Clement Attlee, "Social security to us can only mean socialism".
Yet there were critics. Indeed, it is thought that as late as yesterday, an unnamed twentysomething PPE graduate at Policy Exchange was revising a document entitled "What's Wrong with Welfare?" In the end, however, it was not a rightwing think tank that killed Welfare. The proximate cause of death was a change in child benefit from being available to all to a means-tested entitlement. That marked the end of one of the last remaining universal benefits, in turn causing a fatal injury to Welfare.
It is a testimony to Welfare's powerful charm that few immediately accepted its passing. Hours after its official death, bloggers continued to talk as if it were still alive, albeit under grave threat from the perfidious Tories.
But analysts later confirmed that the change to child benefit did indeed mark the death of the Welfare State as originally envisaged by Beveridge: a "contributory" system, where those who paid in during their working lives could count on financial help from the government when in need.
It expired peacefully on Monday, 7 January, just weeks after marking its 70th birthday.
The system had suffered many attacks over the years, from politicians talking of a "welfare trap", government means-testing, and frothy-mouthed journalists reporting isolated cases of benefit fraud.
For many would-be claimants, Welfare had become a ragged system where, however deserving or needy, they weren't poor enough to qualify for benefits, or the cash involved was too small to bother claiming.
Though David Cameron spoke of a "something for nothing" culture, the opposite was closer to the truth: Welfare had become a "nothing for something" system where taxpayers chipped in but got very little back.
This was very different from the scenes that greeted Welfare's birth in 1942. Then, the BBC broadcast in 22 different languages the details of Beveridge's social insurance scheme and the Manchester Guardianrepeatedly acclaimed it as a "great plan" and a "big and fine thing".
The public was enthusiastic, buying more than 635,000 copies of what was formally titled the "Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Social Insurance and Allied Services".
Yet the golden period of Welfare really came in the 60s and 70s as, thanks to the work of Barbara Castle, Jeff Rooker, Audrey Wise and others, pensions and allowances were made more generous and tied to typical earnings.
"If you were poor, you were far less behind than at any other time in contemporary British history," according to Richard Exell, a senior policy officer at the TUC and a campaigner on welfare issues for more than 30 years. "It produced a Britain that was one of the most equal societies in western Europe."
Just before Margaret Thatcher came to power, a single person out of work would get unemployment benefit worth almost 21% of average earnings; last year, jobseeker's allowance was nearly half that,amounting to just over 11%.
Welfare's big decline came in the 1980s, as the Conservatives moved more benefits from available to all to on offer only to the poor. This was justified as making public spending more efficient.
But, according to a famous and much quoted study by Walter Korpi and Joakim Palme, such means-testing is far less effective and more expensive than universal benefits. In a study of 18 rich countries, the academics found that targetting benefits at the poorest usually generated resentment among those just above – and led to smaller entitlements.
This "paradox of redistribution" was certainly observable in Britain, where Welfare retained its status as one of the 20th century's most exalted creations, even while those claiming benefits were treated with ever greater contempt.
"If you look at unemployment and sickness benefit as a proportion of average earnings, then Britain has one of the meanest welfare systems in Europe," says Palme. "Worse than Greece, Bulgaria or Romania."
Some of that same meanness can be seen in the way Welfare was discussed as it moved into its sixth and seventh decades. It was no longer about social security but benefits. Those who received them were no longer unfortunate but "slackers", as Iain Duncan Smith referred to them.
A recent study by Declan Gaffney, Ben Baumberg and Kate Bell of 6,600 national newspaper articles on Welfare published between 1995 and 2011 found 29% referred to benefit fraud. The government's own estimate of fraud is that it is less than 1% across all benefit cases.
The death of Welfare does not mean an end to all benefit spending. Instead, it is outlived by its predecessor, Poor Relief, in which only the very poorest will receive government cash. Analysts are unsure about the repercussions.
"I'm not aware of any country that's ever had a combination of Victorian-style poor laws and parliamentary democracy," says Gaffney.
Instead of a book of condolences, there will be a special edition of the Guardian's letters page. In separate tributes, BBC4 will air some respectful but little-watched documentaries; there will also be a truly unbearable edition of The Moral Maze.
It's just possible, and I accept I have no documentary evidence, that he was a member of IS in his youth.
Deconstructing the posts certainly indicates that extreme dogmaticism allied with an alienation from the real world which is a signifier.
But, JessM, I'm sure the semiotics of this thread have not escaped you. I would welcome your analysis....
Probably the easiest way to deal with this is simply not to post, although I do realise that it's not always that easy to restrain oneself.
What is it with you ivanhoe ?
You are obviously not on the lookout for a girlfriend or wife as you appear to be deliberately setting out not to create rapport with "the ladies".
You don't seem to want to engage in discussion (otherwise you would put a point of view and discuss not just copy and paste)
Copy and pasting is not polite. If you would like to learn how to copy and paste a link I'm sure someone will explain.
Or is this another one of those weird conceptual art threads, like the bums and tums always was (as I realised this morning)
There is a well known tactic of boring the opposition into submission - is this your cunning plan Ivanhoe I find your long cut n paste jobbies patronising, uninspiring, derivative and unoriginal.
Do you not have any original thoughts?
I lost interested in the first post! A good debate would be .... can we limit the length of anything that has been copied and pasted? It's blooming boring, we all have access to the internet or we wouldn't be on here! So let us find our own quotes, and leave gransnet to our own ideas and opinions!
I notice that you seem to ignore many posts so I'm asking you directly for a response to my post about the South African system and the UK system. You say the welfare state is dead yet I benefit from it every day.
If you're going to post long posts off the internet could you provide the link so that we can read it for ourselve at source.
No. Neither can I. This is not debate, this is haranguing.
"Kill off all desire for discussion" (Absent)
It certainly has me I like a good, honest debate but I cannot even be bothered to read all that lot.
There is a Gransnet rule about preaching on religious matters. Is there something similar about political preaching? There's nothing wrong with supplying a link to an interesting article, but these slabs of copied and pasted extracts from newspapers and the internet kill off all desire for discussion. Such a shame as our political discussions used to be both robust and lively. I think that is very sad.
Ivanhoe if you're going to cut and paste long political treatises you have to be prepared to engage in rigorous debate with other posters, not just trot out diatribes against Thatcher, and sweeping statements about the free-market economy.
Most of us don't need a political education from you.
Ivanhoe, you are probably well meaning but I dont think anyone has voted you in as GN's political advisor. We all have our own minds and will choose what we want to look into. Having anything, no matter how interesting or important, thrust upon us will always put backs up.
HildaW. Ana. Its an interesting article, I though you all might get something from reading it. Clearly not.
Hear, hear!
Oh FGS Ivanhoe.....if you want to be a recycling political journalist ......start your own newspaper or something.
Copied and pasted from the internet. Interesting stuff.
Welfare debate marks opportunity to renew Beveridge’s legacy
NICK PEARCE 15 January 2013
Subjects
Why has Britain's welfare state lost the popularity it once enjoyed? How can it regain this role and where does Labour fit in?
It wasn’t always like this. Social security was once a strategic political asset for the centre-left in Britain.
State pensions, unemployment and sickness insurance, social housing and child allowances all commanded considerable popular support. The extension of the welfare state took place because working people mobilised and voted for it, and they could draw on middle class support at critical moments, such as in the 1940s when the Beveridge report was implemented.
Social security was a majoritarian concern that was underpinned by real socioeconomic forces: the muscle of the organised working class allied to widespread desire to pool risks for growing old or falling sick.
Today, the welfare state continues to command support where it clearly meets underlying, broadly shared social needs: decent pensions for old age in a society that is getting older, for example. But other socioeconomic trends have undermined its moorings in popular sentiment.
The risk of prolonged unemployment now falls most heavily on the unskilled, not the university educated middle class; social housing is no longer a mainstream form of tenure and is rationed to those in greatest need; and changes in family structures have created new forms of vulnerability that were once met within the household, without requiring state income transfers. Opponents of the post-war welfare state have used these changes to retrench or even abolish it in key areas.
Conversely, the reach of the welfare state has been expanded to make work pay and not just to insure people against earnings loss or protect people against shocks.
Changes in the labour market and the structure of the economy have made it necessary to supplement wages with tax credits and other in-work benefits. Indeed, the Labour government made it a deliberate goal of policy to widen the gap between out-of-work benefits and what someone could expect to live on from wages plus tax credits (the only big increases in unconditional cash transfers not tied to work were for families with children and pensioners, who accordingly saw substantial improvements in the value of their social security payments). The UK is not unique in this, however.
Most OECD countries now have tax credit or in-work benefits to top up low wages, including prosperous, high-skill economies like Sweden and Germany. Wage supplements are not simply a feature of Anglo-Saxon economies.
This is why the Conservatives’ attempt to draw a stark contrast between those in and out of work have proved harder to stick than they hoped, since the bulk of the cuts are falling on working people, as the Institute for Fiscal Studies and Resolution Foundation have pointed out.
It has given Labour an opening into the political framing of the debate that otherwise would not have been available to them. (And it is one reason why Iain Duncan Smith struggles with the binary distinction between so-called strivers and skivers, since his universal credit dissolves the in/out work boundary.)
But Labour is still in defensive mode. It has yet to work out a path to a position in which social security works for it politically as much as, say, the National Health Service does.
David Miliband’s powerful speech in the Commons last week was not just interesting for the fierceness of its attack on the government but for what it said about the steps Labour might take on that path. He posed some clear choices. Childcare or higher child benefit? Investment in bricks-and-mortar housebuilding or more increases in housing benefit? Measures to meet big social needs or small pots of money for marginal goods?
What might all this mean? First, welfare reform should be once again aligned to deeper underlying drivers of social change, as it was for much of the 20th century.
Primarily, that means giving priority to caring services, particularly childcare and care of the elderly. Society has rising care needs, which is why demands for new solutions to the cost, quality and accessibility of childcare and social care have become big political issues. Unsurprisingly, therefore, both childcare and social care feature in the Coalition’s mid-term agenda, even if the actual policies we can expect in those areas are likely to be partial and inadequate.
These are areas in which collective policies can be both more cost-effective and progressive than the alternatives, so they should be natural territory for social democratic parties (indeed one of the reasons why the Nordic left has been so successful is that it responded to feminist demands for the extension of care services in the 1970s and 1980s). In that context, Labour’s relative silence on childcare reform is baffling.
Second, the most enduring reforms are those that have institutional life. If the NHS were simply an insurance scheme, it would not command anything like the reverence – indeed, intense veneration – that it enjoys. Institutions embody values and give life to human relationships in ways that cash transfers cannot. They are much harder to cut or abolish.
There will always be a place for income transfers and tax credits in the welfare state, but services like childcare are best delivered by institutions funded for the task, rather than by demand subsidies. The childcare element of the universal credit should be replaced by institutional funding of free or heavily subsidised early-years places. The Coalition is about to go down the wrong path on this score with its tax reliefs for childcare.
Third, work and full employment must be at the core of any new welfare settlement, as they were for Beveridge. A high employment rate, particularly for women, not only helps secure the fiscal sustainability of the welfare state but provides a means by which it is fair and reasonable to ask people who can work to make their contribution.
A compulsory job guarantee for the long-term unemployed is fair if the state acts as a guarantor of employment in the last resort. Full employment must be restored as a central goal of macroeconomic policy.
Finally, the welfare state needs to be brought back into closer touch with those it serves. A double move is required here: first, to rescue social security from residualisation to a so-called ‘underclass’ and to restore its majoritarianism; and second, to devolve more power, responsibility and opportunities for participation in social security to communities themselves.
This is where relational state thinking, inspired in part by Blue Labour insights, can play a transformative role in the statecraft of the centre-left. If the big society is dead then the centre-left needs to put an alternative in its place, not gloat at the funeral.
Today’s welfare debate has led some to write an obituary for Beveridge’s work on its 70th birthday. I beg to differ. This ‘rancid Bill’ might just be the catalyst for its renewal.
Thanks, VQ, that really puts things in perspective. As does your account of the US 'system' Dorset.
I lived in the US in the late 70's and early 80's and learnt to live without the NHS. We were fully covered by Blue Cross Blue Shield. However one had to pay up front and claim the cost for small amounts. When my son had an operation the hospital claimed straight from the insurance company. I had a baby and a toddler at the time. Each visit to the paediatrician for the baby's jabs, weight, development and for any illnesses for both children would cost about $60 - then each jab was itemised, and scripts at the pharmacy could cost up to $30 per item.
When my son contracted appendicitis I rang the 'baby doctor' expecting a home visit - she almost laughed at me - I had to take my child [age 6] in his sister's pushchair to the doctor's office. She came in early especially to see him and referred us straight to the hospital. We received a hefty bill for her coming in early to advise us.
It was good that I am a Registered Nurse as I was able to detect a real problem that would require a doctor and when to treat the child myself.
Years later when I worked at our local GP practice I was always amazed by what people deemed to be an emergency or even a GP visit, when they could treat the patient themselves. It has spoiled us all but I wouldn't be without the NHS even with the mess it's in now.
I have a friend in South Africa who knows what it's like to really live without a welfare state. She lives in a 17ft by 6ft glorified garden shed which has no heating even though winters in her area are cold and damp. She has five jobs and, although she is very ill, has to keep working regardless of how she feels. No work means no money. She cannot fall back on a benefit system as we can. A trip to the doctor costs her £50 and then she has to pay £20 or so for any medicines that might be prescribed. So even though she needs to take medication every day she often goes for weeks without any. She cannot see a time when she would be able to retire as she has no pension plan. The dentist costs her £70 plus treatment. Food is not cheaper in South Africa. In fact a lot of things are more expensive. Instant coffee is a treat.
Please don't tell me the welfare state is dead. We still have a system in place that looks after us in time of need. I go to the doctors and get my medication. I go to the dentist. I get money towards my rent and my council tax is paid. I get money to live on as I'm too ill to work (we both suffer from the same illness).
Now I have checked and it is the same article to which I posted a link on my Facebook page several weeks ago!! Thought it looked familiar.
And you are making the assumption that we can't read the Guardian or other papers for ourselves. Thanks for that!
One too many 'r's there - sorry! The sentiment still stands, though.
And certainly not harrangued!
Join the conversation
Registering is free, easy, and means you can join the discussion, watch threads and lots more.
Register now »Already registered? Log in with:
Gransnet »