The Evolution of the British Welfare State

Product Information

Breaking with his own past, Esping-Andersen ( 1990) points out that there are three particularly important factors at work: the nature of class mobilization (especially union structure); the opportunities to form class-political coalitions (especially those which incorporate the middle class); and the historical legacy of regime institutionalization. Significantly too, his conceptualization of the welfare state differs radically since it is not the level of social expenditure that is measured but the “degree to which individuals, or families, can uphold a socially acceptable standard of living independently of market participation” (Esping-Andersen 1990:37). His measurement of social rights has led him to cluster welfare states around three different types, which he termed the “liberal,” “conservative/corporatist,” and “social democratic.” By 1979 occupational pensions had grown from the modest initiatives recalled earlier into the great welfare success of this country. Alongside these pensions the Tories planted individually owned schemes, known as personal pensions. The advent of these schemes was their major welfare innovation. This advance, however, has been hampered by miss-selling - i.e. persuading people to leave occupational schemes almost invariably against their best interest - often accompanied by the imposition of very high charges and the absence of an employer's contribution. Even so, by 1979, Britain had more assets owned by occupational and personal pension schemes than the whole of the asset portfolio owned by other European Community schemes combined. A significant advance has been made in theorizing welfare state development. Yet much of early work tends to focus on finding one single powerful causal force within the well-established procedures and assumptions which are based on conceptions of linearity. Instead, the second generation of welfare state research began to identify salient interaction effects of multiple factors. In his early work, Esping-Andersen ( 1985), one of the most prominent adherents of the “working-class mobilization theory,” presented a classic formulation that distinguished social democratic models from others. Yet later, in his masterwork (Esping-Andersen 1990), he refined and significantly changed this duality, abandoning an ideal mode of one extreme or the other, and identified three separate routes of welfare state instead.

Mutual Information System on Social Protection in the Member States of the European Union 1(MISSOC). At http://ec.europa.eu/employment_social/spsi/missoc_en.htm, accessed Jul. 2009. Provides basic information regarding social protection measures in the Member States of the European Union and of the European Economic Area. It is therefore smaller in scope but provides more detail and is strongly embedded in social policy discussions at the European level. Welfare had to work with the grain of human nature. Self-interest, one of the most powerful of human instincts, had to be the cornerstone around which welfare reform was built. Thus far, much of scholarly endeavor has been either about welfare state expansion or welfare state retrenchment, and accordingly the resilience of welfare states in relation to change. More recently, though, a number of research projects have begun to examine the new risk configurations that have emerged in the transition to postindustrial societies and that in turn have challenged welfare state arrangements that were established in the context of old, traditional risk contexts of industrial societies (Taylor-Gooby 2004; Bonoli 2005; Armingeon and Bonoli 2006). Numerous risk categories peculiar to postindustrial restructuring make an entry (Esping-Andersen 1999). Yet the central driving force of this postindustrial change is the notable rise in the international mobility of capital, which has an unprecedented impact on the welfare state. Swank has argued that Marxists, neoliberals, political scientists, economists, and popular analysts utilize “nearly identical reasoning to argue that the globalization of capital markets has effectively increased the power of capital over governments that seek to expand or maintain relatively high levels of social protection and taxation” ( 2001:203). In the 16th century, society was faced with the problem of what to do with the poor. Eventually, the Elizabethan government realized they would have to introduce some kind of system to support them. By an act of 1601 overseers of the poor were appointed by each parish. They had the power to force people to pay a local tax to help the poor. Those who could not work such as the old and the disabled would be provided for.

What Is Semantic Scholar?

In 1906 a Liberal government was elected and they introduced a number of reforms. From 1906 local councils were allowed to provide free school meals. In 1907 school medical inspections began. In 1908 an act limited miners to working an 8 hour day. Strictly speaking, the class mobilization thesis should be seen not as a mere variation but as a distinctive theory that has its root in the neo-Marxist tradition because, unlike the logic of capitalism, which sees welfare spending as a means for capital to maintain its dominant position, it views welfare spending as a reflection of the political power gained by workers. It pays attention to the relative power of the “subordinate” class and regards variations in their power as being key in explaining variation in welfare state development. From 1911 workers in certain trades such as building and shipbuilding who frequently had periods of unemployment all contributed to a fund. If unemployed they could claim a small amount of money for a maximum of 15 weeks in any year. Again it was hardly generous but in 1920 the scheme was extended to most (not all) workers.

This is an ideal core text for dedicated modules on the history of British social policy or the British welfare state - or a supplementary text for broader modules on modern British history or British political history - which may be offered at all levels of an undergraduate history, politics or sociology degree. In addition it is a crucial resource for students who may be studying the history of the British welfare state for the first time as part of a taught postgraduate degree in British history, politics or social policy. Those subscribing to such views believe that the high-spending welfare regimes are coming under sustained pressure to reduce the size and cost of their welfare programs because failure to make “domestic investment conditions attractive to internationally mobile capital” (Evans and Cerny 2003:55) will lead to capital flight from their economies. Drawing from the international relations literature, Evans and Cerny ( 2003) argue that the era of postindustrialism is remarkably different from the period that preceded it. In the postwar boom period, social policy was a relatively autonomous field of policy, a domestic issue that was unimpeded by wider economic concerns and so favorable to continual increases in state spending on welfare state activity. Yet “globalization has undermined these conditions.” Hence they anticipate the emergence of the “competition state,” which is “the successor to the welfare state, incorporating many of its features but reshaping them, sometimes quite drastically, to fit a globalizing world” ( 2003:20, 24). The first generation of welfare state research was very much occupied with the question of why welfare states emerge, rather than why welfare states differ and how they differ. Instead of making explicit claims about what explains welfare state variations, the exercise was one of “devising laws” that could account for welfare state development and could be applied to a whole range of countries. A law of 1697 said that paupers (people supported by the parish) must wear a blue or red ‘P’ on their clothes. On a more cheerful note in the 17th century in many towns wealthy people left money in their wills to provide almshouses where the poor could live.Clearly, this line of reasoning carries some compelling elements, not least because it offers a narrative that broadly fits with the historical path of development of the nations to which it was applied. Nonetheless, the core proposition of this logic of industrialism has been subject to a number of criticisms. First, as is the case with the transnational diffusion literature that predicts the sequence within which welfare programs are adopted but not their form (e.g., Abbott and DeViney 1992), it oversimplifies the process of policy development and ignores the important structural variations in the organizational and institutional features of welfare states.

The present Government has now embarked on its programme of welfare reform. Time will tell how well it succeeds in implementing the unthinkable. Making reform workable is a more important objective. As I resigned as Welfare Reform Minister I will inevitably be seen as a biased observer. And bias in the welfare debate is something about which readers should continually be on their guard. urn:lcp:evolutionofbriti0004fras:lcpdf:38d9b24e-1b18-422c-9a11-f72fe9b6069a Foldoutcount 0 Grant_report Arcadia #4281 Identifier evolutionofbriti0004fras Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t3mx2dw2v Invoice 2089 Isbn 9780230224650Welfare was not therefore seen as a neutral agency operating in society. Rather it was one, which, for good or ill, helps determine motivation, shape action and thereby determine character. During the 18th century, the Poor Law continued to operate. In the 17th century, there were some workhouses where the poor were housed but where they were made to work. They became much more common in the 18th century 19th Century Poor Law

The biblical view of human nature - its fallen status, yet conceived to be redeemed - was lost sight of in left-wing intellectual circles by the 1960s. Welfare was by them seen primarily as an act of altruism and this paternalistic view was advanced behind the cover of politically correct statements, so much so that even the Right lost the confidence to mouth, let alone act on, the broader, age-old understanding of mankind. For the unfortunate people made to enter workhouses, life was made as unpleasant as possible. Married couples were separated and children over 7 were separated from their parents. The inmates were made to do hard work like breaking stones to make roads or breaking bones to make fertilizer. In 1909 the Trade Boards Act set up trade boards who fixed minimum wages in certain very low paid trades. Also in 1909, an Act set up labor exchanges to help the unemployed find work. In 1908 an Old Age Pensions Act gave small pensions to people over 70. The pensions were hardly generous but they were a start. From 1925 pensions were paid to men over 65 and women over 60. Widows were also given pensions.

If the welfare state scholarship until the mid-1980s was dominated by works that examined the patterns, reasons, and ways of welfare state expansion, a significant shift began in the late 1980s. Particularly important was the upheaval of the new streams of literature, especially in relation to welfare state retrenchment that brought about a renewed emphasis on the role of institutions.